MONASH UNIVERSITY

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2025 · 2025-01

Nucleic Acid-Based Molecular Circuitry to Control Biological Processes. Via cutting-edge organic chemical synthesis, this DECRA project aims to develop new molecular circuitries for use in biosensing and control. These will be based on the programmable recognition of synthetic nucleic acids and new applications of established chemical reactions that allow for the release of functional molecules only when desired. Two new circuitry modules will be developed and tested - the first a cleavable nucleic acid scaffold for precise light-dependent uncaging, and the second a novel proximity-mediated release system for tissues inaccessible to light. Benefits for Australia span applications in biotech (real-time molecular sensing), fundamental biology and drug development (targeted drug delivery). Field of research: 3404 - Medicinal and Biomolecular Chemistry Cells are molecular machines with thousands of sensors and switches made from biomolecules; these allow cells to control every portion of their function with extreme precision. While large and complex, these systems are based on three core components 1) a sensor to detect a signal, 2) circuitry to translate the signal and 3) an output to cause a detectable change. Using biological building blocks, this DECRA project will employ cutting-edge chemical synthesis to make designer molecular circuits able to sense and control a range of important biological processes. DECRA breakthroughs will fill a current gap in available technologies for precise control of biologically active molecules for use in fundamental biology, biotechnology and drug delivery. Expected benefits include the detection of viral contamination in bio-manufacture facilities such as those used in vaccine production (which is associated with $ billions in lost productivity) and the ability to understand biological processes at the molecular level. This project will train a new generation of interdisciplinary scientists to build critical Australian capacity, while improving productivity and efficiency through smart chemical systems for control and monitoring within biotechnology (AUD $8 billion p.a.) and other sectors. In addition to publications in high impact journals following IP protection, project results will be promoted to a broad audience through public talks, news articles and social media engagement.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2025 · 2025-01

Modelling the social and political drivers of the net zero transition. This project aims to discover new methods for modelling technological, social, and political drivers that enable and constrain net zero transitions. This is crucial to accelerate adoption of low-carbon technologies and behaviours in key sectors yet it is not possible with existing models. The project will integrate and quantify these drivers through an innovative approach merging systems modelling with socio-technical transitions research. This is expected to enable policymakers to design net-zero policies that are cost effective and also build the social and political momentum needed to accelerate the transition in Australia. Benefits include new policy analysis tools, improved net zero strategies, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Field of research: 4407 - Policy and Administration Climate change threatens Australia’s prosperity and could cost the economy $420 billion over the coming decades. If Australia can rapidly scale down its emissions, it could drastically reduce climate challenges and reap benefits of nearly 200,000 new jobs and $900 billion in added economic value. Reaching net zero will require the rapid adoption of clean technologies such as renewables and electric transport and lifestyle changes such as using public transport instead of driving. Policy support is critical to accelerate their adoption but has faced setbacks and delays in Australia due to political resistance and low social acceptance. A key problem is that the models used for policy evaluation and advice identify the most cost-effective pathways to net zero without considering important social and political hurdles or how to overcome them. This project will address this crucial gap by developing a model that incorporates a wide range of net zero technologies and lifestyle solutions along with social and political drivers and barriers to adoption. By doing so, it will guide and enable policymakers to design better strategies to overcome barriers, build momentum for change, and accelerate adoption of net zero solutions. The new knowledge generated will be shared with policymakers and the public through established partnerships, policy briefings, and media. This will support government to transition to a prosperous net-zero economy and realise its ambitious policy commitments.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2025 · 2025-01

