The scheme promotes national and international long-term strategic research partnerships between researchers and business, industry, community organisations and other publicly funded research agencies.

“The Linkage Projects scheme is a fantastic opportunity to collaborate for a shared objective and to use our research expertise to deliver solutions to real-world problems with world-changing impact. I congratulate all the Macquarie researchers for their continued commitment to solve these challenges”, says Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), Professor Sakkie Pretorius.

Professor Richard Shine in the University’s School of Natural Sciences, together with Minderoo Foundation Limited and Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions has been awarded $621,543 for his project Using cane toads to eradicate cane toads. Using recent discoveries about cannibalism in the invasive species, Professor Shine expects to generate new knowledge in invasion biology and amphibian development, with the ultimate aim of preserving native wildlife that is threatened by the cane toad invasion across much of tropical and subtropical Australia.

Associate Professor Jessica McLean in the School of Social Sciences will lead the project Storying and repairing water places in Wiradjuri Country, with $184,365 in Linkage funding. Together with Associate Professor Fiona Miller and collaborators at Western Sydney University, the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, and Mudgee Local Aboriginal Land Council, Professor McLean will use Aboriginal knowledges to story, repair and care for Wiradjuri Country in central west NSW. A key element of the project is on-Country Learning, which will bring collaborators, community members and local school students together on – and with – Country.

There were 81 projects funded in this round of the Linkage Projects scheme.

So, what determines the lifespan of a tree leaf?

The answer to that superficially simple question was recently reported in a paper in Science Advances by an international team of researchers from China, the UK, Japan, Norway, USA, and Australia.

“It’s all about the economic choices faced by plants,” says first author, Dr Han Wang from Tsinghua University in Beijing.

“We already knew that conifers and other evergreen trees make longer-living leaves the closer they are to the poles,” she continues. “Deciduous trees do the opposite. Their longest-lasting leaves are found at the tropics.

“And we knew that long-lived leaves tend to be tougher and thicker, and more expensive to build. Now, we have identified the major environmental factors at play, and summarised them in two equations.

“These leaf economic traits are fundamental to the carbon cycle and nutrient economy.”

The team tested their equations using data from thousands of species from hundreds of ecosystems, drawn from the China Plant Trait Database and the Global Plant Trait Network.

“Each species is essentially taking a punt on the best way to maximise carbon absorption,” says co-author Professor Ian Wright from Macquarie University and Western Sydney University.

“Evergreen conifers growing in poor soil in areas with a long cold winter can only thrive if they make long term investments in their leaves. Whereas deciduous trees, like the maple, race to create new leaves and capture carbon in the summer sun before leaf-drop in autumn,” he adds. “The economically rational decision for a maple tree is to invest in fast-growing, cheap but flimsy leaves.”

Plants have been subject to profound changes in climate during their evolution. Glaciation and other large, and sometimes rapid, changes in recent geological times have resulted in major changes in vegetation. The human impact on climate and direct impact on vegetation are adding to the forces shaping plant communities, in ways that remain only partly understood.

The researchers propose that this research will not only explain what grows where today, but it will also move ecology into a predictive science that will:

• enable better, more accurate global and regional climate models
• allow land managers to better model forests and other vegetation, and predict how climate change will affect ecosystems
• allow better estimation on crop yield and the impact of climate change on agriculture.

The paper builds on 20 years of research led by Wright and Professor Mark Westoby at Macquarie. The global team also includes researchers from Imperial College London, UNSW Sydney, Cornell University, Ishikawa Prefectural University, and the University of Oslo.

Their 2004 paper in Nature, ‘The World-wide leaf economics spectrum’ has been cited more than 7500 times and has been followed by papers on leaf photosynthetic capacity, leaf respiration costs, leaf nitrogen concentration, leaf size, and now, leaf lifespan.

“This body of work has transformed ecology,” says Professor Nathan Hart, Head of the School of Natural Sciences. “It’s also key to ongoing work by Macquarie researchers on the impact of plant invasions, resilience of horticultural species to climate change, and the form and function of plant species on the thousands of islands that surround the Australian mainland.”

A new gene therapy treatment that has been shown to reduce uncontrolled seizures in mice will be ready to begin human clinical trials within two years.

