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Early career researchers awarded $9m funding

17 August 2021
22 Sydney academics receive DECRAs
The University of Sydney has received funding for 22 research projects through the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) scheme.

Minister for Education and Youth, the Hon Alan Tudge MP, announced $83 million in support for early career researchers. The University was awarded $9.1m to fund 22 up-and-coming researchers and received the most humanities and social sciences DECRAs in the country. 

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Duncan Ivison congratulated the recipients.

“It is fantastic to see so many of our early career researchers recognised through the ARC DECRA scheme – achieving a nation leading success rate overall. They are working on exciting projects which will generate new knowledge across an amazing array of areas, including quantum technology, digital repression and political resistance in Southeast Asia, Sino-Western philosophical encounters, sustainable energy solutions and building child-friendly cities.”

Among the 22 recipients are Dr Katherine Kenny, from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, who will investigate the pressing global health challenge of antimicrobial resistance from a community-based perspective, and Dr Catherine Price, from the Faculty of Science, who will develop new approaches to prevent the extinction of threatened native species from invasive predators.

2022 DECRA recipients and projects

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

  • Dr Daniel Canaris – The Aristotelian Soul in Late Ming China
  • Dr Sophie Chao – Human-kangaroo relations: Reconciling perceptions, knowledges and practices
  • Dr Luara Ferracioli – Life without Birth: The Ethics, Politics, and Law of Artificial Wombs
  • Dr Katherine Kenny – Kids, bugs and drugs: Human-microbial relations in everyday family life
  • Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson – Chinese Business: economic and social survival in white Australia, 1870-1940
  • Dr Sanné Mestrom – ART, PLAY, RISK: An interdisciplinary approach to child-friendly cities
  • Dr Aim Sinpeng – Cyber Repression and Political Protests in Thailand

Faculty of Engineering

  • Dr Yuhan Huang – Improving pollutants dispersion in street canyons for better urban living
  • Dr Jonathan Kummerfeld – Generating Plots with Dialogue Based Executable Semantic Parsing
  • Dr Weibin Liang – Engineering of biocatalysis in metal-organic frameworks for CO2 conversion
  • Dr Keita Nomoto – Novel high-performance copper-based materials via additive manufacturing
  • Dr Shenlong Zhao – Realising highly selective catalysts for continuous chlorine production

Faculty of Science

  • Dr Shawna Foo – Identifying factors that counter negative impacts of ocean climate change
  • Dr Shila Ghazanfar – Statistical approaches for spatial genomics at single cell resolution
  • Dr Rosalyn Gloag – Mito-nuclear coevolution as an engine of biodiversity
  • Dr Ashish Goyal – Multiscale mathematical modelling to gain insights into hepatitis viruses
  • Dr Chia-Ling Hsu– Searching for New CP Violating Phenomena at the Intensity Frontier
  • Dr Catherine Price – Protecting prey from predators using sensory tactics
  • Dr Antoine Runge – Going Fourth: ruling light with pure-quartic solitons
  • Dr Dominic Tran – Stop it: Learning response inhibition
  • Dr Carla Verdi – First-principles design of atomic defects for quantum technologies
  • Dr Dominic Williamson – Topological phases of matter for quantum computation

The full list of 2022 Discovery Early Career Researcher Award recipients and their project summaries are available on the ARC website.

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