A total of $5,251,812 will be shared across the projects, which span the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Science and Engineering and cover a range of fields from law and humanities to engineering and natural sciences.
Macquarie ranked seventh nationally, highlighting the University’s commitment to nurturing the next generation of researchers.
Professor Sakkie Pretorius, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), congratulated the successful researchers on their achievement.
“To achieve 10 DECRA grants in a single round, especially in such a competitive environment, is a remarkable validation of our early career researchers’ ambition, creativity and calibre,” he says.
“We are immensely proud of these researchers and excited about how their work will help shape the future.”
Five of the successful DECRA recipients – Dr Catherine Hastings, Dr Alistair Sisson, Dr Julian Schrader, Dr Chris Jolly and Dr Christian Gelder – are former Macquarie University Research Fellows and now part of the University’s Lighthouse Fellowship program. This scheme aims to accelerate and increase the pipeline of research expertise.
The successful Macquarie University research projects are:
Advancing access to justice: Identifying the causes of legal problems
Dr Catherine Hastings, Macquarie Law School
This project will develop a causal explanation for the legal problems of clients of Australia’s tax-funded legal assistance sector. The findings will help organisations target legal services in a resource-constrained environment and provide evidence to inform funding and law reform, improving access to justice and reducing costs in the justice and welfare systems.
Funding awarded: $529,891
Housing in Crisis: Examining the processes and politics of policy change
Dr Alistair Sisson, School of Communication, Society and Culture
This project aims to investigate how and why Australian housing policy has changed in the past five years. By conceptualising the housing crisis as the subject of ‘framing contests’ between different policy actors, and through a phased project design involving mixed methods, it will show who has influenced policy change and how.
Funding awarded: $525,752
Writing Therapy: Narrative writing and the making of mental health
Dr Christian Gelder, School of Humanities
This project will provide a literary history of psychological knowledge in the second half of the 20th century, examining the decline of psychoanalysis and the rise of cognitive therapies. It aims to generate novel insights into the enduring success of therapeutic and self-help writing, as well as the historical development of various vocabularies of wellbeing.
Funding awarded: $511,892
Innovating a new framework for Indigenous-led climate adaptation strategies
Dr Lauren Tynan, School of Communication, Society and Culture
This Indigenous-led project aims to design climate adaptation strategies to help future-proof Australian communities. The interdisciplinary approach responds to calls from researchers for better integration of Indigenous knowledges to bridge the science-policy interface. With a case study in northeast Tasmania, this project will implement and advance the Kin and Country Framework.
Funding awarded: $507,166
Two-stage catalytic upcycling of waste plastics into valuable monomers
Dr Jiaquan Li, School of Engineering
This project aims to develop innovative catalytic technology for converting non-degradable polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) plastic waste into valuable monomers, which can be repurposed to produce biodegradable polymers, promoting a circular plastic economy. The outcomes of this project will provide an advanced solution for efficiently managing plastic waste while enabling the production of high-value chemicals, contributing to both Australia's environmental sustainability and economic growth.
Funding awarded: $530,079
Multi-user delay-Doppler communications
Dr Swaroop Gopalam, School of Engineering
There is an ever-growing need for higher data rates and greater mobility and this project will advance a new two-dimensional (delay-Doppler) mathematical signal formulation to address these demands. This will enable broadband communications in high-frequency spectrum for fast-moving terminals. This project will pioneer innovative techniques in waveform design, multiplexing and resource allocation to dramatically improve performance in rapidly varying channels.
Funding awarded: $530,079
Unlocking the mysteries of bacterial lifestyle transitions
Dr Liping Li, School of Natural Sciences
Bacteria are everywhere, playing a vital role in shaping ecosystems. Many remain dormant in their natural environment until they detect nutrients, triggering a lag phase to reactivate cellular machinery and resume growth. This project aims to advance our understanding of the bacterial lag phase, develop strategies to enhance the efficiency of bacterial cell factories and explore its role in antibiotic resistance, offering insights to combat the antimicrobial resistance global public health crisis.
Funding awarded: $530,079
Cell-free wide-area mm-wave communications
Dr Thanh Tung Vu, School of Engineering
Future communication networks need massive bandwidth for time-critical data applications, such as autonomous cars, the internet of things and extended reality. This project will address the key challenge of exploiting the millimetre-wave (mm-wave) spectrum for outdoor wide-area future mobile communications. Many sectors will benefit from wide-area massive bandwidth including transportation, agriculture, mining and emergency services.
Funding awarded: $529,672
Future of Australian islands: Vegetation dynamics across space and time
Dr Julian Schrader, School of Natural Sciences
This project will investigate plant diversity changes on Australia’s coastal islands in response to climate change, exotic species and sea-level rise. A field study designed with Queensland Parks will investigate ecological change on highly threatened reef islands. This project will guide conservation priorities, protect flora and help ensure islands remain key refuges for biodiversity by reframing island biogeography theory for enhanced conservation in the Anthropocene.
Funding awarded: $528,448
The evolution of dispersal at invasive range edges
Dr Chris Jolly, School of Natural Sciences
Dispersal rate determines how rapidly invasive species expand their range. At expanding range edges, evolution consistently increases dispersal rate, accelerating invasion speed. By focusing on cane toads at a newly formed arid range edge, this project will test the novel hypothesis that dispersal evolution stabilises range edges and, in turn, constrains the spread of invaders.
Funding awarded: $528,754
A full list of funded projects and project summaries is available here.