Media release

ACU success in 2018 ARC Grants

ACU has been awarded over $2.6 million in prestigious Australian Research Council funding in 2018.

The recent announcement of Discovery and Linkage grants capped off a successful year for ACU researchers in education and the humanities.

Dr Benjamin Moffitt, School of Arts, was awarded one of only four Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards (DECRA) in international politics, worth $379,000, to investigate The visual politics of populism.

Two Discovery Projects were also awarded to ACU:

• Dr Melissa Bellanta from the School of Arts has been granted $364,605 for her project, Masculinity and Social Change in Australia;
• Professor Len Unsworth and Professor Kathy Mills from the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education (ILTSE) were successful with their project, Coding Animated Narratives as Contemporary Multimodal Authorship in Schools, worth $442,609.

In the Linkage scheme Associate Professor Lenore Adie, Professor Claire Wyatt-Smith, and Professor Jacqueline Cumming (ILSTE) were awarded $511,658 in ARC Linkage Project funding in addition to industry partner cash contributions for their project, Improving teacher assessment using exemplars and online moderation.

Another ACU researcher, Professor Mark Alfano from the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, is Chief Investigator on a successful Discovery Project led by ANU, Trust in a Social and Digital World.

These results follow ACU’s earlier success in the Future Fellowship round with Professor Kathy Mills from ILSTE awarded $974,636, the only Future Fellowship in the field of education.

The overall success of both our Faculty and Institute senior researchers as well as mid- and early-career researchers reaffirms the strong culture of research across ACU. The outcomes are also testament to ACU’s pursuit of research excellence in our priority areas. Professor Wayne McKenna, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), warmly congratulates the recipients of these ARC grants and acknowledges the efforts of researchers who put forward quality applications into these highly competitive grant processes.