QUT has been awarded four Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) grants totalling $$1,697,823 for research on large infrastructure assessment, energy storage, and combatting disinformation online, and additive biomanufacturing.
- Dr Khac Duy Nguyen from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering was awarded $350,000 to develop an innovative method for assessing the health condition of bridges and other large infrastructure, helping to prevent potential catastrophic failures.
- Dr Jiaye Ye from the School of Chemistry and Physics was awarded $448,169 to develop a membrane that will improve vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) performance and help place Australia at the forefront of clean energy storage technologies.
- Dr Timothy Graham from the School of Communication was awarded $452,000 to develop a world-class computational workflow and recommendations to advance the global fight against coordinated disinformation online.
- Dr Mark Allenby from the School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering was awarded $447,654 to develop a new way of manufacturing bespoke and complex 3D tissues for future agricultural, pharmaceutical, or medical products.
Dr Timothy Graham (pictured), who is also from the QUT Digital Media Research Centre and QUT Centre for Data Science said his research will produce new frameworks, methods, and approaches for detecting and classifying disinformation.
“I will specifically target the coordinated and temporal aspects of disinformation and make it more difficult for disinformation campaigners to weaponise social media.
“Social media users, platforms and lawmakers should be better able to differentiate organic activity from inauthentic activity,” he said.
Dr Khac Duy Nguyen’s research aims to improve the safety of bridges and other large infrastructure by developing new health condition assessments.
“The scale of large infrastructure combined with incomplete or uncertain condition data has made potential failures difficult to predict,” Dr Nguyen said.
“Improved condition-based maintenance will replace ineffective routine maintenance schemes and extend asset life cycles, preventing potential catastrophes.”
Dr Jiaye Ye aims to develop high-performance ion exchange membranes to improve the performance of vanadium redox flow batteries, an emerging technology for large scale renewable energy storage.
“These low-cost membranes could greatly reduce the overall cost of the battery and contribute to its further development,” Dr Ye said.
Dr Mark Allenby’s project aims to control cell behaviour in 3D-printed structures through a combination of additive micromanufacturing, tissue engineering, and computational modelling.
The research is expected to lead to more robust, customisable, scalable, and economical cell culture platforms for future agricultural, pharmaceutical, or medical products.
The three-year projects will start in January 2022.
Minister for Education and Youth, Hon Alan Tudge MP, approved the ARC DECRA grants that help advance researcher career pathways.
QUT Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice President (Research), ARC Laureate Fellow Professor Christopher Barner-Kowollik said QUT placed high emphasis on providing career pathways for junior academics and the ARC DECRA scheme was a critical element in its strategy across all faculties and interdisciplinary research centres.
