From major grant wins, to an Academic of the Year finalist and even Queen’s Birthday Honours, find out which of our colleagues have been recognised this month.

GRANTS
Major grant win for Philosophy Senior Lecturer
Congratulations to Pierrick Bourrat from the Department of Philosophy who has been awarded AUD $1,045,098 by the John Templeton Foundation to fund his project, Evolutionary transitions in individuality: from ecology to teleonomy. This project seeks to establish a coherent conceptual framework for identifying mechanisms of evolutionary transitions in individuality—transitions in the unity of purposive behaviour—and empirically verify the importance of ecological conditions as mechanisms enabling biological individuality. In particular, they will build a new model of evolutionary transitions that specifies what ecological conditions enable a population of lower-level entities to form collective-level entities that acquire Darwinian properties over time and then implement those conditions in an experimental evolution platform.

Grant win for School of Education
A team from the School of Education has been successful in another Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) tender of $29,680 for a research project on Teaching Performance Assessment: Cross-Institutional Moderation. The team includes Professor Mary Ryan, Associate Professor Iain Hay, Dr Rebecca Andrews and Dr John Ehrich. This is an important and strategic project for the School of Education as it signals our national reputation in teacher education, and in particular, our validation of the classroom readiness of our graduates.

$60K to help NSW north-west region recover
The NSW Minister for the Environment has awarded $59,908 from the NSW Environmental Trust for a collaborative project between Macquarie, Gomeroi/Kamilaroi custodians and colleagues at the University of Canberra. The team from the Macquarie School of Social Sciences, includes Emily O’Gorman, Associate Professor Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Jessica McLean, Associate Professor Fiona Miller and Associate Professor Kate Lloyd. The project ‘Enabling Healthier Gomeroi/Kamilaroi Country through On-Country Classrooms’ will examine Gomeroi/Kamilaroi Country on NSW’s north-west slopes and plains. The region has experienced severe degradation over the last 100 years and through two successive On-Country Classrooms, this project will support transformative education programs that enable Gomeroi/Kamilaroi custodians and youth, environmental experts, management authorities and tertiary students, to learn with and from each other and improve Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration for climate change mitigation and adaptation in NSW.

AWARDS AND ACHIEVEMENTS
Academic finalist in Australian Law Awards
Associate Professor Nengye Liu, Director of the Centre for Environmental Law, has been named as a finalist in the Academic of the Year category for the Lawyers Weekly Australian Law Awards. The awards are the pinnacle event in Australia for recognising and rewarding dedicated and hard-working legal professionals. Nengye said he was humbled to be recognised and proud to be named as a finalist. The winners will be announced at a ceremony on 20 August.

Fellowship success
Associate Professor Jaap Timmer, from the Discipline of Anthropology, School of Social Sciences will take up a prestigious 18-month fellowship at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) in October. During this fellowship, Jaap will study how new understandings of history emerge as people’s futures change, with a special focus on societies in Solomon Islands and West Papua. The fellowship will result in a book and a number of articles on anthropology and historicity. Jaap will also organise a conference on perceptions of time and foster future collaborations between Aarhus and Macquarie Universities. He is one of 10 successful candidates selected from 296 applicants.

Macquarie’s Anthropology team recognised globally
Starting in 2022, Associate Professor Lisa Wynn from the School of Social Sciences, will be part of the editorial team of the journal American Ethnologist as associate editor, along with Jesse Hession Grayman (Auckland University) and editor-in-chief Susanna Trnka (Auckland University). This is the first time the journal's editorial collective is all based in the Pacific.  American Ethnologist is one of the top 5 journals in cultural anthropology and Macquarie was competing against five other applicant-teams for the editorship. It is a big coup for Macquarie Anthropology because we now have two of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) journals associated with our department (with Greg Downey as editor in chief of Ethos, the flagship journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology which is a subsection of the AAA). It is unprecedented to simultaneously have the editorship of two AAA journals in a single university outside of the United States, so it speaks to the high standing of Macquarie Anthropology worldwide.

Queen’s Birthday Honours
Mrs Leonie Donovan was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in the Queen's Birthday Honour's List, for services to community history. Leonie has been a stalwart member of the Rundle Foundation and the backbone of our ACE publications for three decades. This is a very well-deserved honour representing many years of dedicated volunteer service to Egyptology at Macquarie.

Dr Breda Carty was also made an Officer in the Order of Australia (AO) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Breda was, until her retirement in 2019, an academic staff member of the RIDBC Renwick Centre (now NextSense Institute) for almost 20 years and still continues as an Adjunct Fellow of the University. The citation for Breda’s award reads: “For distinguished service to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, to education and research, and to the community.”