Travelling North -- The University of Queensland Seriously Populates its Queensland Brain Institute. (September 20, 2006)

    David Williamson's 1979 play Travelling North concerns an aging couple who decide to move to Queensland to escape the bleak southern climate. Now in a well resourced exercise by the University of Queensland's Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) the five members of Mandyam Srinivasan group have been enticed to leave the Australian National University and move to QBI before the end of the year while the University of Melbourne's Jason Mattingley and his group of 12 neuroscientists will travel north come January.

According to The Australian's Dorothy Illing, "High-class facilities and critical mass in specific disciplines are proving to be the new currencies in research... Scientists have told the [Higher Education Section] that is their key reason for moving to UQ. They said the close configuration of the main research institutes, which promotes the cross-pollination of ideas, and good research infrastructure, are key attractants."

"The QBI is trying to bring all facets of neuroscience together: cognitive neuroscience, computational and molecular neuroscience," said Professor Mattingley. "There really are no other facilities in Australia that bring all of those facets of neuroscience together in one place."

QBI together with the Institute for Molecular Bioscience and the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology are to form the centrepiece of the University of Queensland's drive to become a world class power in the biosciences.

Over the past decade University of Queensland Vice-Chancellor John Hay has received for his university well over one hundred million dollars from Irish-American billionaire Chuck Feeney and his Atlantic Philanthropies.

Professor Hay told Illing, "Chuck would meet everybody and be very candid about it, but the understanding was that we would not disclose Atlantic Philanthropies at all. But then later they thought if they were to become public it might encourage others to follow their example. It hasn't happened much in Australia."

The University and Atlantic Philanthropies identified a small number of areas in which they wanted the university to excel and inject discretionary money which would allow leveraging funds from other sources -- in particular the Queensland Government's Smart State initiative, which matched much of the funding.

John Hay's university isn't the only Australian beneficiary of Atlantic Philanthropies but to date its the greatest.

From an Australian perspective the good news is that the researchers will have significantly improved facilities made available to them and in all probability more of the nation's best researchers in the neurosciences will remain here while there's a good chance that oversees investigators will be attracted perhaps permanently but certainly as visiting fellows.