Understanding Procedural Justice in Uneven Family Court Hearings. This project aims to explore procedural justice in uneven family court hearings, where one party appears as a self-represented litigant. Taking a socio-legal, empirical and interdisciplinary approach to the strengths and limitations of current case management practices, it expects to integrate international evidence on self-representation to generate new knowledge about how procedural justice can be best supported in the family law context. Expected outcomes of this project include: enhanced understanding of procedural justice and a best practice protocol for uneven hearings, co-produced with family court judges. This should provide benefits to all court users through improved access to justice and court efficiency. Field of research: 4804 - Law In Context This project will generate original data about self-represented litigants' experiences of family court processes, as well as the pressures and challenges that judges face when managing uneven hearings. This project will address an important gap by exploring how family courts can best support procedural justice in uneven hearings, where litigants’ unfamiliarity with the court process often leads to perceptions of unfairness, and the assistance they require results in increased judicial workloads and delays for others in the court system. The project will produce a best practice protocol for uneven hearings, co-produced with family court judges. The adoption of this guidance will provide several benefits for Australia, through improved access to justice for vulnerable litigants in the family court system, and improved court efficiency by contributing to reduced risk of delays and re-litigation of disputes by dissatisfied litigants. This will support the wellbeing of litigating parties and the children caught up in litigation. Through written briefings and collaborative workshops, the outcomes of the study will be widely shared within the legal profession, judiciary and community legal sector in Australia to support adoption and understanding of the protocol. The findings will also be internationally disseminated to promote translation of the project findings to similar jurisdictions, such as the UK, who are also contending with the challenges presented by uneven hearings.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2025 · 2025-01

Understanding structure, dynamics and function of receptor splice variants. This project aims to understand the functional role of a specific class of G protein-coupled receptors by leveraging advanced cryo-electron microscopy, mass spectrometry, and computational approaches. This project will address fundamental knowledge gaps of how different isoforms of the receptor affect its signalling behaviour. Examining the shape and conformational dynamics of receptor isoforms provides a richer understanding of their cellular function. The comprehensive structural and functional data will allow us to produce molecular movies to better communicate the dynamic receptor activation process. This should provide significant benefits to the Australian community by visualising receptor isoforms with altered physiological function. Field of research: 3101 - Biochemistry and Cell Biology Our cells need to communicate with each other and the outside world. The process of communication is mediated by miniature protein molecules on the cell surface that act as signal receptors. These receptors, however, are not all exactly the same throughout cells in the body and differ in both size and chemical properties. These differences impact how they receive and transmit specific signals which leads to different responses in the cell. To understand this process, we first need to ‘see’ it. This proposal aims to link the mechanism of changes in these receptors to their cell response in our bodies by using cutting edge imaging techniques. This study will benefit the Australian community by providing a broader understanding of these vital receptors to their diverse roles in important biological processes. This project aims to bridge the gap between the laboratory bench and the general public, by leveraging the latest developments of computational and graphics tools to communicate our scientific data. We will produce engaging and informative 3D animations of these scientific insights to be made publicly available, making our research broadly approachable by experts and laypeople alike.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2025 · 2025-01

An Urgent Need for School Belonging: Meta-Analyses & Participatory Action. The project aims to address the decline in school belonging in Australia by utilising a multi-method approach. This integrates two distinct types of meta-analysis—one based on individual student data and another on qualitative research—alongside participatory action research. This project expects to generate new and applied knowledge in the area of school belonging, contributing to both theory and practice. Expected outcomes include actionable insights and approaches for educational practice, derived from stakeholder engagement. Given that school belonging profoundly influences student wellbeing, engagement, and broader societal factors like employment and further education, this project should provide significant benefits in these areas. Field of research: 5201 - Applied and Developmental Psychology Students with a low sense of school belonging face risks like academic underperformance and poor psychosocial health. Despite advancements such as increased funding and national curricula, school belonging is declining in Australian schools, and the nation's academic standings are also falling. According to well-established research, enhancing school belonging positively impacts academic outcomes, with long-term benefits for further education, employment, and mental health in adulthood. Yet, this knowledge has not been fully applied in Australian academic settings, let alone to the specific challenges around growing mental health issues among children and adolescents. This project aims to fill this critical knowledge gap and develop a comprehensive foundation to maximise students' wellbeing and educational opportunities. Through cutting-edge methods, the project will provide new knowledge of school belonging and identify factors that enhance or impede it. The findings will underpin the co-design of applied, evidence-based strategies and resources for nationwide implementation. To maximise national societal impact, and successful roll-out of resources the project will engage educational stakeholders, including students, educators, and parents, facilitating the translation of these strategies into actionable policies and practices across educational settings in Australia.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2025 · 2025-01

