Our academics have once again excelled this month with a range of awards and achievements, including four successful applications in round one of the Macquarie Research Acceleration Scheme (MQRAS), a John Templeton Foundation win and a recipient of the 2022 John Mulvaney Fellowship by the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
GRANTS
Professor Niloufer Selvadurai from Macquarie Law School, and colleagues Professor Dali Kaafar (FSE), Professor Shlomo Berkovsky (FMHHS), Dr Ian Wood (FSE) and Associate Professor Mark Dras (FSE) have received $592,796 in funding from the National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grants (NISDRG) for their project on 'Fighting Global Phone Scams with Conversational AI'. This project aims to address the increasing public menace of phone scams through redirecting scam calls to conversational AI bots optimised to present convincing scam victims.
Professor Neil Levy and Associate Professor Mark Alfano from Department of Philosophy have been awarded an $870,049 grant from the John Templeton Foundation for their project, ‘Are we rational animals?’ from 1 December 2022 to 1 September 2025. Tradition holds that humans are distinguished from animals by rationality. But cognitive science has called this claim into doubt. Given its intrinsic interest and challenge to an influential view, this project is expected to lead to new avenues for experimental work and enable us to develop a more realistic assessment of the extent of human rationality.
Macquarie Research Acceleration Scheme (MQRAS) round 1 successes
Dr Alex Woods, from the Department of History and Archaeology, has received $44,933 in funding for the project Antiquity in the Archive. Collection and Curation of Archaeological Archives in Egyptology - A Case Study on Beni Hassan, Egypt. The project aims to critique the development of an archaeological archive through the digitisation of Beni Hassan material in the Griffith Institute archive, University of Oxford.
Professor Bronwyn Carlson, Dr Terri Farrelly and Madi Day from the Department of Indigenous Studies have received $41,212 in funding for their project Monumental disruptions: Understanding ‘what works’ in community approaches to remove, rectify and reimagine colonial commemorations. This project aims to investigate ‘what works’ in community approaches to remove, rectify or reimagine colonial commemorations.
Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley from MCCALL has received $34,452 in funding for the project ‘The ABC, its Archives and its Audiences. This project aims to understand the role of the ABC in the lives of its listeners and viewers. It will uncover and interpret archival records of ABC Advisory Committees over five decades, show how our national broadcaster established systems for identifying and distributing expert knowledge, and reveal how it perceived and interacted with audiences.
Associate Professor Courtney Fung from the Department of Security Studies and Criminology has received $49,894 in funding for the project China’s Rise in the United Nations: Developing a Dataset of UN Executive Leadership Competitions Literature. This proposal will build the first comprehensive database of UN executive leadership competitions, focusing on China’s strategy and tactics for their candidatures.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Professor Michelle Arrow from the Department of History and Archaeology has been elected Vice-President of the Australian Historical Association as part of the 2022-2024 AHA Executive Committee.
AWARDS
Zac Roberts, a Yuin scholar within the Department of Indigenous Studies in the Faculty of Arts, has been awarded the 2022 John Mulvaney Fellowship by the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Zac is currently undertaking his PhD where he is researching the relationship between Aboriginal and Jewish communities in Australia since 1788. The John Mulvaney Fellowship supports Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander early-career researchers and PhD students working in any field of the humanities to undertake research or fieldwork.