Our international reputation and standing continues to grow, with 2015 being an active year of engagement with our partners across the globe. Over the past 12 months we have hosted more than 66 high level delegations, including international universities, governments, research funding agencies, scholarship bodies, and NGOs – with the aim of promoting our learning and teaching strengths, research, teaching and learning activities and encouraging international collaboration.

During this time the International Relations (IR) team has worked closely with faculties, key offices and research centres including PACE, the Office of the DVC (Research), CUDOS and the SIMHUB on visit programs for delegations from 29 countries. These activities have included workshops, networking events, symposiums and tours of our facilities.

“International visits play an important role in ‘emboldening the University’s international recognition’ as set out in ‘Our University: A Framing of Futures’,” explained Michele Robinson, Associate Director International Relations.

“They build and strengthen relationships, identify synergies and deliver strong outcomes, including funding to support staff and student mobility, joint research and teaching programs and scholarships,” she says.

Key visits have included the Vice-Chancellors/Presidents of Uppsala University (Sweden), China University of Geosciences-Wuhan (China), and North-South University (Bangladesh), the Hamburg-Fudan research workshop, a delegation of 15 National Universities from Japan, and government delegations from China, Vietnam, Russia, France, Germany, Korea, and the European Union.

In the last week IR has hosted visits from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, French higher education and research institutes including the CNRS; as well as German organisations, including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the German Research Foundation.

“Collectively, these organisations administer more than €2 billion [just over $2.9 billion AUD] of funding, making them heavyweights when it comes to international research,” says Michelle.

Macquarie also actively engages with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (in Australia and overseas), Austrade and the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet – all of whom are tasked with promoting Australian higher education and research internationally. The IR team has participated in roundtables and hosted one-on-one meetings with Australian Heads of Mission and Trade Consuls to a number of countries including Mexico, India, the Philippines, Iran, France, the US and China.

“We are looking forward to an even busier year to come,” says Nicole Brigg, Director of Macquarie International. “We would like to thank all of our partners across the University for their support during 2015, which was a great success.”

For further information on past and upcoming events involving the International Relations team, please contact Michele Robinson, Associate Director, International Relations at (michele.robinson@mq.edu.au).

Getting the student experience right is the biggest challenge that faces any university. The biggest part of this challenge is offering a learning and teaching program that is engaging and interesting, challenging, meaningful in the context of individual aspirations, and well matched to expectations.

And now, following endorsement from the Vice-Chancellor, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) and Pro Vice-Chancellor (Learning and Teaching) are proud to release the Learning and Teaching Strategic Framework 2015-2020.

“Learning for the future sets a bold course for our learning and teaching, capturing the full potential of new technologies and changing landscapes but always keeping the capabilities of our graduates at the heart of all that we do,” says Professor Dowton, Vice-Chancellor “Our students remain our constant purpose, and this framework will help us provide each of them the greatest possibility for success in their studies.”

Developed in collaboration with the University community, Professor John Simons, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) says that “the Strategy presents an opportunity for Macquarie to build its reputation around excellent student experiences and outcomes.”

Presented in short-form, three key objectives capture a range of goals that, when combined, forms a connected learning community dedicated to the service of its students.

1. Provide connected, creative and innovative learning experiences.
2. Ensure deep, broad graduate capabilities through a connected curriculum.
3. Foster a culture that supports excellence.

“The strength of this strategy is assured by our dedicated staff, committed to achieving objectives across our community of faculties, departments, disciplines and partnerships,” says Professor Sherman Young, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Learning and Teaching). “It highlights unique and valuable ways for every office, portfolio, department, and engages with the University’s educational mission.”

The long-form version of the strategy is anticipated for release in early 2016, detailing an implementation framework to further guide strategic planning.

Confident about this strategic approach to learning and teaching, John says: “The future is already here, and this is how we will distribute it. Macquarie will actively embrace and prepare to respond to the uncertainty that comes with life on the cutting-edge in the service of innovation and a more valuable experience for every student.”

