Emerging Institutes
[ Research Review 0809 ]
By Shane Cahill
Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Peter Rathjen believes the removal of barriers to new ideas and a ten-year outlook for emerging institutes will give us the tools to cope with a challenging future.
The genie is out of the bottle and Peter Rathjen couldn€™t be happier. €œIf you remove barriers, it turns out that academics are naturally engaging of others,€ says Professor Rathjen.
€œThey are driven by ideas €“ that€™s why they work in universities €“ and if you enable them to pursue ideas without restriction that€™s exactly what they€™ll do.€
After taking up the position of Deputy Vice-Chancellor in March 2008 with responsibility for research, world-renowned stem cell authority Professor Rathjen began a program to harness Melbourne€™s research breadth to meet contemporary challenges.
€œWhat we€™re seeing is the marshalling of enormous intellectual energy across the institution,€ he says.
€œWe€™re seeing significant new projects and new funding bids that we hadn€™t previously conceptualised. I think the reason is that our researchers are pursuing their interests in an interdisciplinary context, focused on problem solving.€
The first of the new multidisciplinary institutes was the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, followed by the Melbourne Institute of Materials, the Melbourne Energy Institute and the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society. The May Federal Budget delivered funding for the Melbourne Neural Engineering Institute. Proposals for several other institutes spanning the breadth of University activity are well advanced.
The institutes are virtual rather than a physical presence, with an anticipated ten-year life span.
€œIt€™s a conversation. We get top-down ideas and bottom-up ideas, we look for opportunities in the external marketplace, and from this complexity of internal and external drivers we synthesise directions forward.€
Professor Rathjen sees the new institutes as a means of the University meeting the demands of society and engaging with the new ways of research required.
€œWe have an aspiration to being a publicly-spirited institution and we have to inspect what it means to be publicly-spirited in our research agenda. One of the things that we have decided we would like to do is to harness that magnificent research strength that is Melbourne University in pursuit of the most pressing societal problems.€
According to Professor Rathjen the institutes will not necessarily manage the research projects. Rather they will allow researchers from across a range of disciplines to self-assemble to tackle what he terms €œreally big challenges€.
€œThose challenges are largely defined by society rather than defined by the researchers themselves.€
To meet this shift to alignment with external problems Melbourne€™s institutes build on the trend of the past 20 years away from single discipline alone to interdisciplinary research.
€œWe find within our institutes researchers from quite different disciplinary backgrounds coming together united by a wish to solve a common problem, and it seems it€™s at those interfaces that much of the more exciting research is done,€ he says.
Such a seismic shift in the focus of research calls into question the form of the existing foundation of research, the PhD.
€œWe are having to have a hard think about what a PhD program means for this University because our PhD structure is basically disciplinary-based,€ Professor Rathjen says.
€œMy understanding is that in the best US universities now more than 50 per cent of PhD students are enrolling in interdisciplinary projects and we€™re going to have to find our way to enable that trend.€
Professor Rathjen believes the Melbourne Model€™s core of depth and breadth will allow for such a transformation. But the change goes much further than curriculum or administrative issues.
€œWhat we€™re really exploring is research in the context and service of society. To advance that, you are going to have to bring together more than one disciplinary focus.€
So how is this new social engagement going to emerge?
€œIt€™s a challenge. We€™re going to have to try things and see which ones work and discard those things that don€™t work. A lot depends on leadership.€
The prizes of success are substantial, with a brace of multi-million dollar projects and potential partnerships in development.
€œThe institutes are very powerful ways of articulating our research to the external world. We€™re big and we€™re complex and it has been hard for us to find a way to explain to others what we do.
€œAs we assemble under terms like energy or materials, those outside the University can look in and see what we do and from that we find we are becoming a target for various forms of partnerships, sometimes with external large corporations, sometimes with government bodies and sometimes with benefactors who are very interested in funding research and like to fund it through these large thematic approaches.€
The Melbourne institutes are also in the process of establishing partnerships with leading universities around the world.
Secondary education too will need to take account of these moves beyond single-discipline research.
€œMy sense is that cross-disciplinary research is based in disciplinary expertise. You€™ve got to be trained in discipline-based skills, but you€™ve got to combine these with the breadth that enables you to interpret your training in a social context.
€œThe Melbourne Model, with its emphasis on both depth and breadth, is ideally suited to this.€
What are the next areas for examination?
€œWe see these institutes having a natural life of about a decade and therefore we want to form them around areas that will be of enduring value. We want to make sure we tackle things that are bound to be important in ten years€™ time.€
Emerging areas cited by Professor Rathjen include materials; energy and sustainable societies; social equity; creative cultures; brain science; and communication.
Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute
The University has recently announced the appointment of Professor Craig Pearson as Director of the newly established Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute (MSSI), commencing full-time in September 2009.
Professor Pearson has an international record of academic and research achievement in agricultural and environmental policy and extensive senior leadership experience, including institution building and strategic change management. In his distinguished career Professor Pearson has worked in government, industry and universities and currently sits on the Advisory Board, International Centre for Sustainable Cities and a number of review and editorial boards.
The University late last year launched the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute €“ a key interdisciplinary research institute whose work advances the goal of a sustainable society in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. MSSI addresses the socioeconomic aspects of environmental change as well as the biological and physical issues.
Research at the Institute focuses on issues surrounding the sharing of resources between humans and their physical environment, particularly in the areas of agriculture, sustainable cities, risk and resilience (including climate change), and water.
The Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research and the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Network (Social Economic and Institutional Dimensions) are two significant climate change initiatives in the MSSI space. The Institute provides a portal to the important sustainability research undertaken at the University.
