Work by UNE researchers that will promote better understanding of the spread of disease, cancer and weeds, and how inequality affects the health of succeeding generations, are the latest projects to be backed by the Australian Research Council (ARC).
Professor Yihong Du was awarded $404,000 and Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart was awarded $380,000 to lead their respective projects in the 2022 round of ARC Discovery grants.
UNE researchers have now won a combined $5.8 million in ARC and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funding for 2022.
Professor Du will be using his tenth Discovery grant to continue development of mathematical models that can be applied to ‘propagation phenomena’, which refers to events like the spread of infectious diseases, or the invasion of alien plant or animal species.
The work of Prof. Du and his colleagues on nonlinear partial differential equations has contributed to understanding of how fast a propagation event might spread, how persistent it might be, and where the event’s front might reach.
But Prof. Du observes that as technology advances and human society comes under growing pressure from the effects of climate change and novel disease, there is growing pressure to modify and improve the mathematical basis of propagation models.
“An important modification we are continuing to work on is to include the propagation front in the model directly, which results in partial differential equations with ‘free boundaries’,” he says.
“This mathematical problem is much more difficult to treat than the traditional models. Nevertheless, we have managed to establish some quite complete mathematical theories in various important special cases, thanks to the hard work of the team, and generous supports from various sources, including three consecutive preceding ARC grants on this topic.”
Professor Maxwell-Stewart is leading a team enquiring into the inter-generational transfer of inequality, using health as an index.
“Once viewed as primarily a product of recent conditions such as lifestyle choices, it is now evident that health outcomes can also be shaped by intergenerational mechanisms,” Prof. Maxwell-Stewart says.
“Our vulnerability to disease is shaped by a range of factors, among them our biological and socieconomic heritage.”
Attempting to analyse intergenerational influences in current populations would require intergenerational demands of time. Rather, Prof. Maxwell-Stewart and his team are going back over the records of Australian convicts and their descendants, seeking for clues on how “disadvantage experienced by one generation impacted on the life expectancy of those that followed”.
Several other UNE researchers are leading or collaborating on other important projects - see a full list below (For more information on recipients of major grants, search UNE Connect).
“These are the most competitive and prestigious research funds in Australia and our success continues to demonstrate the excellence and quality of research that is being conducted at UNE,” says UNE’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor - Research, Professor Heiko Daniel.
“UNE’s research strategy is focussed on innovative, high-quality research with outcomes that impact society; our success with ARC and NHMRC is a key part of this strategy.”
“Our researchers are active across many fields of inquiry, developing solutions to contemporary challenges and finding new answers to age-old questions.”
UNE’s 2022 ARC and NHMRC grant recipients
ARC Future Fellowship Award
Associate Professor Romina Rader was awarded $900,000. The 4-year project aims to bridge the gap between crop pollination services and pollinator health. Insect pollinators play an integral role in the quantity and quality of production for many food crops, yet there is growing concern that in agricultural landscapes, the limited availability of floral and non-floral resources might be contributing to global pollinator health declines. This project will synthesize global datasets, develop new methodological tools and conduct new, targeted empirical work to develop an integrated approach to pollinator resource management with the explicit objectives of maintaining both wild pollinator health and to support crop pollination service delivery in modified systems.
ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards
Dr Marissa Betts was awarded $386,762. This 3-year project will be exploring the nexus between global palaeogeography and the rise of animals. The Ediacaran–Cambrian periods (635–485 million years ago) capture one of the most critical events in the history of life, but are rarely the focus of global-scale palaeogeographic modelling. By employing a holistic, multi-proxy approach that synthesises vast fossil and geological datasets, this project aims to reconstruct continental positions to determine how shifting landmasses influenced the evolution of the first complex animals. Expected outcomes and benefits include a new, animated global model of continental evolution that can be used across a broad range of fields, particularly for studies investigating the development of Earth System processes and the biosphere in deep time, with potential applications in resource exploration.
Dr Piers Kelly was awarded $412,606. Message sticks are marked wooden objects that were once used throughout Indigenous Australia to convey important information between communities. The intended outcome of this project is to answer a central question: What role did message sticks play in Indigenous long-distance communication? Drawing on archival evidence and original fieldwork in the Top End, the project aims to be the first empirically grounded study of message sticks as a practice. The project expects to define message sticks as a class of material culture, explain their communicative dynamics, generate new cross-cultural insights, and strengthen collaborations between research institutions, museums and Indigenous cultural organisations.
ARC Discovery Projects grants
Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and team have been awarded $380,124 to examine the ways in which biological and socioeconomic heritage can shape vulnerabilities to disease. Once viewed as primarily a product of recent conditions such as lifestyle choices, it is now evident that health outcomes can also be shaped by intergenerational mechanisms. Analysis of these in current populations is impractical given the considerable time it would take for a prospective study to unfold. The analysis of historical populations, however, presents an opportunity to circumvent this obstacle. Using data for male and female convicts and their descendants, this project seeks to determine the extent to which disadvantage experienced by one generation impacted on the life expectancy of those that followed.
