Trio of future fellows
Three top women researchers at UniSA have been named Future Fellows in the inaugural round of the new ARC funded Fellowships.
The new scheme is targeted at retaining and attracting Australia’s brightest and best researchers to contribute to a national priorities innovation agenda.
UniSA’s Associate Professor Libby Roughead (Division of Health Sciences), Associate Professor Jill Slay (Division of IT, Engineering and the Environment) and Dr Catherine Whitby (Ian Wark Research Institute) have won research funding totalling almost $2.2 million over the next four years. It will go towards research projects in key areas including nanotechnology, the use of medicines and forensic computing for essential infrastructure services.
UniSA Deputy Vice Chancellor, Research and Innovation, Professor Caroline McMillen says she is delighted with UniSA’s early success in the new competitive grants field.
"As a dynamic, young, research institution it is exciting to see that our focus on attracting and nurturing outstanding researchers has been successful," Prof McMillen said. "We are extremely proud of the achievements of our three Fellows and of this important national recognition of their work.
"They are each dedicated and outcome-focused researchers, working in fields for which they have a real passion and their work is of national and international significance."
Prof Roughead is researching pharmaceutical reimbursement systems world-wide and will lead an analysis of international policies guiding decision making. She will interview key leaders in the USA, UK, Canada and Australia to develop comparative data. The project will also include an assessment of the suitability of using administrative health data sets to gather evidence for the Australian health system.
Working in process control and monitoring systems for large essential utilities, Associate Prof Jill Slay will be examining vulnerabilities due to increasing internet-connectedness through corporate IT networks. Her work aims to develop the capability to deliver a novel system architecture that identifies, preserves, analyses, exploits and visualises digital evidence collected from such nationally critical services as power, gas, oil, water and sewage.
And in a project set to benefit established Australian minerals processing industries and emerging pharmaceutical applications which rely heavily on controlling the effects of small, solid particles in emulsions and foams, Dr Catherine Whitby will apply advanced microfluidic techniques. She aims to provide a new platform for studying how particles can be used to manipulate the interactions between drops and bubbles. She hopes to deliver significant new fundamental understandings of the behaviour of particles at drop and bubble surfaces and enhance the development of new and improved nanotechnologies for increasing the international competitiveness of Australian industries.