A study published in Science Advances by a team led by Professor Lars Ittner at Macquarie’s Dementia Research Centre showed their treatment could prevent seizures in mice by clearing build-ups of a protein in the brain.

Epilepsy is the most common neurological disorder worldwide, affecting about 70 million people. Two-thirds of those with severe epilepsy can be treated with traditional medications, but about a third of patients do not benefit from any of the available treatments. In some cases, the seizures worsen when treated with standard drugs.

Dravet syndrome, which is caused by a genetic mutation and begins in infancy, is one such form of severe epilepsy. It can result in as many as 40 seizures an hour, and is associated with serious developmental delays and a high mortality rate.

Professor Ittner and his team have been studying the causes of neurological diseases for many years, including extensive investigations into the role played by the build-up of tau proteins.

One of their recent studies found hyperexcitation of the neurons caused by tau protein build-up is a key driver of the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

Hyperexcited neurons fire continuously instead of only when stimulated, and can result in seizures, neural network dysfunction, and cognitive decline.

Having identified this link with hyperexcitation, the team began looking at diseases other than Alzheimer’s in which hyperexcitation was a key feature, including epilepsy.

Tau proteins: a delicate balance

The build-up of hyperphosphorylated tau in the brain’s microtubules has been shown to be associated with a number of neurological diseases, including various forms of dementia.

When functioning correctly, the phosphorylation process provides a fine-tuning function that allows proteins to communicate with each other. In the right amount and location, phosphoryl is vital to maintaining the brain’s signalling pathways, but too much can have a toxic effect.

When a protein molecule becomes hyperphosphorylated, too much phosphoryl sticks to its surface, altering its shape and impairing its ability to bind to and communicate with other proteins. The phosphoryl acts as a lubricant, allowing the molecules slip apart and float free, while also changing their secondary structure in a such way that they aggregate.

Professor Ittner likens this process to hair being washed down a drain. The drain can cope with a few hairs, but as more and more build up, they clump together with other detritus and eventually block the pipe.

In this case, the pipe is the human neuron. Once blocked it dies, and no treatment exists to regenerate neurons.

The newly published research was led by Nicolle Morrey, a second year PhD student from Professor Ittner and Dr Janet van Eersel’s team. The researchers proved that in contrast, when tau is phosphorylated by kinase p38y at a specific location on the genome, Threonine 205, it can prevent excitotoxicity, and therefore seizures.

“We can harness p38y to work in our favour,” Professor Ittner says.

“Recently, we designed a new gene therapy vector, and by introducing our new therapy to the brains of mice via this vector, we have been able to show we can increase production of p38y only where it is needed.”

When treated with the new gene therapy, mice with uncontrolled epilepsy had a better chance of survival, as well as showing marked improvements in behaviour and brain activity.

“We have tested this therapy extensively, and rigorous assessment by independent labs has confirmed our results,” Professor Ittner says.

“Our next step is to conduct more detailed pre-clinical evaluation in preparation for clinical trials.

“It is showing tremendous promise as a treatment for acute neurological conditions, and we hope to be able to offer it, initially to patients with uncontrolled epilepsy, within the next five to seven years.”

Earlier this year, Macquarie University created a new company, Celosia Therapeutics, to turn this and other ground-breaking research into commercially available medical treatments.

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Sakkie Pretorius says an impressive number of Macquarie’s applications in this round have been successful, with 20 per cent being funded.

“It is extremely gratifying to see the work of our world-leading researchers being recognised yet again through such significant grant funding,” he says.

“These are projects with the potential to make a difference to the lives of patients battling debilitating and life-threatening diseases, and they represent the tremendous breadth of research underway at Macquarie.”

Five of the grants go to projects led by researchers from the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences, with the sixth from the Faculty of Science and Engineering.

• A team led by Professor Antonio Di Ieva from Macquarie Medical School, and including Dr Sidong Liu, Professor John Magnussen and Professor Benoit Liquet, receives $1,556,663. Their five-year project, ‘Computational analysis and artificial intelligence in brain tumour imaging: towards the augmented diagnostics of the future’, will aim to improve clinical outcomes by using computer models, including AI, to augment expert diagnosis of brain tumours.