Professor Yihong Du has been awarded $404,000 to develop new mathematics in nonlinear partial differential equations to better understand the propagation phenomena arising in a variety of applications, such as the spreading of infectious diseases or cancerous cells, or the invasion of alien species. New models of partial differential equations over spatial regions with moving boundaries will be introduced and systematically studied to provide deep understanding of the mechanisms of important new phenomena in propagation, including accelerated spreading and the onset of such spreading. The mathematical questions are concerned with the long-time dynamics of equations with free boundary, and the asymptomatic profiles of their solutions.
Professor Yihong Du is also part of a two-person collaborative team, which has been awarded $427,000. The project, administered through The University of Sydney, analyses many models fundamental to physical and biological sciences which are obstructed by singularities. The project aims to discover and classify the singular solutions for two important types of nonlinear equations: elliptic and parabolic. The project expects to generate novel methods to decipher singularities by using innovative approaches from geometric analysis and dynamical systems. Expected outcomes of this project include new and powerful tools to advance a more general theory of singularities. This should provide significant benefits, such as new mathematical knowledge on key issues on singularities lying at the forefront of international research and enhance expertise in an area of worldwide recognition in Australia.
Dr Diana Barnes is part of a collaborative team awarded $275,000. The project, administered through Monash University, aims to investigate the neglected history of women’s engagement with Stoic ideas in early modern England (1600-1800). It expects to generate new knowledge of a distinctive strand of women’s Stoic thought by taking a novel interdisciplinary approach to different genres of early modern writing. The intended outcomes include a new understanding of women’s valuable contributions to philosophy, literature, and politics in the period, as well as a greater appreciation of the gender-inclusivity of Stoic philosophy. This should provide significant benefits, such as the development of Stoic therapeutic techniques informed by women’s experiences, and the promotion of gender equality through the recognition of women’s intellectual history.
Dr Nathan Wright is part of a collaborative team awarded $404,000. The project will be administered through The University of Queensland. Knowing how to define traditional Aboriginal food production and settlement systems is a key challenge to Australian archaeology in light of the far reaching success of Bruce Pascoe's popular book Dark Emu. This project aims to undertake a new trans-disciplinary investigation, the first incorporating archaeological science, plant genetics and palynology through the lens of Niche Construction Theory to generate new empirical data in order to determine how we best define Aboriginal socio-economic systems. Investigating the intricacies of Mithaka economy and possible 'village sites' with a focus on the idea of plant domestication, the project will identify how we best define these sophisticated cultural and economic systems.
Associate Professor Jill Fielding is part of a collaborative team awarded $382,715. The project, administered through the Australian Catholic University, explores how developing Critical Mathematical Thinking (CMT) in the classroom provides students with the necessary skills to address complex real-world problems. Fostering CMT, however, is difficult and teaching practices around its development are under-researched and under-theorised. This study aims to generate new insight into teaching practices that can promote or inhibit students’ CMT development. To address this aim, the team uses an innovative video-based methodology that integrates researcher and teacher perspectives on students’ CMT development.
ARC Linkage Projects grants
Dr Deborah Bower is part of a collaborative team awarded $601,024. The project, administered through La Trobe University, aims to address the damage caused by invasive foxes by applying new methods of protection for threatened species. This project expects to generate new knowledge in the areas of conservation biology and invasive species management by comparing the effectiveness of fox control strategies for improving the population viability of declining freshwater turtles. Expected outcomes of this project include a community-based conservation model that prevents turtle extinctions in south-eastern Australia at considerable cost savings. Significant benefits include improved management of the impacts of invasive species, and restoration of ecosystem services provided by the scavenging role of freshwater turtles for maintaining water quality.
Dr Amy Moss is part of a collaborative team awarded $343,712. The project, administered through The University of Adelaide, aims to demonstrate the molecular basis of a non-proteinogenic amino acid toxin accumulation by using genomics and genome editing to produce a non-transgenic, protein rich legume. The significance of the outcomes will be a fundamental understanding of how non-proteinogenic amino acids are metabolised in plants and an inexpensive, high-protein feed for the pork and chicken industries thereby reducing production costs and increasing profitability. The outcomes from the research are fundamental knowledge of non-proteinogenic amino acid metabolism and turnkey approach to identify, engineer, test and produce value added crops. The benefits of the research are a multi-purpose crop for Australian crop and animal producers.
Prof Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Dr Richard Tuffin are part of a collaborative team awarded $441,572. The project, administered through Monash University, aims to link 890,000 population records to place of residence from 1838 to 1930, to examine the relationships between where people live, mortality, life expectancy and health. Where people live impacts their life-course outcomes. Using novel matching techniques, the project expects to identify intergenerational changes and the spatial dynamics of inequality and social mobility. Expected outcomes include the creation of a public resource of linked data and a better understanding of long-run health and inequality. These should provide economic and social benefits by informing policy aimed at contemporary social and health challenges, enhancing our understanding of Australian history, and developing public resources.
NHMRC Ideas Grant
Professor Natkunam Ketheesan was awarded $485,134. While Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) is the commonest heart disease found in children and young adults, control of Strep infections that lead to RHD are ineffective as no specific test for timely diagnosis is currently available. The project team has identified immune antibodies produced in RHD that can help the development of a new cost-effective specific test. During this 3-year project, the team will also identify the pathways that lead to heart damage.
