The initiative was led by PVC (Research Performance and Development), Professor Amanda Barnier and Deputy Deans Research and Innovation. The Themed workshops and Open-Door workshops gave researchers an opportunity to explore research strengths and consilience, and to forge new collaborations aimed at bringing a range of disciplinary perspectives to research problems.

Professor Greg Downey, Interim Dean, Macquarie School of Social Sciences participated in the Brain Capital workshop.

“Everyone worries about academic silos which can keep us isolated in our own groups, talking to the same people over again. Macquarie is a special place where you can get new connections to happen. I am excited to pursue new leads and find fresh collaborators,” he says.

Themed workshops were co-hosted by Professor Barnier, and Deputy Deans Research and Innovation and Open-Door workshops were hosted by Research Centre directors. Workshop themes included Ageing Well, Ageing Together and Living Pasts, Resilient Futures. There were also workshops on Sustainable Cities and Brain Capital.

“The workshops revealed new ways in which our researchers and research teams might collaborate, coordinate, and converge efforts to become more than the sum of our parts. They highlighted Macquarie’s many research strengths and culture of collegiality as well as enormous potential for new and distinctive approaches to solving the big problems of the future,” says Professor Barnier.

By 29 August, over 20 Expressions of Interest had been received. From these, selected collectives will be invited to pitch their MQRC bid to a panel of internal and external experts in late September.

Workshop participant Associate Professor Dr Lisa Spagnolo, of Macquarie Law School says, “at the end of the workshops there were some tentative ideas for potential future collaborations. Of course, it is up to individuals to follow through, something that isn’t easy when we are all time poor. But that was the beauty of the workshops – they were an impetus to do that. A great starting point to spark connections and interest!”

Information about the 2023 MQRC Scheme and Workshops can be found on the Research Centres Scheme webpage.

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), Professor Sakkie Pretorius, says it’s particularly pleasing to see four humanities projects funded.

“Through each of our future-shaping research priorities, but particularly Resilient societies, we strive to better understand ourselves and the cultures around us, so we can help build ethical, just and inclusive communities,” he says. “I congratulate all the successful recipients in the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Science and Engineering and look forward to seeing the positive impact of these projects.”

Congratulations to our DECRA recipients

Dr Regina Fabry  (Faculty of Arts)
$328,092 for ‘Living to tell, telling to live: Experience, narrative, and the self’

A robust sense of self is crucial for our mental wellbeing and in this project Dr Fabry will analyse the biological underpinnings of the human mind and define the core features of self-narratives, leading to a novel theory about the sense of self and enhancing our understanding of the power of self-narratives. 

Dr Ana Tanasoca (Faculty of Arts)
$374,686 for ‘The Common Heritage of Mankind: A Cosmopolitan Preservationist Ethic’

This project aims to provide the first systematic, unified moral framework for understanding the ‘common heritage of mankind’ principle of international law, which postulates that some assets are valuable for all mankind and hence should be preserved for perpetuity.  It will provide an important contribution to philosophical debates on intergenerational justice, cosmopolitanism, climate change, and humanitarian intervention and provide practical guidance to policymakers and stakeholders in reshaping global governance around this principle.

Dr Pierrick Bourrat (Faculty of Arts)
$441,200 for ‘Inheritance and the Emergence of Individuals: From Concepts to Practice’

This project aims to solve a fundamental problem in biology:  how entities at one level biological organisation (e.g. single cells) transition or evolve into entities at a higher level (e.g. multicellular organisms). The project will demonstrate that conceptual research by philosophers of biology can make an impactful contribution in biology and answer fundamental questions in this field.

Dr Monika Zalnieriute (Faculty of Arts)
$426,530 for Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making, Privacy and Discrimination Laws

Monika’s project aims to expand knowledge of the effectiveness of Australia’s discrimination and data privacy laws by drawing on empirical mixed methods and comparative US and EU experiences.  Monika was successful in securing her DECRA grant through her previous role at the University of New South Wales but recently joined the Macquarie Law School (welcome Monika!).

