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ARC Postgraduate Research Scholarship

A postgraduate research scholarship
A $41,753 per annum stipend scholarship for research students within the Faculty of Science.

Highlights

Value Eligibility Open date Close date
$41,753 p.a. (up to 3.5 years)
  • Domestic/international student
  • Masters by Research or PhD within the Faculty of Science
  • Hold an Honours degree or Masters degree
27 January 2025 16 February 2025

How to apply

Apply here.

Benefits

The Scholarship will provide a stipend allowance equivalent to the University of Sydney’s Research Training Program (RTP) stipend rate (indexed on 1 January each year) per annum, subject to satisfactory academic performance as per the below duration:

 I.            up to 1.5 years for a successful Master’s by Research recipient (full-time equivalent),

  II.            up to 3 years for a successful PhD recipient with a possible six-month extension (full-time equivalent).

The Scholarship will also provide academic tuition fees to the successful international recipient, subject to satisfactory academic performance as per the below duration:

I.            up to 6 research periods for a successful Master’s by Research recipient (full-time equivalent),

II.            up to 12 research periods for a successful PhD recipient with a possible 2 research period extension (full-time equivalent).

Who's eligible

You must:

  • have an unconditional offer of admission or being currently enrolled to study in a Masters by Research or PhD within the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney
  • conduct research related to the ARC projects for which you have applied
  • conduct research under the supervision of researchers who hold the ARC grant that funds the project for which you have applied
  • hold at least an Honours degree (First Class or Second Class Upper) or Masters degree or equivalent. 

Please Note: An applicant without an unconditional offer of admission may apply and be selected, however, no scholarship offer will be sent until the applicant has an unconditional offer of admission.

Background

The Faculty of Science Australian Research Council (ARC) Scholarship is designed to support research candidates in conducting research that directly contributes to the Australian community. This scholarship is designed to fund high quality students undertaking research aligned with ARC funded research projects. These projects may relate to any field of ARC funded research in the Faculty of Science.

The scholarship may be co-funded by the Faculty of Science and external ARC research grants, or industry-funded projects such as the ARC Discovery Project (DP), ARC Future Fellowships, and Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) with approval from the Associate Dean (Research Education), may be fully funded by the Faculty of Science.

Project 1: Sustainable, Resilient, and Affordable Net-Zero Transitions in the Face of Global Shocks (Supervisor: Mengyu Li)

Summary: Global systems for energy and food are increasingly strained by escalating challenges, including climate change, extreme weather, pandemics, and geopolitical tensions. Events like trade disputes, military conflicts, and polarized global alliances compound the risks, while natural disasters intensify disruptions to supply chains and critical infrastructure. Together, these shocks threaten economic stability and test the resilience of societies worldwide.

This PhD project aims to develop robust, future-proof strategies to net-zero emissions future, focusing on resilience in energy and food systems under global volatility. The research will explore how geopolitical instability, global polarization, and disaster events affect economic resilience, and how adaptive systems can mitigate their impacts.

The project’s key aims are:

1. Quantifying Resilience: Define and measure the capacity of economies, societies, and ecosystems to absorb and adapt to shocks while maintaining functionality.

2. Exploring Alternative Transitions: Identify sustainable, resilient, and secure scenarios for future energy and food systems that withstand shocks, ensuring affordability and environmental sustainability.

This research offers a unique opportunity to address critical global challenges, applying innovative methods to shape robust economic systems capable of enduring uncertainties. Come and join us to be part of this transformative journey to pioneer resilient strategies, shaping a more secure and sustainable future in an increasingly unpredictable world.

 

Project 2: Growing good neighbours: a systems approach to maximising pollination success in target plants (Supervisor: Tanya Latty)

Summary: The world faces two pressing challenges: feeding a growing population and preserving biodiversity. Planting pollinator-friendly flowers alongside crops has been proposed as a promising strategy to address these challenges. Such companion planting can enhance crop yields by boosting pollination success, reduce pesticide use by attracting beneficial predatory insects, and support biodiversity. However, not all flowers make good ‘neighbours.’ Some may hinder the pollination success of nearby plants by ‘stealing” pollinators, while others may fail to attract or support predatory insects or native insects effectively.
What makes a flower a good neighbour depends on a complex interplay of factors, including the behaviours of flower-visiting species, flower traits, and the spatial arrangement of flowers. In this project, we will take a complex systems approach to uncover the mechanisms that drive interactions between neighbouring flowers and identify the traits that make certain flowers ideal neighbours for crops.

This interdisciplinary project combines behavioural ecology, pollination biology, and modelling. The ideal candidate will have an interest in pollination and either experience with individual-based or mathematical modelling—or the enthusiasm and willingness to learn these skills.
Join us to address one of the pressing issues of our time and make a tangible impact on sustainable agriculture and biodiversity conservation. 

