There have been some wonderful achievements by our academics this month including successful ARC 2021 Link Project recipients, funding from the French Government’s Pacific Funds Secretariat, a Betty Roland Prize shortlist and a new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow.
AWARDS
Honorary Lecturer, Dr Alec Morgan from MCCALL, has been shortlisted for the Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting for his feature documentary ‘Ablaze’. The award is part of the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Winners will be announced on 16 May 2022 at the NSW State Library during Writers Week.
GRANTS
Professor Kristian Ruming from Macquarie School of Social Sciences, alongside a team of researchers, have received $119,798 of funding from Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) for their project ‘Understanding the drivers and outcomes of public housing relocation practice and policy’. A final report will provide a set of policy and practice recommendations designed to improve tenant relocation policies for both State housing authorities and residents in the future.
Professor Shawn Ross, Dr Brian Ballsun-Stanton, and Dr Penny Crook alongside colleagues from the Faculty of Science and Engineering (Associate Professor Steve Cassidy and Dr Nuria Lorente) have secured an additional contract to support CSIRO's Australian National Soil Information System as part of the Federal Pilot Soil Monitoring and Incentives Program. Building on their previous work for CSIRO (announced in December) and the ARDC funded FAIMS3 project, this award for $132,000 is to support development of additional features in the next three months as part of the commissioned offline data collection notebook, supporting GIS, photos, and structured data. This work will improve the speed, quality, and consistency of data collected by Southern Cross university as part of the Pilot Monitoring Program. Consultation with the faculty’s Research Partnerships Manager, Daniel Johnston was essential in developing a successful quote.
ARC round two 2021 Linkage Projects scheme
Associate Professor Donna Houston, Associate Professor Kate Lloyd, Dr Miriam Williams and Dr Justine Lloyd from the Macquarie School of Social Sciences, along with colleagues from their Partner Organisation, the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, have been awarded $254,046 for the project, The power of public spaces to connect communities and places. This was one of two research projects from Macquarie University to receive funding in the second round of the 2021 Linkage Projects Scheme.
French Government’s Pacific Funds Secretariat Funding
Associate Professor Tom Murray, Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature, and Professor Bronwen Neil, Department of History and Archaeology, have been selected by the French Government’s Pacific Funds Secretariat for funding in 2022/23 for a documentary research project‘Consilience des connaissances pour les solutions climatiques et la sécurité alimentaire en Polynésie française et dans les îles Cook grâce à la gestion des Rahui/Ra’ui’. The Fonds Pacifique has awarded $90,000 to the investigators from the Creative Documentary Research Centre and their international partners from the Okeanos Foundation for the Sea (Darmstadt, Germany), the Senckenberg Museum (Frankfurt - Germany’s largest natural history museum), the prestigious Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (Bremen, Germany), and Te Fara Natura Museum (Moorea, French Polynesia). The project is timed to coincide with the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-30).
ACHIEVEMENTS
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow
As of May 2022, Dr. Elynn Gorris (PhD 2014, UCLouvain) will join the Department of History and Archaeology with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship of the EU Horizon 2020 programme in partnership with the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium).
Dr. Gorris has a multidisciplinary background in Middle Eastern Philology (MA, 2008), Ancient History (MA, 2009) and Archaeology (MA, 2011). She has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Middle East (Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, U.A. E.) and has held several scholarly positions, including a postdoctoral fellowship of the Belgian National Research Fund (FNRS) and a visiting postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and in Tehran. In 2019, she was appointed editor of the renowned journal Iranica Antiqua, annually bringing together the latest research in the field of ancient Iranian civilisations.
During her time at Macquarie, Dr. Gorris will conduct the research project TRADElam under supervision of Prof. J. Álvarez-Mon. The TRADElam project aims to expand our knowledge of interregional contacts in the Persian Gulf region during the early to mid-1st millennium BC. More specifically, the project will highlight the Neo-Elamite commercial maritime and land networks with neighbouring Mesopotamia and Eastern Arabia, by investigating product circulation and the peoples involved in commercial exchange.