• A team led by Professor Lars Ittner from Macquarie Medical School, and including Dr Julia van der Hoven, Dr Yuanyuan Deng and Dr Shelley Forrest, receives $1,212,345 for a four-year project on ‘Inhibition failure in Alzheimer’s disease’. The project will investigate how networks of neurones fail in the brains of people with dementia and will test new ways to prevent or treat the resulting losses.

• A team led by Associate Professor Vivek Gupta from Macquarie Medical School, and including Professor Stuart Graham and Associate Professor Mehdi Mirzaei, receives $1,186,771 over four years for a project titled ‘Let there be light – Modified Serpin as a Dual Function Therapeutic Agent in Glaucoma’. Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of blindness worldwide. Professor Gupta’s team has engineered a protease inhibitor to protect the cells in the retina, and the funding will allow them to test its effectiveness when delivered direct to retinal cells using an ‘artificial virus’ approach.

• A team led by Dr Shelley Forrest from Macquarie Medical School, and including Dr Annika van Hummel, receives $1,025,253 for a three-year project on ‘Understanding neurodegeneration caused by oligodendroglial dysfunction’. It will investigate globular glial tauopathy, a debilitating form of early-onset dementia, which shows abnormal tau proteins in oligodendroglia, the main support cells for neurones. While previous research has focused on the neurones, this study will investigate the effect of dysfunction in the oligodendroglia.

• A team led by Dr Christina Perry from the School of Psychological Sciences receives $876,991.56 for a project titled ‘Incubation of craving for alcohol: Is exercise a viable intervention?’ Environmental cues can elicit strong cravings in people with alcohol use disorder, and these cravings increase over longer periods of abstinence, raising the risk of relapse. Built on a preclinical study that found voluntary exercise can help prevent cravings, this four-year study will identify the neural changes responsible for the increase in cravings and the restorative effect of exercise, and test how long the benefits of exercise last.

• A team led by Distinguished Professor Nicki Packer from the School of Natural Sciences, and including early career researcher Dr Hasinika Hewawasam Gamage, receives $847,242.50 to investigate ‘Metformin, gut epithelium and microbiome in the prevention of colorectal cancer’ over the next three years. Metformin – a drug used to treat Type 2 diabetes – has also been shown to suppress cancer and has the potential to prevent colorectal cancer. The successful implementation of Metformin as a preventative in colorectal cancer is being limited by a lack of knowledge on how it elicits these anti-cancer effects. The project will examine its impacts on the colon’s mucous lining, its microbiome and the development of colorectal cancer.

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), Professor Sakkie Pretorius, said he was once again extremely pleased by the breadth and depth of research excellence evidenced in the successful applications complimenting Macquarie’s focus on consilience and collaboration.

“Discovery Project funding provides an opportunity for our researchers to continue to strive to develop and achieve their research aspirations and create a pathway for future impact that will benefit us all,” Professor Pretorius says. “I congratulate and celebrate the success of all the Discovery recipients as they advance their research and the Macquarie University mission of world-leading research, world-changing impact.”

Congratulations to our new Discovery Project teams

Also, congratulations to the Macquarie University researchers named as Chief Investigators on Discovery Projects led by other universities.

• Dairying currently faces major economic, social and environmental challenges worldwide.
• Corporate dairy farming is placing undue strain on small-scale farmers, rural communities and the environment.
• The dairy sector faces greater competition from plant-based and artificial milk alternatives.
• Governments can help the ‘just transition’ of smaller-scale farmers and communities into opportunities provided by these challenges.

Contented cows quietly grazing lush green pastures to produce wholesome fresh milk could become a relic of the past if global trends highlighted by Macquarie researchers continue into the 21^st century.

This bucolic ideal is already being replaced by huge, industrialised farms where herds are fed in mechanised sheds and milked by robotic machines as worldwide, large corporations replace traditional family-run farms.

Writing for the leading international journal Agriculture and Human Values, PhD candidate Milena Bojovic and Associate Professor Andrew McGregor from the Department of Geography and Planning in the Faculty of Arts believe the global dairy industry faces increasingly complex social, environmental and economic challenges from global, national and local sources. These include:

• growth of milk markets and consumer demand in the Global South, particularly Asia, while milk consumption in the Global North has flattened or even decreased as more consumers demand plant-based alternatives such as soy and almond
• intensified use of capital, land and animals to meet increasing production demands, whereby smaller scale farms are purchased by larger corporations
• growing awareness of the ecological impacts of dairying, particularly on local soils, water quality and the global climate
• rapid development of plant-based and ‘artificial’ milk in laboratories to replace products from dairy cows.

