WESTERN Australia’s public universities have secured 7.8 per cent of the Australian Research Council’s latest round of grants, continuing the long-running pattern whereby WA is underweight on a per capita basis.
WESTERN Australia’s public universities have secured 7.8 per cent of the Australian Research Council’s latest round of grants, continuing the long-running pattern whereby WA is underweight on a per capita basis.
The federal government this week announced the awarding of 1,126 research grants worth $376 million, mainly under its Linkage and Discovery schemes.
Of this total, WA was awarded 87 grants worth $29.2 million.
The distribution of grants highlighted the dominance of the Group of 8 ‘sandstone’ universities, which traditionally have accounted for the bulk of university research in Australia.
Collectively, the Go8 universities won 69 per cent of the grants.
Within this group, the biggest winners included: the University of Melbourne, awarded $42.8 million; Monash University in Melbourne ($39.6 million); and the Australian National University in Canberra ($38.6 million).
The University of Western Australia, also a Go8 member, was the big winner in WA, being awarded 50 grants worth $18.9 million.
In line with the national pattern, the grants to UWA represented around two-thirds of all federal research funding coming to the state.
On top of the federal grants, UWA said a further $10.4 million had been pledged by national and international organisations to support specific research projects.
In addition, 12 UWA academics and researchers won individual fellowships to support their work.
UWA projects to gain research funding include work on the stability of oil rigs on the North West Shelf, four-dimensional mapping of mineral deposits, Indian Ocean climate change, artificial intelligence and image processing for defence and security.
UWA deputy vice-chancellor (research) Robyn Owens said the university’s strengths in the energy and minerals industries, defence, evolutionary biology, climate science and agriculture had all been recognised.
Of the other public universities in WA, Curtin was awarded 27 grants worth $7.9 million, Murdoch was awarded seven grants worth $1.8 million, and Edith Cowan was awarded three grants worth $0.6 million.
Curtin was one of just nine universities across Australia to secure a share of funding under the indigenous researchers development scheme.
Funding under this scheme has increased in recent years to just more than $2 million.
The low funding for WA researchers partly reflects their poor success rate when applying for Discovery project grants. The overall success rate for Discovery applications was 22 per cent, whereas for WA researchers the success rate was 17.5 per cent.