Access a copy of the short-form Learning and Teaching Strategic Framework

• download a short-form PDF copy of the White Paper
• download a screen reader compatible version

A limited number of hard-copies are available. Request a copy by emailing pvclt@mq.edu.au

“Our international reputation is built upon the excellence of the research undertaken by our highly committed and talented researchers across a broad spectrum of research activity,” says Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Sakkie Pretorius. “The night was a true showcase of the outstanding research and innovation being undertaken at Macquarie.”

The 2015 Research Awards were this year aligned with our five Future-shaping Research Priorities which were developed as a means to support the University’s current and emerging areas of disciplinary research strength with the significant challenges of today and tomorrow.

“Their breadth and local, national and global relevance offer researchers a considerable level of stability over the next 10 years. Each recognises the world-leading research with world-changing impact undertaken across the range of disciplines by researchers at Macquarie,” says Sakkie.

The Awards also honoured Excellence in Higher Degree Research, Excellence in Higher Degree Research Supervision, Early Career Research and Excellence in Research Leadership.

Congratulations to six staff, recognised with Excellence in Research – Five Future-Shaping Research Priorities Awards

Professor Jennifer Hudson
Healthy people: Improving emotional health
ARC Future Fellow and Centre for Emotional Health Director Professor Jennifer Hudson is working to stamp out childhood anxiety. Through international collaboration with more than 15 different institutions and anxiety clinics from around the world, the team is able to create tailored, individualised treatment for children with anxiety disorders. “If we can improve the emotional health of young people, then we can have an impact on individuals across their lifespan – improving their life satisfaction, their happiness and their emotional health,” she says.

Professor Wendy Rogers
Resilient societies: Supporting surgical innovation
ARC Future Fellow Professor Wendy Rogers is on a mission to make surgery safer for patients around the world. Her team developed the Macquarie Surgery Innovation Identification Tool (MSIIT), a questionnaire that identifies how much a surgical intervention differs from usual practice. If it meets a certain threshold, the tool triggers support to make it safer for the patient. “My grand plan is to use the conceptual tools from moral philosophy and ethics to identify and understand practical issues in healthcare and to try to resolve them in ways that make healthcare safer and better for people,” she says.

Professor Stefan Trueck
Prosperous economies: Modelling electricity prices
Centre for Financial Risk Co-director Professor Stefan Trueck wants to keep utility prices reasonable in Australia. He creates statistical or econometrical models to forecast the price behaviour of electricity. This is particularly important for large customers such as retailers who buy electricity on exchange and could be at risk with extreme price fluctuations. His models help hedge those risks. “I want to do things that help people, that help the economy and help financial markets to achieve better outcomes,” he says.

Associate Professor Brian Atwell
Secure planet: Improving our crops
Associate Professor Brian Atwell wants to feed the planet. Conservative estimates show that the Earth’s temperature will rise on average 0.9 degrees Celsius over the next century, which could mean disaster for plants that are highly sensitive to their environment. Atwell’s team has found a gene in heat-tolerant rices in northern Australia that allows photosynthesis at higher temperatures, enabling higher productivity of the plant. “There will be a group of people who have an open mind about using wild plants in Australia to try to improve the 15 or 20 major foods that feed almost everybody on this planet,” he says.

Professor Nicolle Packer
Innovative technologies: Understanding disease
Professor Nicolle Packer is helping in the fight against every disease in humans. Data from all over the world come together in her team’s project, UniCarbKB, to understand how sugars attach to the surface of cells and interact to bring about diseases. With the innovative technologies and the informatics needed to analyse data, the project makes it possible to develop new targets and diagnostics for these diseases. “I truly believe these molecules are important in the way our bodies function and how they stop functioning,” she says. “As one of my post-docs has said to me, ‘It’s all about sugars. It always was and always will be.’”