The authors contend that these challenges have important socio-ecological implications for farmers, communities and local environments, and highlight the complex interactions between these challenges. Larger corporations are better able to address the ‘cost-price squeeze’ faced by small-scale farms, forcing small farms to sell to corporations. In turn, farming populations diminish and services in local, dependent rural communities enter a downward spiral in populations and services.

Increased corporatisation also degrades the local environment and increases methane production from cows, contributing to anthropogenic climate change. Capital-intensive technologies, such as automated milking and feeding systems, reduce human-animal interactions to become rationalised, mechanistic and transactional, rather than the traditionally caring relations between farmers and their herds. Finally, the rapid development of dairy alternatives such as plant-based milk and synthetic milk, coupled with consumer awareness of the negative environmental impacts from industrialised dairy production, are decreasing demand for dairy milk in the global north and placing further social and economic pressures on local communities.

In response to these complex challenges, the authors highlight the important roles governments can play in moderating and providing leadership to support the transition of dairy-farming families and their impacted communities. This should be directed towards the opportunities offered by:

• de-intensification to protect smaller, pasture-based milk producers from corporate takeover to encourage dairy milk production for niche milk markets
• diversification to assist family farmers into alternative industries
• upscaling the production of dairy alternatives and supporting farmers and their communities to transition into new food production systems.

Such government involvement would result in a more just transition for farmers and families to alternative industries that could maintain or even grow rural communities and their populations while improving environmental conditions in rural areas.

Eight staff, representing all four faculties, were identified as research field leaders, highlighting the breadth of research excellence at Macquarie. Our University was named top research institution in 11 fields, including accounting and taxation, animal behaviour and ethology, early childhood learning and computational linguistics.

This is the fifth year The Australian has created the list of the nation’s top researchers and institutions in 250 fields, based on the number of citations given by peers to research published in top journals. Information about the methodology is available in the magazine.

Macquarie was also included in the magazine’s ‘top entrepreneurial universities’ list, based on number of venture capital-funded start-ups founded by graduates (and adjusting for size). The result reflects the success of the Macquarie University Incubator in nurturing innovation and generating investment for start-ups, including the newly launched gene therapy company Celosia Therapeutics.

Macquarie is the top Australian research institution in 11 research fields:

• Acoustics and sound
• Accounting and taxation
• Animal behaviour and ethology
• Computational linguistics
• Early childhood education
• Epistemology and scientific history
• Foreign language learning
• Geometry
• Otolaryngology
• Philosophy
• Plastic and reconstructive surgery

How far in advance do preparations begin?
The preparations begin just over 12 months in advance of the event. Usually we would have infrastructure from past TEDx events however, we have had to start from scratch as the previous organisers left MQ a while ago. We have worked hard to ensure the next event is set from the ground up – we have documentation and minutes of all meetings and strategy. We will have clear hand-over procedures and a foundation for the next team to take over. This will help in ensuring the sustainability of the platform.

What is involved in securing the event at MQ?
Running an event at the cross-section of two big brands – MQ and TED – requires approval from a lot of different people. The other Director, Zeyad, and I began by pitching to MQ portfolios for sponsorship and funding. The response was immensely positive, and everyone collectively agreed that TEDx needed to happen at Macquarie. Once we had Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Sakkie Pretorius; Executive Director, Student Engagement and Registrar, Gail White; and the Student Representative Council behind us we were good to go.

The second phase involved getting a licence from TED to run our event. This is particularly difficult for a large event like ours. Luckily, we had support from our colleague Sheila Pham, who has run TEDx events around the world. After a few months of collaboration with TED in New York, we were granted a licence! And this meant we were all stations go go go!

How do you curate the speaker line up?
The best thing about TEDx is that it’s not a conference. It doesn’t matter how experienced or how old you are, what your profession is, or what discipline you come from. Once you strip a person from all these things you are left only with an idea and their capacity to tell a rich story. And that has been our approach to curation: focusing on the idea. As the lead curator, I have spent so much time attending events and meetings in different parts of the University, asking for recommendations for speakers, spending weekends at events. In one week, I was speaking to a high school student, former president of the Human Rights Commission Gillian Triggs, a well-known poet, and some members of Julia Gillard’s team!

