University of Tasmania, Australia

The University of Tasmania has attracted $7.6 million in federal research grants from the Australian Research Council (ARC).

Twenty grants totalling $7.6 million awarded by ARC in this year's Discovery Projects round

The University of Tasmania has attracted $7.6 million in federal research grants from the Australian Research Council (ARC).

Key research areas that will benefit include bushfire management, black holes and star formation, measuring the impacts of ocean acidification and the teaching of maths and English.

UTAS has been awarded:

• 16 Discovery Project (DP) grants, totalling $5,194,599.
• Three Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards, totalling $1,114,860
• One Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities grant, totalling $150,000, plus $1.1 million in funding from partner organisations.

Acting Vice-Chancellor Professor David Rich said it was an excellent outcome for the University and its researchers.

"It is never easy to attract research investment and this result illustrates the high standards of our academics.

"This funding announcement places UTAS 12th nationally for both new DP grants and funds awarded," he said.

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Paddy Nixon congratulated the researchers who secured funding.

"The variety and scope of the projects awarded funding attest to the remarkable strength of research here at the University," Prof Nixon said.

"Given our earlier funding achievements this year, this is very exciting - the future of research at UTAS is looking extremely promising."

UTAS' Professor Maggie Walter, School of Sociology and Social Work, has also been successful as a collaborator on the Special Research Initiative for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Researchers' Network, which attracted $3.198 million ARC funding.

In October this year UTAS celebrated the receipt of $9.5 million in the annual national health and medical research funding round. In June UTAS also secured $7.6 million in the ARC Linkage grants round.

The successful projects awarded funding:

• Living with bushfires: generating essential evidence for sustainable fire management, $375,000
• Eternal struggle: star formation and black hole activity in galaxies, $370,799
• Group theory and phylogenetics: exploiting symmetry to uncover evolutionary history, $369,061
• Observations of remarkable eastward flows in the South Indian Ocean, $480,000
• Powerful knowledge: mapping out standards of teachers' knowledge for teaching mathematics and English to achieve the goals of the curriculum, $181,000
• Detecting financial contagion using high-frequency data, $471,000
• From words to deeds: the politics of compliance in post-crisis international tax reform, $179,490
• Climate-driven windblown dust and flood runoff can increase marine diseases by fungal pathogens, $268,000
• Understanding fish-killing mechanisms by harmful algal blooms: towards the design of effective mitigation strategies, $334,000
• Polymer nanoparticles and their assembled supracolloidal monolithic structures for applications in separation science, $330,000
• Dynamic resilience and stability properties of marine systems: the importance of environment-engineer feedbacks in kelp forests, $325,000
• A melt inclusions pursuit into the identity of carbonatite magmas and their economic potential, $154,270
• Resolving dissolved organic matter: new multi-dimensional separation approaches, $480,000
• Genetics of species differentiation and hybridisation in Eucalyptus, $355,000
• Regulation of seed development in grain legumes, $335,000
• The ageing brain: plasticity and training, $340,739
• Leadership and the construction of environmental concerns in Australia, $181,100
• Using jurors to gauge informed public opinion on sentencing, $400,000
• Host-tumour interplay in Tasmanian devils with devil facial tumour disease: can immune cells be harnessed for therapy?, $380,000
• Free ocean carbon enrichment infrastructure for the Southern Ocean: measuring impacts of ocean acidification on biological communities, $150,000.