Accessible Mathematics for Students who are Blind or have Low Vision. This project aims to create an accessible digital workbook that supports participation in mathematics by students who are blind or have low vision (BLV). Difficulty accessing visual materials, graphing calculators and sharing materials with teachers and peers has led to low participation rates by BLV students in secondary school mathematics, limiting future employment opportunities. By applying human-centred co-design methods, an innovative digital workbook will be created that allows mathematics and graphics to be manipulated and shared by BLV students, educators and their peers. This should provide significant benefits to Australia by ensuring greater equity of access to education and employment for people with disability. Field of research: 4608 - Human-Centred Computing The academic achievement of students who are blind or have low vision (BLV) is lower in mathematics compared with other academic subjects and BLV students are choosing not to undertake mathematics and related Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields in upper secondary school. Not only does this impact educational opportunities, it severely impacts future employability, where the current employment rate for BLV Australians is only 24%, and the cost of this reduced employment to the Australian economy is estimated to be $2.3 billion per year. This project aims to overcome current barriers to collaboration and access to graphics and calculation that face BLV students studying mathematics by creating the world’s first accessible multimodal digital mathematics workbook. Co-designed with project partners the workbook will facilitate the accessibility of mathematics and collaboration in the classroom between BLV students, peers and their teachers. Dissemination of the research through workshops and training for educators and building a community of practice around the workbook is a key focus of the project. The Australian Government’s Disability Strategy (2021-2031) calls on all Australians to “ensure people with disability can participate as equal members of society”, and by tackling mathematics accessibility, this project can play an essential role in supporting the career options of BLV students as well as promoting broader social inclusion.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2025 · 2025-01

The origin story of immune cells: effects of the gut microbiome . This project aims to investigate how the microbes that live in the gut determine how immune cells behave throughout the body. This will help us understand how gut microbes change how bodies function. By using an innovative approach that allows immune cells in the gut to be labelled and tracked, this project expects to generate new knowledge in understanding the how gut microbes and the immune system act together to alter how the body works. Expected outcomes include developing new techniques and new scientific theories to advance our understanding of gut immune cells, gut microbes and change how we study them. This work will also build new national and international collaborations to enhance national research capacity. Field of research: 3204 - Immunology This project aims to understand how the microbes that inhabit the gut impact the immune system. We still do not understand how this happens at the molecular, cellular, and physiological levels. This project seeks to understand how diet, acting via gut microbes, determines what organs gut immune cells travel to, and how their behaviour changes within these organs. This work may form the basis for future human and livestock interventions to benefit the health of Australians. This project will develop new tools with potential for intellectual property based on a new understanding of gut immune cells and gut microbes. We will engage with key stakeholders, such as the general community and the livestock industry, through media outlets and Australian livestock stockfeed manufacturers, respectively.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2025 · 2025-01

