University of Melbourne early-career researchers awarded over $6 million from the Australian Research Council

Fourteen researchers from across the University of Melbourne have been awarded more than $6 million by the Australian Research Council. Image credit: Shaan R. Ali Photography
Fourteen researchers from across the University of Melbourne have been awarded more than $6 million by the Australian Research Council. Image credit: Shaan R. Ali Photography

Fourteen early-career researchers from the Faculties of Arts, Engineering and IT, Science, Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences and Business and Economics have been awarded more than $6 million in funding through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) 2025 round 1.

DECRAs are awarded to outstanding researchers who are generating new knowledge to address significant problems. DECRAs offer exciting opportunities for Australia’s promising early career researchers to develop in supportive environments, while boosting Australia’s research and innovation capacity. DECRA projects result in new technologies and ideas, leading to new jobs, economic growth while aiming to improve the lives of all people living in Australia.

University of Melbourne recipients of the 2025 DECRAs are:

ARTS

  • Dr Sarah Ball: An investigation into how policy makers in Australia understand digital service delivery, and how this understanding shapes the design and implementation of ethical and effective digital services.
  • Dr Peter Millwood: An examination of Taiwan’s transformation from one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes to the most vibrant democracy in East Asia today.
  • Dr Caitlin Vincent: Using opera as a lens to examine gender inequality in freelance work contexts.

ENGINEERING AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

  • Dr Mogeng Li: An investigation of microplastic pollution in aquatic environments.

SCIENCE

  • Dr Jessica Dunleavy: Defining the mechanisms of the exotic tubulins, TUBD1 and TUBE1, to define how they direct the building and regulation of complex microtubule structures.
  • Dr Marcus Giansiracusa: Ytterbium, a rare earth ion with rich deposits in Australia, has theoretical potential as a single-molecule magnet (SMM) that has not yet been demonstrated in practice. This project aims to build from preliminary insight to overcome this barrier and prepare the first ytterbium SMMs.
  • Dr Wei Huang: Developing a novel deep neural network causal framework for data from large-scale surveys.
  • Dr Vera Korasidis: An investigation of the hidden record of our planet’s resilience to high carbon dioxide levels through analysing fossil pollen and charcoal preserved in sedimentary rocks.
  • Dr Andrew Urquhart: An investigation of the basis for how a recently discovered group of transposable elements are able to move within and between genomes in fungi.

MEDICINE, DENTISTY AND HEALTH SCIENCES

  • Dr Kate Mason: An investigation into the ways housing and neighbourhood factors contribute to inadequate sleep.
  • Dr Caio Pimentel Seguin: An investigation of the problem of how signals are transmitted via the connectome to establish communication between brain areas.
  • Dr Matthew Silcocks: An investigation into how the genomes of human populations in East Asia and Oceania have adapted to fight the pathogens they encountered.
  • Dr Ryan Wick: A project to discover and develop new algorithms for reconstructing bacterial genomes using DNA sequencing data.

BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

  • Dr Siqi Pan: A project aiming to explore matching by characteristics as an innovative approach to simplifying preference formation and expression in real-life matching markets.

See the full list of recipients here.