Dr Xuyun Zhang (Faculty of Science and Engineering)
$387,141 for ‘Scalable and Deep Anomaly Detection from Big Data with Similarity Hashing’

Anomaly detection – aiming to identify anomalous but insightful patterns in data mining –  is an important big data analytics technique, but existing detection methods suffer from either high computational cost or low detection performance. This project aims to develop a detection framework to advance detection performance and efficiency, bringing huge benefits to applications such as real-time predictive maintenance in smart manufacturing, and intrusion detection in cybersecurity.

A technology 10 years in the making is now set to help tens of millions of people, with the world’s largest chemical company licencing the rights to a world-changing Macquarie University discovery.

Every day, the community of researchers at Macquarie University is working on innovations that could potentially improve human welfare and protect our environment. But how do these technologies progress from an academic hunch all the way to their application in the world?

Enter Macquarie University’s Commercialisation and Innovation team. Their role is to identify and commercialise new technologies developed by our researchers so that business, industry and the community can benefit.

Over a 10-year period, Professor Brian Atwell of the Department of Biological Sciences has worked with former Macquarie PhD student and post-doc, Dr Andrew Scafaro, to isolate a gene from a wild Australian rice that renders plants tolerant to very hot days beyond the mid-30s (which is about three degrees hotter than the optimum for commercial cereal crops). With conservative estimates predicting an average increase in the Earth’s temperature of at least two degrees over the next century, major grain shortages are expected. This innovation will help the world sustain wheat yields through heat waves and general global warming.

The technology was developed in a team involving international collaborations and supported by colleagues at Bayer CropScience in Belgium. The recent transfer of agreements to the German company BASF – the largest chemical producer in the world – has culminated in a mutual licence agreement with Macquarie University to bring a heat resistant wheat crop to market.

“We’ve spent the last two years negotiating the license for this technology,” notes Anna Grocholsky, Macquarie University’s Director of Commercialisation and Innovation. “Research started with Bayer. Bayer acquired Monsanto and then Bayer CropScience’s wheat business was acquired by BASF.

“Macquarie University has such a strong record for innovation and it’s immensely satisfying to be able to help people like Brian and Andrew translate their incredible efforts into solutions with truly global potential.

“This deal with BASF represents a fantastic team effort from Brian and Andrew, Legal and the Commercialisation and Innovation team.”

With BASF having licensed the rights for wheat, Anna’s team are also working with Professor Atwell and Dr Scafaro to license the technology in other crops and grains, expanding its potential to secure a staple food source for many millions of people.

You can read more about this groundbreaking work in The Lighthouse. For information on this technology, or other new technologies being developed at Macquarie, contact Anna on +61 437 463 317.

1. How are our views being affected by the media or social media we are consuming?

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer here. As consumers, we are partially able to choose what we read, and we also distort information as it spreads through our online and offline social networks. Because of this complexity, research examining what we consume, what we believe, and how it affects our actions is able to reveal patterns, but it cannot tell us how much of an effect media has. However, research on the spread of misinformation points to the importance of echo chambers for certain topics like climate change, where surveys also show that ideology and political views are closely aligned with opinions.

2. How can we better counteract our consumption of misinformation?

Say the New York Times publishes an opinion piece from a climate skeptic, even if the facts in it are distorted or wrong, reading it can help us break out of our own echo chambers and learn more about how people justify their beliefs. After all, we can’t counteract something we don’t understand.

3. When it comes to scientific evidence vs alternative truths, how can we begin to tell one from the other?

As scientists, we are caught between the classical ideals of science—where we are seen to be perfectly objective observers of the world—and the practicalities of being part of the world we study. In my research into financial competing interests, I see problems of bias in research almost constantly. I believe that the blurring of the lines between advertising and science has fed a growing distrust of science in the public and has made it harder to detect misinformation. My practical advice is to always consider the motivations behind what you see or read. Initiatives like Snopes, Health News Review, and The Conversation’s FactCheck are excellent resources—they do much of the hard work for you.

4. Is the University currently undertaking any research or project initiatives to help combat science misinformation?

In my team in the Centre for Health Informatics, we have an NHMRC-funded research project where we are building tools to monitor information related to vaccines. These tools will be used to track the provenance and spread of both evidence and misinformation. A group of us from across several faculties were also involved in organising a workshop earlier this month. There is a great wealth of knowledge about the problems, theory, and practice of science communication across the University, and our hope is that these workshops will help to stimulate new collaborations to help address some of the most pressing problems of our time. Stay tuned for future events.