 

Project 3: Re-imagining pain: Mental imagery impact on pain perception (Supervisor: Jemma Todd)

Summary: This project aims to explore how mental imagery influences pain perception, anxiety, and expectancy. By
leveraging cutting-edge virtual reality technology, we'll uncover the role of mental imagery in pain experiences.
Our interdisciplinary team, collaborating internationally, will conduct controlled experiments and ecologically valid
experience sampling, to better understand the impact of mental imagery on pain perception. The outcomes may
pave the way for novel interventions beyond this project, benefiting over 3 million Australians suffering from
chronic pain. This research not only enhances our understanding of pain dynamics but also holds potential for
future cost-effective clinical treatments, reducing suffering and healthcare costs.

 

Project 4: Seeing the world one step at a time (Supervisor: Reuben Rideaux)

Summary: Our perception of the world does not solely rely on what our eyes see. Our actions play a crucial role in shaping how we perceive the world around us. Three of the most frequent actions are eye movements (saccades), reaching/grasping, and walking. The first two are well studied and known to influence perception. During saccades, for example, vision is briefly lost (“saccadic suppression”) and when reaching, our eye gaze diverts to the target and away from other objects. Despite its fundamental role in our daily lives, little is known about how walking influences perception.

This project combines multiple technologies (virtual reality, electroencephalography, eye tracking, motion platform, artificial intelligence) to test dynamic perception in free-walking observers in virtual multisensory environments. It will reveal how walking modulates perception at the step rate, the influence of intention (active vs passive action) and establish the neural mechanisms underlying the perception/action link.
Understanding the influence of walking on our perception holds the potential to improve public safety and unlock myriad benefits in our daily lives. For example, the discovery of saccadic suppression informed digital display design to improve user experiences (e.g., exploiting saccadic masking, reduced motion blur.). The outcomes from this project could be harnessed to inform public safety measures/policy and enhance the efficiency of digital displays, communication systems, and device feedback mechanisms, thereby enriching user experiences.

 

Project 5: Strong light-matter coupling based optical computing (Supervisor: Girish Lakhwani)

Summary: Optical computing devices and neural networks are inherently capable of tackling pattern recognition tasks and handling big data, which are essential for artificial intelligence. Nonetheless, using photons to achieve efficient computation continues to be a significant challenge. Photon-photon interactions are considerably weaker and necessitate high intensities, significantly restricting their applicability in optical computing components such as switches and transistors.

Light can strongly couple with organic semiconductor molecules and materials at room temperature, forming exciton-polaritons that are quasiparticles with both light and matter properties. Polaritons can substantially modify excited energy states and display nonlinear optical characteristics. Interparticle interactions in exciton-polaritons can be orders of magnitude greater than weakly interacting photons, making them exceptional candidates for optical computations. In this project, you will experimentally investigate and utilise exciton-polaritons for efficient optical computations. The project provides opportunities to concentrate on devices or spectroscopy in collaboration with theorists, experimentalists, and our industry partners.

 

Project 6: Chiral nano-optics (Supervisor: Girish Lakhwani)

Summary: Telecommunications networks use light signals transmitted through fibre to quickly transfer information over long distances and electronic circuits to process and store the data. Breakthrough technology in modern information transmission networks can be attained through all-optical switches. These switches use light-encoded data as a medium for optical switching, eliminating the need for relatively slow and error-prone electronic circuits susceptible to heat. All-optical switches use nonlinear interactions between photons. Second-order nonlinear effects are highly symmetry-specific, i.e., they require a material to be non-centrosymmetric. Chiral materials inherently fall into this category, making them an intriguing class of materials to examine for nonlinear properties.

In this project, you will experimentally investigate the nonlinear optical and chiroptical properties of hybrid semiconductors, including chiral metal-organic frameworks and perovskites, using advanced spectroscopic techniques. The focus will be on their applications in all-optical switches and sensors. You will have opportunities to collaborate with synthetic chemists and device physicists.

 

Project 7: Analysing non-stationary complex systems with applications to sleep (Supervisor: Ben Fulcher)

Summary: This scholarship is to support an Australia Research Council funded project on data-driven methods for tracking non-stationarity in time series, with applications to sleep data. The student should have strong background experience in quantitative methods (preferably with training from physics or mathematics and experience with data-driven analysis), and a keen interest in time-series analysis and sleep.

1. Background

a. The Faculty of Science Australian Research Council (ARC) Scholarship is designed to support research candidates in conducting research that directly contributes to the Australian community. This scholarship is designed to fund high quality students undertaking research aligned with ARC funded research projects. These projects may relate to any field of ARC funded research in the Faculty of Science.

b. The scholarship may be co-funded by the Faculty of Science and external ARC research grants, or industry-funded projects such as the ARC Discovery Project (DP), ARC Future Fellowships, and Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) with approval from the Associate Dean (Research Education), may be fully funded by the Faculty of Science.

