University of Melbourne early career researchers receive over $9 million in ARC grants

Twenty-one University of Melbourne researchers have been awarded over $9 million in ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award grant funding.

Twenty-one University of Melbourne researchers have been awarded over $9 million in grant funding in the first round of the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) 2024.

Researchers across the faculties of Architecture, Building and Planning, Engineering and IT, Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, Arts and Science received a total of $9,069,463 in research funding.

DECRA is an initiative of the ARC to support, and create opportunities for, outstanding early-career researchers with demonstrated capacity for high-quality research and emerging capability for leadership and supervision in both teaching and research, and research-only positions in Australia.

This year’s University of Melbourne ARC DECRA 2024 awardees are:

  • Dr Judy Bush (ABP) - Advancing knowledge of governance and implementation of nature-based solutions to address the climate change-biodiversity nexus in cities
  • Dr Wing Yan Chan (Science) – Unravelling coral-algal interactions with single-cell imaging, providing vital information for reef managers and restoration practitioners
  • Dr Amanda Franklin (Science) - Using cutting-edge, interdisciplinary techniques to answer a fundamental biological question: what drives the extraordinary diversity of colours in nature?
  • Dr Natalie Galea (ABP) – Regarding the male-dominated Australian construction industry, investigating the policy failure of gender equality initiatives and how institutional and individual resistance to gender equality is applied and adapted over time and across different contexts
  • Dr Claire Gordon (MDHS) – Defining the phenotypic, functional and regulatory heterogeneity of human tissue resident memory subsets in organs like the gut, liver, and skin using a unique human organ donor tissue resource, to inform therapy research
  • Dr Edward Hinton (Science) – Seeking to understand the flow of hydrogen in underground porous layers
  • Dr Liam Hodgkinson (Science) – Developing provably reliable universal model selection criteria to facilitate trustworthy scientific machine learning
  • Dr Ryan Johnson (Arts) – Aiming to harness two important topics in the humanities: the global significance of culturally hybrid nations for global modernity, and the significance of East Asian Studies for World Literature
  • Dr Maria Karidakis (Arts) – Investigating healthcare interpreting practice with First Nations Peoples
  • Dr Ang Li (MDHS) – Investigating the capacity for current and future housing policy to build social wellbeing and reduce vulnerability to climate change
  • Dr Feng Liu (FEIT) - Developing an advanced and reliable scheme of hypothesis transfer learning, called Trustworthy Hypothesis Transfer Learning (TrustHTL)
  • Dr Crystal McKinnon (Arts) – Conceptualising the connection between colonial history and contemporary justice matters in Australia by investigating violence and deaths that have occurred through encounters with police or agents of the state
  • Dr Remika Mito (MDHS) - Producing a large-scale model of brain wiring over the human lifespan through MRI data
  • Dr Tuan Nguyen (FEIT) - Developing a novel alkali-activated concrete-based system for renewable energy storage
  • Dr Mark Rabanus-Wallace (Science) - Using barley genomes to harness information from the dark genome to discover new genes with agricultural importance
  • Dr Jemimah Ride (MDHS) - Investigating ways to encourage employers to create mentally healthy workplaces
  • Dr Melissa Rogerson (FEIT) - Developing design tools for hybrid games that combine technology with tabletop play
  • Dr Tyne Sumner (Arts) - Investigating how recent forms of narrative fiction reflect and shape understandings of digital surveillance
  • Dr Gerry Tonkin-Hill (MDHS) - Developing novel techniques to model bacterial genome evolution and improve our understanding of how major agricultural and human pathogens evolve
  • Dr Carlson Tsui (MDHS) - Defining the signalling cues provided by tissue microenvironment that control the development and maintenance of stem-like T cells, and thereby dictate systemic immunity
  • Dr Ali Zavabeti (FEIT) - Investigating the novel high mobility atomically thin materials synthesised from solid and liquid metal surfaces and to analyse the interfacial properties of their crystal

See the full list of ARC DECRA 2024 researchers here.