Knowledge Enriched Approach for Effective Personalization. This project aims to integrate the strength of both knowledge and data to generate effective personalization using a novel neural-symbolic machine learning approach. This project expects to solve several challenges in pure data driven approaches (e.g., data sparsity, data bias and lack of transparency) while leveraging the simplicity of heuristic-based approaches. Expected outcomes include a novel neural-symbolic approach for user modelling that is applicable to personalisation problems in a wide range of industries. This is expected to provide significant benefit to public organisations through enabling provision of personalised service by better understanding individual users (e.g., personalized learning and personalized medicine). Field of research: 4605 - Data Management and Data Science Personalised data analysis, such as e-commerce and social media, is becoming increasingly pervasive as we interact with personalised data analysis systems on an almost daily basis. Beyond these obvious applications, personalisation has potential to revolutionise healthcare, education and employment through leveraging big data to provide data-driven support. There are currently significant challenges associated with lack of transparency and minority individuals being overwhelmed by the majority due to lack of enough data that limit wide-scale application of these techniques. This project aims to develop novel personalisation algorithms to solve these long-term challenges, by leveraging both knowledge and data in a novel neural-symbolic machine learning approach. Communication and uptake of the research outcomes will benefit government and communities by providing organisations with the ability to provide more personalised services through better understanding of individual users. Through existing strong collaborations with non-profit organizations including Monash Education, Turning Point (treatment, policy and education on health), CSIRO and Alfred hospital, this work will aid in providing services to disadvantaged individuals through better understanding individual needs and adoption/uptake through policy intervention and will contribute to promoting thriving communities where individual needs can be identified and catered for.

GrantConnect (Australian Government grants) · FY 2025 · 2025-01

Development and application of machine learning algorithms in... Category: Medical Research

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2025 · 2025-01

Generative Models for Generalised Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition. This project aims to develop innovative techniques rooted in generative models for more generalised human action recognition using privacy-preserving skeleton sequences. This project expects to contribute new knowledge in data-efficient learning, zero-shot learning, and domain adaptation through the development of novel methods. Expected outcomes of this project include novel techniques for generating skeleton data and enhancing action recognition models, enabling models to recognise unseen actions and adapt to diverse domains with limited training data. This should provide significant benefits to science, society, and the economy nationally and internationally, through various applications such as in autonomous vehicles and healthcare. Field of research: 4611 - Machine Learning This project aims to develop advanced techniques based on generative artificial intelligence (AI) for better human behaviour understanding, using human motion sequences that protect privacy. Unlike current systems that need a lot of human-collected training data and only work in specific areas, the proposed system eliminates the need for large datasets for model training and the models will be able to work in general situations where there can be unseen human behaviours or unseen scenarios. This implies that the action recognition models can reliably operate across diverse real-world scenarios. For example, it can make healthcare better by detecting falls and giving personalised exercise advice. Besides, in transportation, it can understand how people walk and behave, making self-driving cars safer. Moreover, it can be used to improve athlete training by analysing movements. This project will not only drive technological innovation but also facilitate tangible solutions that enhance safety, healthcare, and overall human well-being. The outcomes of this project will be promoted via public engagement (e.g. organising workshops, seminars and public talks), online platforms (e.g. Github and blog), open access publications and industry collaborations. This will effectively communicate and integrate the project outcomes into various sectors, maximising their impact and benefitting society at large.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2025 · 2025-01

An investigation into metabolite-mediated immunity. This project aims to investigate how the immune system is modulated by metabolites, an emerging and key area of the life sciences. Presently, little is known about metabolite-mediated immunity, thereby representing a major knowledge gap. The project aims to combine mass spectrometry, structural and biochemical approaches to learn how metabolites are (i) presented by an antigen presenting molecule called MR1 (ii) how this leads to activation by specific T lymphocytes. Outcomes will significantly advance current understanding of the molecular basis underpinning metabolite-mediated immunity. Major benefits will include fundamental new knowledge about immunity that may ultimately be used by the biotechnology industry. Field of research: 3101 - Biochemistry and Cell Biology Metabolite-mediated immunity by T cells is emerging as a key area in the life sciences, being implicated in protective and unwanted immunity responses, and tissue repair. This proposal will explore the use of novel biochemical tools, combined with structural and mass spectrometry approaches to study how T cells of the immune system responds to metabolites. The national interest of this proposal lies in a) an advancement of basic knowledge in how metabolites modulate immune system function and b) the multi-disciplinary nature of the research proposal that will increase Australia’s research capacity within the life sciences via the training of a new generation of biochemists and immunologists with these skills. Further, this project will lead to patentable findings surrounding small molecule metabolites which will have direct implications for the biotechnology industry, where immunotherapies have the potential to treat many conditions relating to the function of the immune system. In addition to publication of results in generalist and immunology-based academic journals, the work will be disseminated to the public via media releases, social media and public lectures.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2025 · 2025-01

