News & Views item - July 2005

 

 

11 New ARC Centres of Excellence to be Established in 2005. (July 5, 2005)

    On June 15 the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson announced the awarding of $122 million of public funding over the next five years for eleven new centres of excellence at eight Australian Universities. That averages out to $2.2 million per centre per year. In addition partner organisations have pledged to contribute a total of an additional $71 million.

 

It's to be hoped that those centres demonstrating progress progress, intellectual as well as material, will achieve useful additional resources and sustained support beyond their initial period of funding.

 

It may be of interest in the light of recent pronouncements by Dr Nelson concerning the reorganising of research funding to be associated with the Research Quality Framework currently under  preliminary construction  that three of universities to host the new centres are not members of the Group of Eight while the universities of Adelaide, Sydney and New South Wales missed out.

 

Some additional information is obtainable from http://www.arc.gov.au/pdf/CoE_summaries_June2005t.pdf.

 

 

 New Centres of Excellence - Established 2005

Successful Proposals

Host Institution

5 Year Public Funding
(M)

Innovative science for sustainable management of coral reef biodiversity
James Cook University
$12   
Structural and Functional Microbial Genomics
Monash University
$10   
Design in Light Metals
Monash University
$14.5
Cultural and Media Industries
Queensland University of Technology
$7
Antimatter-Matter Studies
Australian National University
$7
Vision Science
The Australian National University
$11
Coherent X-ray Science
Melbourne University
$9
Free Radical Chemistry and Biotechnology
The University of Melbourne
$12
Plant Energy Biology
University of Western Australia
$12.5
Ore Deposits
University of Tasmania
$15
Electromaterials Science
University of Wollongong
$12