Melbourne tops latest research funding
[ Research Review 0307 ]
The University of Melbourne has again topped the latest rounds of Australian competitive research funding, winning more than $118 million in Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) grants for 2007.
The University led the NHMRC funding table, receiving more than $81 million – up from $67 million in 2005 – to support 109 projects investigating a broad range of health conditions, including diabetes, breast cancer, immunology, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, vaccines, and premature babies.
Melbourne’s new NHMRC funding is well ahead of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute ($52 million), University of Sydney ($45 million), Monash University ($42 million) and the University of Queensland ($40 million).
The University’s $81 million is more than 15 per cent of the total $529 million NHMRC funding pool, awarded to 52 medical research institutions across Australia.
Almost $37 million will flow to the University in the latest round of ARC grants for 2007, supporting 92 new ARC Discovery Projects, 19 prestigious Discovery Project fellowships; a Discovery Indigenous Researchers Development project; and 21 Linkage grants (bringing University researchers together with industry and community partners).
Congratulating the successful researchers and research teams, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor John McKenzie cautioned that the University could not be complacent about its competitive research funding success.
“This year the success rate across the sector for ARC Discovery grants fell to 20 per cent, down from 30 per cent just two years ago,” he said.
In an interview with The Australian Higher Education Supplement Professor McKenzie reaffirmed that Melbourne’s academics would continue to pursue a forceful research agenda.
Calling for a return to a first-round cull where grants that clearly were not going to be successful were returned to the institution, Professor McKenzie said that “this would encourage universities to be sharper than we already are in making sure that applicants who went forward were likely to get through the first-round of the process”.
Two Melbourne immunology research teams have been awarded a total of almost $26 million in the new NHMRC funding round.
Professor James McCluskey’s team will receive $14 million to investigate the immune system, how the body reacts to infection and what happens when the immune system fails, and Professor Joseph Trapani’s team, $10.8 million to investigate the role of the immune system in the control of the onset and progression of cancer.
Professor James Best has been awarded $2 million to establish the Centre for Clinical Science in Diabetes, a NHMRC Centre of Clinical Research Excellence.
A research team led by University of Melbourne physicist Professor Geoffrey Taylor has been awarded two ARC grants totalling almost $3 million for ‘frontier experiments’ in high energy physics, supporting physicists in the ‘expected era of discovery’ in the knowledge of fundamental particles that makes up the Universe.
Melbourne’s new grants results are available from links on the University’s Melbourne Research Office web page at www.research.unimelb.edu.au/
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