Professor David Raftos
Innovative technologies: Safeguarding our oyster industry
Professor David Raftos is working to future-proof Australia’s oyster industry. Besides being New South Wales’ largest aquaculture industry, oysters are instrumental in forming estuarine ecosystems such as that in Sydney Harbour and the Hawkesbury River. Working with the Australian oyster industry, Raftos’ team discovered a set of genes in oysters that allows them to survive disease and tolerate environmental changes. “So far our results are remarkable,” he says. “In just a single generation of breeding using this new technology, we’ve had a 30 per cent improvement in the number of oysters that survive disease outbreaks.”

See the full playlist of videos online, including those highly commended in these award categories.

Distinguished Professor Award: Seven of our academic finest bestowed with a mark of distinction

Also announced during the 2015 Research Excellence Awards, the Distinguished Professor award is the highest academic honour Macquarie can bestow on a member of our academic community, recognising professors who have made an outstanding contribution to their field of scholarship or discipline and to the University.

Seven staff will carry this title in 2016, including six renominated from the first cohort awarded in 2010.

The six continuing recipients of the 2015 Macquarie University Distinguished Professor Award are:

• Professor Mark Westoby, Faculty of Science and Engineering
• Professor Naguib Kanawati, Faculty of Arts
• Professor Sue O’Reilly, Faculty of Science and Engineering
• Professor David Throsby, Faculty of Business and Economics
• Professor Stephen Crain, Faculty of Human Sciences
• Professor Ronald Rapee, Faculty of Human Sciences

Newly nominated in 2015:

• Professor James Guthrie, Faculty of Business and Economics

Congratulations to all our award winners.

Read about our Early Career Research and Higher Degree Research Award winners.

The day was divided into an exhibition space in the foyer open to all staff. Here, teams showcased their hard work and provided insight into how they align with our strategic initiatives and priorities. The Conference featured a series of insightful discussions by our executive leaders on our progress in some of our priority areas and future vision for the University to an audience of senior staff who were tasked with reporting back to their areas on what they learned.

“I have been the Vice-Chancellor of this University now for three years, and it remains the most rewarding experience of my professional career,” says Professor S Bruce Dowton as he opened the conference. “We are here to serve the big questions facing society, and our challenge is to be responsive and nimble in addressing them.”

Among the presentations, the Vice-Chancellor, COO Dr Paul Schreier and CFO John Gorman led a panel discussion exploring the economic outlook for higher education globally, and how that might affect the budget and financial reality of the Australian sector and Macquarie University in particular.

“There will be very significant global demand for graduates in the future,” says Dr Schreier, “and we are in the business of supplying them. There is a great opportunity for us if we are able to seize it.” Nonetheless, the panellists spoke of the need for financial restraint throughout 2016.

“Our annual surplus is reinvested every year into capital works and improvements, and that is how we finance the long-term future of the University. We must work to improve our surplus in 2016 and that will involve some tight budget decisions next year,” says the Vice-Chancellor.

This year’s budget has been adversely affected by a reduction in international student enrolments, but the panel indicated that there were signs of improvement for next year. “The upturn in international recruitment hasn’t happened yet, but early indications are that 2016 will see a growth in our international student numbers,” says Dr Schreier.

Director of Strategic Planning, Associate Professor James Rabeau, says the event was a truly engaging and informative experience for all in attendance. “The all-staff exhibition was an exciting showcase of on the ground action occurring across campus. The exhibition is an important vehicle through which our entire community can learn about the development and implementation of Strategic Initiatives and discuss progress. I spoke with many staff at the exhibition keen to gauge their thoughts, and all were impressed with the depth and quality of the displays on show,” he says.

Conference presentations highlighted areas of key strategic significance, including Learning and Teaching, Academic Health and the Business Process Improvement Initiative, to provide insight into how Our University: A Framing of Futures is being realised. One of the many highlights from the Conference was a panel discussion which included external corporate partners Optus and Abbott Australasia who gave their perspective on how to better connect academia with industry.

“We were fortunate to get real external views, and a clearer sense of the importance and emphasis the University is placing on industry engagement,” says Associate Professor Rabeau.

Did you attend the all-staff exhibition? Tell us what you think.