Briardo and Thomas were among eleven researchers from universities across Australia to be included in the recent round of fellowships:

• Briardo for work on Synthebiont: Travelling back in time to the origin of photosynthetic eukaryotes
• Thomas for the project From one to many: Synthetic yeast chassis for C1 metabolism

Synthetic Biology is one of the fastest growing areas of modern science with a wealth of potential for developments in fields such as healthcare, industrial biotechnology, agriculture and food research.

Through its Synthetic Biology Future Science Platform (SynBio FSP), CSIRO is establishing a collaborative community of practice extending across the Organisation, Australia more broadly, and linking into international efforts in the field.

The fellowships are designed to position Australia as a major international leader in Synthetic Biology by attracting outstanding national and international early-career post-doctoral researchers to expand our research capacity in the field.

*What is Synthetic Biology?

Synthetic biology is essentially the application of engineering principles to biology.

It involves the design and construction of biological systems and devices, as well as the re-design of existing, natural biological systems, usually based on DNA-encoded componentry, and their application for useful purposes.

Components include DNA, RNA, and proteins (commonly enzymes); these are used to build genetic circuits encoding cellular machinery, which may be applied either in vivo (inside cells) or ex vivo (in test tubes or other non-cellular environments).

It is a highly interdisciplinary science, drawing on biology, engineering and computer science, as well as many other fields, and has potential application in areas as diverse as manufacturing, human health, agriculture and protecting ecosystems.

In Australia, there are a number of research and development projects in the design or implementation phase across agricultural, industrial and environmental applications.

*Source: CSIRO

“I’ve learnt a lot from Ishan and his drive. I’m a very science-oriented person, and I rarely think of the application beyond the lab. It’s taken Ishan’s drive for me to become interested in the idea of commercialisation and the potential it holds. It’s also made me realise that there’s a lot of missed opportunities that I wish I had harnessed in the past. We’re taking a lot of the products that Ishan has developed and studied during his PhD and pitching them to the market.”

The products Ishan refined during his PhD are ‘ultra-small’ diamonds. It is hard to capture how small they are, but they are roughly the width of one-thousandth of a human hair. These already exist in research labs and are even available for sale by some small companies, but Ishan’s research has demonstrated ways to make them smaller and better than any other currently available. It’s a very unique material.

“The true beauty in this project has been the significant element of collaboration; we’ve worked with so many teams around the university. We’re chemists, but we’ve had to work very closely with both physicists and biologists in order to really understand the full extent of the applications for these products. Over the last year, we formed a company called LuciGem together with three physicists who also work at Macquarie,” said Louise.

“It’s been a very different way of working for me, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. The strength in this is that because we know exactly what the product is, we can start applying it to many different things and fields beyond our areas of expertise. There are already universities both in Australia and overseas using our products which is great.

“Some students have more of a ‘commercial’ edge than others and it’s a great way to keep them involved in research while developing commercial skills along the way. Funding this is more difficult and higher risk, but the fast pace and new way of thinking makes it all worthwhile, especially as a training ground for dynamic students who’ve just completed postgraduate studies. It’s been so great having Ishan stay on beyond his PhD to pursue this. I’m very proud of him.” Dr Brown concluded.

IMAGE: The LuciGem team: Carlo Bradac, Louise Brown, James Rabeau, Varun Sreenivasan and Ishan Rastogi (left to right) in the Macquarie University Pop-Up Incubator.

As one of the leading research hubs for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) worldwide, Macquarie University and US-based VoiceBox Technologies recently announced an international research and development partnership.

VoiceBox Technologies is an award-winning pioneer of Contextual Natural Language Understanding (CNLU) and the leading innovator of next gen Voice Artificial Intelligence (Voice AI). VoiceBox is taking voice interaction from today’s NLU based systems to the next generation by employing AI techniques in advanced Semantic Language Understanding, large-scale data mining, Deep Neural Networks and advanced machine learning.