Most of our speakers have been recommended by several people inside and outside of MQ. Once we had a huge pool of potential speakers, we spent many months from October last year to June this year narrowing down our powerful line-up. Though it was not easy, we are so happy with our line-up with even more to be announced. Every speaker is unique. No two topics are similar.

Being an “Idea Curator” has been one of the most transformative experiences I have ever had. I can now say with honesty that I have an open mind to ideas – because this process has forced that out of me.

What is your favourite part of the process?
My absolute favourite part of the process has been meeting, and learning from so many incredible people across Macquarie who I otherwise would never have met. It started with putting together a team, which now has around 20 people in it and will expand to around 80 by September. It’s been great to provide an opportunity for members of Macquarie who value community involvement, idea sharing, and leadership experience for those of us early in our careers. TEDx MQ brings together PhD candidates, PACE students, undergraduate students, staff and professional portfolios into one team dedicated to giving our community a chance to connect with the power of ideas. To me that is incredible!

If you want to see an ex-footballer that led a global movement to save a refugee in Thailand, or Sydney’s best pastry chef; or see what happens to our brains when we listen to music, or how artificial intelligence will change your visit to the doctor then come to TEDx Macquarie University.

The day has been filled with topics that will suit staff from across the University, both Professional and Academic and the ‘Fast Ideas’ component of the day will give the audience a chance to share their idea on the TEDx stage.

Check out the photo gallery from the last TEDx event held at Macquarie University

We sat down with Associate Professor Shawn Ross to learn more about the future of the field, what researchers can learn, and how he’s taking his experience in the Department of Ancient History to this new role.

The fields of Ancient History and Data Science and eResearch seem like they are worlds apart. Are there any similarities? 

Ancient History and Classics were fairly early adopters of approaches like computer assisted text analysis and agent-based modelling (amongst others). Archaeologists use geographic information systems (GIS) and statistical analyses day in and day out, but struggle to manage the diverse data that fieldwork generates.

What made you interested in this directorship and what experiences will you draw on for the role?

My experience building eResearch infrastructure, and the cooperative work with a range of field researchers in a number of disciplines that arose from it, drove my interest in the directorship. Working with researchers to sort out their data reveals weaknesses in research design pretty quickly, and that led me to confront the problems with transparency and reproducibility that many disciplines are now facing. Every solution to those problems I’ve seen involves adopting digital research methods.

The University has launched a new Data Science and eResearch strategy. What do you see as the pillars of this strategy?

I’d say the ‘pillars’ of the project are:

1. Ensuring staff have the resources they need to accomplish their research to the highest possible standard.
2. Building staff awareness, confidence, and capacity regarding digital scholarship. Reaching beyond ‘innovators’ and ‘early adopters’ to the majority of potential beneficiaries is something I will be focussing on as part of my role.

Where do you see the field of eResearch going in the future?

In the future, I think that eResearch will really focus on making research designs and outcomes more robust, especially with regard to transparency and reproducibility. In order to evaluate, reproduce, or replicate results, all steps of the research project and all ‘research objects’ (not just data but, for example, the code underlying all statistical analyses) have to be available.

What is your advice to researchers who are curious about exploring data science and eResearch but have yet to do so?

I’d say the best way to start is to bring a research problem, or an early-stage research project, to someone who has done data science or eResearch work in the past, and see what improvements to your usual research approaches digital techniques can offer. It’s always easier to work with someone else, at least at first, if you want to explore digital scholarship. We’ve had students in our Digital Methods MRES unit marvel at how much time they can save, or how much more they can do, through the judicious application of technology to their research. The other thing I would say is that introducing digital methods to a project usually involves an up-front time investment for a later pay-off in efficiency or quality.

To learn more about the strategy and priorities, visit the Data Science and eResearch page.

The Motor Neurone Disease Service and Research Centre at Macquarie University cares for 10 per cent of all MND patients in Australia.

Join Professor Dominic Rowe and the MND community on Friday 23 June for an important fundraising evening to support people living with MND and to progress research into finding a cure for this debilitating disease.

For all the details, follow the link.