Industry and business partnerships

Our ongoing partnership with Qantas is developing flight-planning systems that will help the airline fly optimised routes, reduce fuel consumption and improve operational effectiveness. This is helping to pave the way for greater operational efficiency and supporting greener commercial aviation.

Managed by Professor Salah Sukkarieh from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR), the research has focused on how aerodynamics, flight mechanics, large-scale optimisation and machine learning algorithms can be used to design better flight-planning routines and fuel prediction models.

The partnership is now looking at building on the outcomes of the research as well as focussing on new areas of research, such as weather avoidance.

Additionally, the collaboration has allowed our students to work closely with an industrial partner to provide them with valuable commercial experience so that they can hit the ground running when they enter the workforce.

Our Brain and Mind Centre is partnering with the BHP Foundation on a five-year program ‘Right care, first time, where you live,’ combining local knowledge and lived experience with cutting edge research to create sustained, coordinated and digitally enhanced youth mental health care. 

A successful 9-month pilot program was run in 2020 with Healthy North Coast, the provider of the North Coast Primary Health Network (PHN). Armed with real-time data, the PHN worked with community and service providers to focus on social connectedness through a program that is now in place in six towns in the region. 

These local models will become a blueprint, to be scaled up or down to support the mental health service needs of communities across the country.

We have an ongoing partnership with international mining group Rio Tinto, seeking to increase mining automation. Established in 2007 in the Faculty of Engineering, the Rio Tinto Centre for Mine Automation (RTCMA) works on the development and deployment of technologies that hope to deliver fully remote autonomous mining processes. 

The research partnership's next phase will focus on providing an improvement in safety, predictability, precision and efficiency of typical surface mining operations through automation.

In addition to working closely with Rio Tinto, the RTCMA has also contributed to training the next generation of mining automation engineers and technicians, providing our undergraduate and postgraduate students with vital exposure to commercially relevant real-world problems.

In the modern workplace, employees are required to continually update their skills to be successful. So how do we educate the next generation of students to equip them with the necessary skills, resilience and experience to secure their future in a rapidly changing environment? 

As part of our Industry and Community Project Units (ICPUs), students address complex problems on behalf of our partners. With Adobe, students are looking at “how we close the digital skills gap?” and are proposing solutions on how we should enhance the future of education. Adobe challenged our students to identify creative ways that businesses, educators and governments can tackle the digital skills shortages and provide Australian graduates with the skills they need to lead effectively in the contemporary digital workforce.  Find out more about the work our students are doing with Adobe

Solutions to complex problems such as these cannot be solved in a silo. Therefore, we bring together interdisciplinary groups of students to come up with genuine ‘out of the box’ solutions. Throughout the semester student groups have the opportunity to learn from and engage with, senior Adobe executives before presenting their final recommendations.

This is just one of many ICPU projects that partners our students with leading organisations to tackle real-world problems. More than 70 organisations across six countries have engaged with over 5000 students. The solutions offered by our students have reinforced the value of these industry partnerships and the importance of involving industry in creating real-world educational experiences for students.

Through our agreement with GE Healthcare, we are exploring opportunities to support the research continuum - from research at the laboratory bench through to biotechnology manufacture, clinical trials, clinical imaging research, adoption by the healthcare system and wealth creation through life science and health care innovation.

This partnership builds on our review of our medical research and our multidisciplinary research initiatives, such as the Charles Perkins Centre, and represents a shared vision for improving access to affordable, quality healthcare.

Together we’ll seek to add value to our expertise in obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, cancer, mental health and neuroscience, infectious diseases, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and population health services.

Besides research programs, researchers and students will also benefit from proposed industry placements, equipment training and the co-development of industry-relevant courses.

In partnership with ANZ Bank, our undergraduate students have been envisioning the future of banking.

As part of our Industry and Community Projects Units (ICPU) program, small groups of students from diverse disciplines develop solutions to genuine problems defined by our partners. 

With ANZ, each project team explored how disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain technology and the emergence of open banking could affect the way the banking system operates. Instead of a final exam, the students presented their findings to senior stakeholders at ANZ Bank who assessed the originality and commercial viability of their ideas. Learn more about the work our students are doing with ANZ.

Inclusive and equitable workplace policies and practices boost economic growth, drive productivity, and build economic participation and inclusion across sectors, life stages and demographics. Our Gender Equality in Working Life (GEWL) Research Initiative is working to build inclusivity in the workplace through a collaboration between industry, government, and NGOs, on cutting edge research to produce actionable insights that organisations can use to build true gender equality. 

Led by Professor Rae Cooper AO and Associate Professor Elizabeth Hill, the initiative brings together our academics with industry leaders to build the vision for a gender-equitable workforce that transforms research into policy and embeds that policy in organisations across sectors. 

The initiative offers a focal point for collaboration between scholars, business practitioners and policymakers to explore, understand and respond to factors affecting individuals, work, employment, family and community. GEWL engages with trends impacting the workforce and helps link leading academic research to inform evidence-based and actionable policy.