World-leading research; world-changing impact

By connecting our ideas and expertise across all faculties, Macquarie’s researchers continue to lead or contribute to world-leading research with world changing impact.

The Research Strategy 2025 refreshes and builds on the achievements of the first five years of the Strategic Research Framework: 2015–2024. The foundations of the framework (the future-shaping research priorities and the key objectives) remain stable as intended, but some elements (research themes, research streams and supporting strategies) have been updated to reflect internal and external changes.

Research objectives

We research aims to:

Future-shaping research priorities

Our future-shaping research priorities have been identified as crossdisciplinary areas in which we either have, or wish to build, research excellence and scale.

The broad and inclusive future-shaping research priorities offer scope for faculties and individual researchers to continue to pursue their areas of expertise, but in the context of opportunities to contribute to areas aligned with national and global challenges of significance.

The University’s commitment to these research priorities is a commitment to impact, to making a difference and to measuring that effect. Macquarie will support and grow the areas articulated in our research themes and streams while maintaining an agile and opportunistic approach to new areas of growth potential.

We are pioneering health, integrated healthcare and lifelong learning for wellness in our ageing world. We focus on:

  • pedagogies for health and lifelong learning
  • health and resilience
  • translational health and medical research
  • sensory and cognitive processing
  • hearing, language and literacy.

We aim to understand cultures in our changing world and build ethical, just and inclusive communities. We undertake research into:

  • societal transformation
  • culture and communication
  • ethics, governance and justice
  • transformational education experiences
  • Indigenous knowledge, contemporary challenges and opportunities.

We are strengthening economic productivity to promote prosperity in our diverse world. We're researching:

  • role, operation and risks in global financial and economic systems
  • organisation sustainability, productivity and competitiveness.

We are sustaining our interdependent world and exploring our place in the universe. This involves:

  • nature and the environment
  • exploring planet earth and beyond

We're advancing our interconnected world with frontier technologies, systems, designs and creative practice. This involves research into:

  • science and engineering technologies for the 21st century
  • big data.