Sign up to receive the Higher Education Landscape monthly email produced the Office of Strategic Planning by emailing strategy@mq.edu.au. This month in focus: Cybersecurity.

“Our vision is to improve lives,” says Natalie Sequeira, Director, Academic Health Strategy, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. “Our Centre builds on the success of integrated approaches to patient care, discovery and continuous learning that are already in place overseas.”

MUHSC is built on the belief that the best patient care is only possible in environments where the latest research discoveries are applied in treatment, to deliver real impact where it matters most.

“The Centre provides a platform where health professionals are teachers and learners simultaneously, to inspire others to innovate for better patient outcomes,” says Natalie.

In the past year, the Centre has been established and made considerable progress. The Australian Institute of Health Innovation (AIHI) was welcomed to the University, and the newly created Macquarie University Clinical Associates (MUCA) is gearing up to drive the integration between the Hospital and the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences to provide innovative mechanisms for the employment of, and engagement with, clinicians.

“We have recently published our strategic plan, and in addition to the AIHI and the MUCA, we are putting in place a clinical leadership structure for the Centre to drive integration where it will have the most impact,” says Natalie.

Staff are welcome to view the strategic plan and learn how the Centre plans to drive health innovation at Macquarie.

Next year, the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences will launch its first undergraduate degree program – the Bachelor of Clinical Science. The team is also in the early planning stages of innovative postgraduate programs, including Master of Public Health.

“We’re looking forward to sharing our current milestones and plans for the future with the community at the all-staff exhibition,” says Natalie. “Staff will be able to interact with every stage of our health translational research pathway – from the laboratory bench, to the patient bedside, to the outpatient clinic. They will see how we impact the broader community and improve lives around the world. Basic health checks will also be provided, courtesy of the Hospital and the Department of Health Professions.”

Event details
When: Thursday September 24
Time: 8.30am – 12pm
Where: Macquarie Theatre foyer

Discover more about the Centre below.

“The Web Transformation Project will offer a substantially enhanced user experience of our digital space for our key audiences,” says Web Project Director Richard Powell. “With the help of many across campus we’ve accomplished a great deal but there is still much to do before we launch.”

Rich explains the long-term scope of the project encompass both the staff.mq.edu.au and students.mq.edu.au sites, however the October launch will only reveal our public site mq.edu.au.

“Content from our existing site has now been migrated to the new 6000-page website,” says Rich. “Last week we revealed the skeleton site to content owners to give them a first look at how the site is structured.”

Rich says given the significant number of public-facing pages in scope, content owners will be working tirelessly in the next week to make sure their content has successfully been migrated.

“We believe we’ve captured everyone who has a public-facing page, but if a page owner thinks they may have been missed, we need them to contact us as soon as possible,” says Rich.

Instructions for content owners on how to review content

• Clear instructions on what you need to do before 24 September are available on the Web Transformation Project wiki.
• It is recommended you subscribe to updates as ALL future instructions will be provided there.

Think you’ve been missed?

• Contact the Web Transformation Project team at web.project@mq.edu.au
• Contact your relevant Faculty Web Officer.

Information session
Staff are welcome to join the Web Transformation Project team to learn more about the process for the project in the lead-up to the 12 October launch.

Got a question for the team? Submit your question now.

When: Tuesday 1 September
Time: From 4pm
Where: T2, Building E7B

Keep up-to-date
This Week will provide weekly updates until the site launch on Monday 12 October.

A crucial element of our student experience is access to wellbeing and other support services, accurate advice and referral – processes that were identified for streamlining by members of the Student Engagement for Success strategic initiative last year.

Now, following the implementation of a Business Process Improvement Initiative (BPII) that pinpointed key opportunities for improvement, the University has developed a set of resources, standard processes and tips for staff in front line roles to enhance how students are referred across campus to our varied support services.

“We’re committed to providing our students with the best experience we can offer to enable them to achieve their academic aspirations,” says Deidre Anderson, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Students and Registrar). “That experience can only be realised when there is collaboration between academic, administrative, support and professional service units on projects like this.”