MelbourneE nergy Institute
Concerns about climate change, diminishing resources and rising energy demand provide one of the key challenges of our time. To meet this challenge and advance research towards securing a sustainable, affordable energy supply into the future, the Melbourne Energy Institute takes an interdisciplinary and collaborative research approach.
By bringing disciplined-based research strengths together and by engaging with stakeholders outside the University, the Energy Institute offers the critical capacity to rethink the way we generate, deliver and use energy.
The Melbourne Energy Institute is an access point for industry, government and community groups seeking to work with leading researchers on innovative solutions in the following areas: new energy resources; developing new ways to harness renewable energy; more efficient ways to use energy; securing energy waste; and framing optimal laws and regulation to achieve energy outcomes.
The Energy Institute presents research opportunities in bioenergy, solar, wind and geothermal power; nuclear and cell options; and carbon capture and storage. It also engages in energy efficiency for urban planning, architecture, transport and distributed systems, and reliable energy transmission. Economic and policy questions constitute a significant plank of the Energy Institute€™s research program and include: market regulation and demand; carbon trading; system modelling; climate change feedbacks; and social justice implications of energy policy.
The Melbourne Energy Institute brings together the work of over 150 researchers providing international leadership in energy research and delivering solutions to meet our future energy needs.
Melbourne Materials Institute
The Melbourne Materials Institute is the entry point for researchers and industry seeking to work with leading researchers at the University of Melbourne on innovative solutions in the materials science domain.
Advances and innovations in materials science are essential if we are to the bridge the great problems of our age €“ in water, medicine and energy €“ and their solutions.
One of the global challenges we face in this century is reinventing the use of materials, including more nearly complete cycling of technological materials, to help capture the CO2 from our carbon fuel-burning power plants, to provide universal access to clean, safe water, to extract energy from the sun more effectively, and to create the new generation of batteries so that we can escape our dependence on oil and convert to electric cars.
These problems have no simple solutions: they are big, complicated and multifaceted, requiring large-scale, sophisticated interdisciplinary responses.
The Melbourne Materials Institute brings together researchers from a range of disciplines €“ physics, engineering and biomedicine €“ capable of providing an interdisciplinary perspective to unlock these intractable issues. We aim to link with industry to provide sustainable real-world applications that solve these problems. We believe that the new industries of the middle of the 21st century will arise from fundamental advances in areas of our expertise.
The Melbourne Materials Institute has established strengths in the nanomedicine, energy, quantum technology and photonics fields with a strong track record of delivering advances in fundamental science leading to innovation and commercialisation. Together with industry, we will provide the enabling technologies for a more sustainable future.
Melbourne Brain Institute
The newest institute to be added to the University of Melbourne€™s stable of cross-disciplinary research institutes is the Melbourne Brain Institute. MBI will focus the University€™s neuroscience research activities to optimise productivity and impact, increase funding for research in this area and enable more efficient use of existing facilities and infrastructure. The institute will be responsible for enhancing interdisciplinarity in neuroscience through stewardship of cross-faculty activities which involve collaboration with researchers from areas such as Engineering, Optometry and Vision Sciences, Ophthalmology, Law, Economics, and Social Sciences. It will provide an international neuroscience research-based focus that will attract and retain talented researchers from around the world in addition to the best postdoctoral researchers and research higher degree students; develop new research ventures to address significant gaps in the University€™s knowledge base in the neurosciences; and enhance the University€™s connectivity with the community and with key stakeholders in order to optimise research outcomes and knowledge transfer and maximise the translation of neuroscience research to clinical outcomes.
The Institute will work through a small core unit that will draw together key researchers and administrators whose activities will be enhanced to meet a broader objective, namely to promote interdisciplinary research in the neurosciences across the University of Melbourne. The core unit will create opportunities for links between the University€™s researchers in areas such as disease, social context and health costs, thus strengthening University-wide responsiveness to neuroscience-related matters. The Institute will also provide a focused opportunity to collaborate with institutional, hospital and commercial partners, in order to maximise research outcomes, facilitate knowledge transfer and strengthen the standing of the University of Melbourne as a leader in research in the neurosciences nationally and internationally. Professor Trevor Kilpatrick, world-renowned MS researcher, has been appointed as the inaugural director for this initiative.
Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES)
The Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES) is a cross-disciplinary research institute dedicated to innovations in broadband products and services that benefit Australian society.
As this publication was going to press, the Victorian Government had just announced that it would provide $2 million for the new Institute, which is the nation€™s first cross-disciplinary research institute dedicated to maximising the community benefits of broadband technologies.
Professor Rod Tucker, Director of IBES, says the Institute will source skills and resources of leading University researchers and 10 major industry leaders. Together they will develop and test new products and services which will benefit society, in areas such as e-health, e-education, e-commerce, and environmental monitoring.
IBES has attracted the support of leading global and local companies to join its research program. They include Cisco, Microsoft, Alcatel-Lucent, Telstra, Ericsson, NEC Australia, Optus, Allied Telesis, Pacific Broadband Networks, and Haliplex. The research will also be enhanced by the support of Bell Labs and NICTA, Australia€™s national research centre of excellence in Information and Communication Technology.
Professor Tucker says IBES will serve as a national and international focus for research and innovation across the full spectrum of social, business and technological activities associated with and influenced by the new Australian National Broadband Network.
The strong support of industry, coupled with the support and commitment of the State Government of Victoria, positions IBES to play a key role in the development of an Australian industry that is ready for the true broadband revolution, according to Professor Tucker.
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