The 2015 Research Awards directly aligned with the Five Future-Shaping Research Priorities outlined in the Strategic Research Framework (2015 - 2024). Each category recognises the world-leading research with world-changing impact undertaken across the range of disciplines by researchers at Macquarie University.
"I am very honoured to receive the Macquarie Research Excellence Award on behalf of my team. This research brings together a great group of investigators from a range of different disciplines (philosophy, law, surgery and bioethics)," says Professor Rogers.
"Together we've investigated the challenges of supporting safer innovative surgery by linking conceptual research to practical outcomes."
Professor Joseph Pugliese (MMCCS) and Dr James Martin (PICT) also received Highly Commended awards for their respective research projects.
The Faculty of Arts congratulates the winners on their outstanding achievements.
2015 Macquarie University Research Awards winners (from Faculty of Arts)
Excellence in Research – Resilient Societies
Professor Wendy Rogers
On the cutting edge: promoting best practice in surgical innovation
The development of new surgical procedures is vital to progress in healthcare but it can be harmful to patients. The harm can occur in ways that are difficult to identify and manage appropriately as they often fall into grey areas between ordinary practice and surgical research. Surgeons have a tradition of trying new techniques or devices to help their patients. Yet we know that while innovations may benefit patients, they can also lead to serious patient harm. Our research supports the safer introduction of surgical innovations by creating an original and reliable way of identifying prospectively when surgical innovation occurs. This allows appropriate supports to be put into place, thereby meeting the twin aims of both fostering innovation and enhancing patient safety.
Highly Commended: Excellence in Research - Resilient Societies
Professor Joseph Pugliese
State Violence and the Execution of Law
Professor Jospeh Pugliese researches how the institution of law was, in the waging of the War on Terror, perverted in order to legitimate, officially, a range of violent practices that contravened US law, international law and international treaty obligations. It offers a forensic analysis of how the political divide between human and animal has played a fundamental role in enabling torture, secret imprisonment and killing via drones. It demonstrates how the scripting of the victims of the War on Terror as non-human animals often resulted in their being tortured, killed and disappeared with impunity.
Early Career Researcher of the Year Award - Business, Humanities and Social Sciences
Dr James Martin
Cryptomarkets and the Online Drug Trade
Dr James Martin is a critical criminologist with recent research focused on cybercriminology. Dr Martin focuses on the ‘dark net’ or ‘deep web’, an encrypted sub-section of the internet through which drug traffickers distribute a growing range of illicit substances. Dr Martin’s research has identified that growth in the illicit online drug trade has had the unexpected benefit of reducing violence during drug exchanges and lowered the opportunities for criminal gangs to profit from the global supply of illegal drugs.
Dr Martin believes the online illicit drug market has gentrified the drug trade. Some of the online distributors operating through the ‘dark web’ advertise their marijuana as “organic” and their cocaine as “conflict-free”. Though there is no way to ascertain the veracity of these claims, it does demonstrate the depth of the online illicit drug market and the tool used by different distributors to differentiate their products.