Dr Benjamin Wilkes, Manager, Allied Health, Campus Wellbeing and Support services, and BPII champion across business areas, says an enhanced student experience was at the core of this initiative.

The referral process was reviewed as a Lean Methodology Rapid Improvement Event, which allowed consideration and inclusion of many perspectives from previously dispersed areas of service provision from across campus.

“The process enabled many stakeholders to identify their practices that could be shared, identify the means to increase consistency, and reduce the time it takes students to get the support they need,” says Dr Wilkes.

The new, streamlined process is detailed in a clear process map, new referral guide and accompanying wiki page that outlines how to respond to a student’s needs based on their eligibility for services and current presenting needs. Additional content will be added throughout 2015.

“The process map and guide provide front line staff with clear procedures on how to deal with regular, complex and emergency referrals with efficiency and confidence,” says Dr Wilkes.

Dr Wilkes explains all referrals will be recorded on Tracker so that histories of student queries are viewable to service staff, and accessible when students make contact.

“The greatest benefit to a student is that their needs and questions can be answered by the first, or at least the second person they contact,” he says. “It also means there will be far fewer instances of a student bouncing between services without receiving the support that most accurately reflects their circumstances or needs.”

“Cross-disciplinary teams across campus have been hard at work developing and delivering projects that support our values and strategic priorities,” said Director of Strategic Planning, Associate Professor James Rabeau. “The exhibition will be an opportunity to shine the light on some of this great work and provide staff with a look at some key initiatives in development.”

Exhibitors include:

• Campus Master Plan
• Health research projects
• Macquarie International
• PACE
• The Student Journey

The University Annual Conference, held in conjunction with the all-staff exhibition, is a one-day event where our University executive group share their thinking and planning around key strategic topics with University leaders. Those who are invited to the conference will share learnings with their respective teams.

Event details
When: Thursday 24 September
Where: Macquarie Theatre Foyer
Time: 8.30am – 12pm

Keep up-to-date with current Framing of Futures strategic priorities, initiatives and news.

You can contribute to its success by joining a staff research group.

Register your interest to participate.

Your involvement could take the form of a face-to-face interview, an online survey, designing or navigating through a web based tool, or trying to complete tasks using prototypes of the new website.

Learn more about the Web Transformation Project and keep up-to-date.

For more information contact Margaret Chidgey (margaret.chidgey@mq.edu.au) or call ext. 4399.

“Our offer to conversion process was convoluted, inefficient and uncoordinated,” said Michaela James, Associate Director, Marketing Planning and Strategy.

Steve Phelps, Team Leader, New Students, says that in an increasingly competitive higher education marketplace, universities need to provide potential students with peace of mind and assurance that they are making the right choice.

The process, which encompasses an offer to study, offer acceptance, initial enrolment, unit choice, and enrolment into classes, was reviewed as a Lean Methodology Rapid Improvement Event (RIE), to address inefficiencies and produce a plan to streamline the process for domestic undergraduate and postgraduate course work students.

“Following the RIE, we improved our customer experience by simplifying the processes and information future students come into contact with, to help with their decision making and ultimately secure their place at Macquarie,” Steve said.

Through feedback from students the RIE team have increased their understanding of student needs, and the overall perception of Macquarie, at what is a critical and formative stage.

“Although we know our process backwards, students learn this once, so it’s critical it’s made as easy as possible. Words like accept and enrol, for example, are foreign to future students,” Michaela said. “We now incorporate more customer centric language such as ‘secure your place’ instead of accept your offer, and ‘choose your units and classes’, in place of enrol in units.”

Michaela explains that for the majority of staff involved in the RIE, accepting an offer was not just an administrative process, but one where future students actively sought information around units, majors and timetables.

Other changes to the process include:

• A congratulatory SMS to students to inform them of an offer and to check their email
• The ability for students to immediately accept an offer
• A targeted communication campaign to support the conversion process
• A change in data management and verification practices to allow for immediate contact with students receiving offers from the UAC process.

Contact the Business Process Initiative team if you have a process improvement idea.