Hydrogen Hub Futures. This project aims to assist Australia’s developing hydrogen industry deliver its potential decarbonization, economic and social benefits, by critically examining the hydrogen hub model and its impact on regional communities. This project expects to generate new knowledge by being the first ethnographic study of Australia’s emerging hydrogen industry. Expected outcomes of this project include enhanced understanding of the consequences of the hydrogen hub model and its impacts for regional communities, theoretical development in the social sciences of industrial decarbonisation, a documentary film for research dissemination, and policy recommendations for hydrogen development planning that take into account community concerns and desires. Field of research: 4401 - Anthropology The development of hydrogen holds great potential for Australia in terms of boosting the economy, creating jobs, and rejuvenating export industries, all while aligning with Net Zero carbon emission targets. To facilitate rapid expansion, there are plans to establish hydrogen hubs where the production and consumption of hydrogen will be concentrated in regional communities. However, this will bring about significant changes to the way of life and landscapes in these regions. To date, there has been very limited research on the potential social impacts of the emerging hydrogen industry, and even less on how communities in hydrogen hubs can actively shape their futures. This research aims to conduct in-depth investigations in communities identified as hydrogen hubs to understand their aspirations regarding this major transition and work to ensure the hydrogen industry can effectively deliver its promised benefits while considering the unique needs and desires of the communities involved. The research will produce a documentary film highlighting the key impacts and community visions for the future of their regions as hydrogen hubs, as well as a policy report to disseminate the findings and ensure that community perspectives are not only recognized but also integrated into the planning and development of hydrogen hubs.

GrantConnect (Australian Government grants) · FY 2025 · 2025-01

Brain signature of loss-of-consciousness across species Category: Medical Research

GrantConnect (Australian Government grants) · FY 2025 · 2025-01

Developing and Repurposing Therapies: Pioneering Interventional... Category: Medical Research

GrantConnect (Australian Government grants) · FY 2024 · 2024-12

Impact of biased agonism at the GLP-1R in the treatment of obesity and... Category: Medical Research

GrantConnect (Australian Government grants) · FY 2024 · 2024-12

Improving the quality of survival after critical illness Category: Medical Research

GrantConnect (Australian Government grants) · FY 2024 · 2024-12

Optimising the emergency response to save lives: An Aus-ROC Centre of... Category: Medical Research

GrantConnect (Australian Government grants) · FY 2024 · 2024-12

Making better use of blood: new knowledge to improve stewardship of... Category: Medical Research

GrantConnect (Australian Government grants) · FY 2024 · 2024-12

Towards Elimination of Avoidable Infections in Surgery Category: Medical Research

GrantConnect (Australian Government grants) · FY 2024 · 2024-12

Applying innovative approaches to developing transformational treatments... Category: Medical Research

GrantConnect (Australian Government grants) · FY 2024 · 2024-12

Developing and Repurposing Therapies: Pioneering Interventional... Category: Medical Research

GrantConnect (Australian Government grants) · FY 2024 · 2024-12

Developing, translating and implementing biostatistical expertise in... Category: Medical Research

GrantConnect (Australian Government grants) · FY 2024 · 2024-12

Harnessing disease tolerance and immune protection to treat fungal... Category: Medical Research

GrantConnect (Australian Government grants) · FY 2024 · 2024-12

Optimising the use of antibiotics for sexually transmitted infections to... Category: Medical Research

GrantConnect (Australian Government grants) · FY 2024 · 2024-12

A molecular approach to unlocking B cell memory potential Category: Medical Research