$7M in new ARC grants drive research innovation

Minister for Education and Training, Senator the Hon. Simon Birmingham announced that University of Sydney researchers have received 55 Discovery Projects, worth $21 million and 13 Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards (DECRA), worth $4.5 million. Of these, $7 million in grants were given to researchers in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies.

“The Faculty is very pleased with the recent Australian Research Council (ARC) outcomes for Discovery Projects and DECRA Fellowship commencing in 2018,” says Professor Kim Rasmussen, Associate Dean Research.

“We did particularly well in Discovery funding with a success rate of 22%, more than 3% higher than the national average. This success is a testament to the quality of our research and research teams.”

Professor Assaad Masri, from the School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, received a $956,000 Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) grant to work on cleaner and more efficient processes that will benefit a range of applications from engine design to the generation of new fuels. He also received a Discovery Projects grant of some $500,000 for his work in the dynamics of droplets and nanoparticles in turbulent flames.

There were three researchers awarded DECRA fellowships. These were:

Ms Huimin Liu, School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Tailoring efficient photothermal catalysts for carbon dioxide reduction

Ms Jingyu Lu, School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering
Probing interfacial impedance in all-solid-state lithium-ion batteries

Dr Chang Xu, School of Information Technologies
Multi-view synergistic learning for human behaviour analysis

There were 12 Discovery Project grants awarded to the Faculty. These included Professor Brian Uy (Head of the School of Civil Engineering) for his project on the behaviour and design of large fabricated stainless steel composite structures; Professor Qing Li (School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering) for multiscale modelling and nondeterministic optimisation of stents; and Professor Xiaoke Yi (School of Electrical and Information Engineering) for on-chip radio frequency photonics for advanced signal processing.

For more information on the November round of ARC funding grants, refer to the November 2017 ARC Grants Announcement.