Dr Mark Johnson from the Department of Computing has been named the Chief Scientific Officer of VoiceBox Australia and will lead the VoiceBox office as a Centre of Excellence for Voice AI. Dr Johnson is overseeing the advanced labs located on the University’s campus in the heart of the Macquarie Park Innovation District (MPID). VoiceBox Australia will focus on research and development of Voice AI – a next gen intelligent interface that will provide voice recognition and natural language understanding at a much higher level of sophisticated intelligence, enabling higher accuracy and usability than previously achieved.

“Macquarie University is one of the few places in the world with research strengths across a broad range of language sciences, including NLU,” said Dr Johnson, Chief Scientific Officer of VoiceBox Australia. “Together with VoiceBox, we will focus research and development efforts on next generation Voice AI, as well as continually honing expertise in speech recognition and natural language understanding.”

“Our new Centre of Excellence in Australia represents our commitment to developing Voice AI as well as exploring opportunities in the Asia Pacific Region,” said Mike Kennewick, VoiceBox CEO. “Macquarie is an elite research facility that consistently attracts and keeps top talent because of its willingness to innovate. Mark is a world class scientist – the perfect leader to execute on the VoiceBox vision to provide an intelligent interface for the Internet of Things.”

This research partnership highlights the innovation taking place in the region, as well as the potential for industry collaboration with academia. By way of employment, student placement opportunities and the identification of further joint research projects, this partnership will actively contribute to the local innovation ecosystem and deliver measurable research impact and engagement.

“In the past, Dr Johnson would have been required to relocate to the US to undertake such an opportunity,” said Barbara Messerle, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering. “However, with Macquarie’s commitment to the MPID, we will see many more ground-breaking opportunities emerge.”

The forum was held as part of a project entitled ‘Delivering safe and effective test result communication, management and follow-up’ which is being led by Associate Professor Andrew Georgiou.

“The project has three main goals,” Andrew explained. “The first being to improve the effectiveness and safety of test result management through the establishment of clear processes of communication, responsibility and accountability.”

“The second is to harness health IT to inform and monitor test result management, and the third is to enhance the contribution of consumers to the establishment of safe and effective test result management systems,” he said.

The five-year venture brings together experts from many different backgrounds specialising in specific aspects of healthcare delivery. Working together, the project stakeholders will deliver better solutions in areas such test result communication to both doctors and patients, delivery of patient care, and consumer engagement.

Dr Robert Herkes, Clinical Director of the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, also hopes that the project will improve delineation models when it comes to understanding test results.

“There are currently unresolved issues around what is an abnormal test result and when an alert for these tests need to be made,” he said.

In addition to members of the CHSSR, other stakeholder attendees at the forum were from the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, SEALS Pathology, Health Consumers NSW, Clinical Excellence Commission, Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia, Australian Healthcare and Hospital Association, Prince of Wales Hospital, St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney Children’s Hospital, Liverpool Hospital, Diabetes Australia, CanSpeak, MDA National and Spok.

You can read more about the project here.

Professor Michael Withford and Dr Simon Gross from the Department of Physics and Astronomy are part of a team selected to take part in the next round of CSIRO’s ON Accelerator, a program boosting Australia’s innovation performance by accelerating big science and technology ideas into commercially viable innovation opportunities.

For the first time CSIRO welcomed Australian university applications into the program, recognising the importance of collaboration and engagement between research sectors in driving Australia’s innovation agenda.

Macquarie’s team Modular Photonics is a collaboration with the University of Adelaide and ANU.

The team’s winning idea – a photonics chip that has applications for faster data transfer in data and telecommunication companies – is built on the strengths of Australian photonics research to increase the speed and flow of data to, from and within data centres. The chip is currently three times faster than market technology.

“Before commencing the program I believed that as university researchers we understand real world needs and can readily identify potential commercial opportunities. I can see now that we are frequently guilty of developing a ‘solution’ first and then go in search of a problem. The CSIRO program has enabled us to focus on the problem first and trust that we will find the right solution later. This will involve learning how to better identify potential end-users and ask the right questions,” said Professor Withford.

“One of my key learnings from the program was that having an interesting technology is not sufficient for commercial success. The program has changed my approach to commercialisation and I’m looking forward to learning more through the 12-week CSIRO AcceleratiON bootcamp,” said Dr Gross.