Scrapping the ARC Future Fellowships scheme would have a significant impact on the Australian research community, with knock-on effects for innovation, the economy, and society at large.
The National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy funds 27 individual facilities that provide a wide range of services to Australian scientists.
Education Minister Christopher Pyne has backed down on his threat to defund NCRIS if the Senate failed to pass the government’s university deregulation bill.
The government believes innovation will be crucial to our future productivity, yet it is threatening cuts to research infrastructure that is instrumental to promoting innovation and new technologies.
The NCRIS-funded Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) benefits pastoralists, business, tourism and Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. Cutting it will hurt them all.
As scientific researchers, we are often surprised by some of the assumptions made about us by those outside our profession. So we put together a list of common myths we and our colleagues have heard anecdotally…
Increasing university-industry collaboration and boosting the commercial return from research is currently under review by the Australian government. The Minister for Industry (and recently for Science…
My decision to turn down a lucrative Discovery Early Career Award (DECRA) worth A$385,000 was outlined in an ABC report broadcast last week. The DECRA is a prestigious grant given by the Australian Research…
There can be little doubt that the research environment in universities is changing: it is now less a collegiate community of scholars than a competitive game of winners and losers. This transformation…
“What’s in a name?” was essentially the Australian government’s response when concerns were first expressed about dropping “Science” from the ministerial portfolio titles back in 2013. That same response…
It’s been a year of incredible feats in science and technology but also a year of uncertainty too as the Australian government’s budget proposed changes to the funding for universities and cut funding…
Academics love games. We can’t resist playing them – but the Research Excellence Framework (REF) is our favourite. As the results of the UK’s 2014 assessment of university research are digested, academics…
Research assessment is only partly reliable as an indicator of the real quality of the work going on in higher education. It has a dual character. On one hand it is rooted in material facts and objective…
The dominance of a “golden triangle” of universities in the latest research assessment exercise has renewed concerns that other universities may get less government research funding in future. The results…
Director, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute & Professor of Medical Biology, and an honorary principal fellow in the Department of Zoology at the University of Melbourne, WEHI (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research)
Previous Vice President of the Academy of Science of South Africa and DSI-NRF SARChI chair in Fungal Genomics, Professor in Genetics, University of Pretoria, University of Pretoria