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Monday, 9 August 2010

Outstanding UWA staff have attracted almost $100 million for research in the past few weeks - an excellent result.

Our success in gaining such levels of competitive national funding points to a university punching above our weight and well on the way to achieving our target of being counted among the world's top 50 universities by mid-century.

Among recent achievements, we received funding from the Federal Government's Education Investment Fund towards a total of $63 million to establish an Indian Ocean Marine Research Centre.

Based at the Crawley campus, the centre will boost marine science capacity in Australia with more than 240 world-class researchers - from our University, the CSIRO, the State Government and the Australian Institute of Marine Science - investigating climate change, the sustainable use of marine resources, conserving marine biodiversity, coastal zone management and security and safety.

In another development, we were awarded possibly the highest ever Australian Research Council allocations to the Humanities in Australia for a Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotion to be hosted by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

With a grant of $24 million over five years, this new centre will address the big question of how societies think, feel and function, providing greatly enhanced understandings of how to improve emotional health among modern Australians. It will train and mentor a new generation of young Australian researchers and heighten Australia's international reputation for excellence in humanities and performing arts research.

While we will be hosting this Centre, our University is also collaborating in more than half of the nation's newly announced federally-funded Centres of Excellence. Our researchers will collaborate with universities in Australia, Canada, China, Europe, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States in research ranging from astro-physics to geotechnical science and engineering. Our inclusion in seven of Australia's 13 Centres of Excellence ranks us second in Australia in these research ventures.

In another recent development, National Health and Medical Research Council funding of close to $10 million was announced for three more new Centres for Research Excellence. These will focus on Aboriginal health and wellbeing; improving the diagnosis, early intervention treatment of asbestos related diseases; and continuing our ground-breaking work in early cystic fibrosis lung disease as well as improving the understanding and management of other chronic lung diseases.

And while we were celebrating these heartening endorsements of our national standing, in a competition of a different kind, a UWA-led team became one of six international finalists in a challenge to develop the next generation of fully autonomous robots that could undertake dangerous missions in hostile environments.

The team is up against five others from the USA, Turkey and Japan and is in the running for a prize of more than $800,000 and opportunities to apply their vehicle prototypes and human-robot interfaces in contracts with the US and Australian Departments of Defence.

We can all be proud of our world class researchers.

Vice-Chancellor Alan Robson

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