2. Eligibility

a. The Scholarship is offered subject to the applicant having an unconditional offer of admission or being currently enrolled to study in a Masters by Research or PhD within the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney.

b. An applicant without an unconditional offer of admission may apply and be selected, however, no scholarship offer will be sent until the applicant has an unconditional offer of admission.

c. Applicants are required to conduct research related to the ARC projects for which they have applied.

d. Applicants must be willing to conduct research under the supervision of researchers that hold the ARC grant that funds the project for which they have applied.

e. Applicant must also hold at least one of the following degrees:
I. an Honours degree (First Class or Second Class Upper) or equivalent, or
II. Masters degree or equivalent.

3. Selection Criteria

a. The successful applicant will be awarded the Scholarship on the basis of:

I. academic merit,
II. area of study and/or research proposal,
III. curriculum vitae with previous research experience in fields relevant to the project, and
IV. personal statement that demonstrates their interest in the ARC projects for which they have applied.

b. The successful applicant will be awarded the Scholarship on the nomination of Associate Dean of Research Education in consultation with the relevant research supervisor(s), or their nominated delegate(s).

4. Value

a. The Scholarship will provide a stipend allowance equivalent to the University of Sydney’s Research Training Program (RTP) stipend rate (indexed on 1 January each year) per annum, subject to satisfactory academic performance as per the below duration:

I. up to 1.5 years for a successful Master’s by Research recipient (full-time equivalent),
II. up to 3 years for a successful PhD recipient with a possible six-month extension (full-time equivalent).
b. The Scholarship will also provide academic tuition fees to successful international recipient, subject to satisfactory academic performance as per the below duration:

I. up to 6 research periods for a successful Master’s by Research recipient (full-time equivalent),
II. up to 12 research periods for a successful PhD recipient with a possible 2 research period extension (full-time equivalent).

*The Faculty of Science reserves the right to substitute the academic course fees from this scholarship with another scholarship which provides equivalent value as long as the recipient will not be financially disadvantaged.

c. The extension of scholarship is subject to funding availability and with the approval of the Associate Dean (Research Education).

d. If the scholarship recipient converts from a Master’s by Research to a PhD or vice-versa, the maximum duration of the Scholarship becomes that of the new candidature.

e. Periods of study already undertaken towards the degree prior to the commencement of the Scholarship will be deducted from the maximum duration of the Scholarship excluding any potential extension period.

f. The Scholarship is for commencement in the relevant research period in which it is offered. Recipients can defer the Scholarship subject to the approval from their Lead supervisor and the Associate Dean (Research Education), or their nominee.

g. Recipients cannot transfer the Scholarship to another area of research or change their Lead supervisor or change their degree without the prior approval of the Associate Dean (Research Education), or their nominee.

h. No other amount is payable.

i. The Scholarship will be offered subject to the availability of funding.

5. Eligibility for Progression

a. Progression is subject to attending and passing the annual progress evaluation.

6. Leave Arrangements

a. The Scholarship recipient receives up to 20 working days recreation leave each year of the Scholarship and this may be accrued. However, the student will forfeit any unused leave remaining when the Scholarship is terminated or complete. Recreation leave does not attract a leave loading and the supervisor's agreement must be obtained before leave is taken.

b. The Scholarship recipient may take up to 10 working days sick leave each year of the Scholarship and this may be accrued over the tenure of the Scholarship. Students with family responsibilities, caring for sick children or relatives, or experiencing domestic violence, may convert up to five days of their annual sick leave entitlement to carer’s leave on presentation of medical certificate(s). Students taking sick leave must inform their supervisor as soon as practicable.

7. Research Overseas

a. The Scholarship recipient may not normally conduct research overseas within the first six months of award.

b. The Scholarship holder may conduct up to 12 months of their research outside Australia. Approval must be sought from the student's supervisor, Head of School and the Faculty via application to the Higher Degree by Research Administration Centre (HDRAC) and will only be granted if the research is essential for completion of the degree.

c. All periods of overseas research are cumulative and will be counted towards a student's candidature. Students must remain enrolled full-time at the University and receive approval to count time away.

8. Suspension

a. The Scholarship recipient cannot suspend their award within their first six months of study, unless a legislative provision applies.

b. The Scholarship recipient may apply for up to 12 months suspension of the Scholarship for any reason during the tenure of the Scholarship. Periods of Scholarship suspension are cumulative and failure to resume study after suspension will result in the award being terminated. Approval must be sought from the student's supervisor, Head of School and the Faculty via application to the Higher Degree by Research Administration Centre (HDRAC). HDRAC will consult with Scholarship Office to confirm funding availability for the period of suspension. Periods of study towards the degree during suspension of the Scholarship will be deducted from the maximum tenure of the Scholarship.

9. Changes in Enrolment

a. The Scholarship recipient must notify HDRAC and their supervisor promptly of any planned changes to their enrolment including but not limited to: attendance pattern, suspension, leave of absence, withdrawal, course transfer, and candidature upgrade or downgrade. If the award holder does not provide notice of the changes identified above, the University may require repayment of any overpaid stipend.

10. Termination

a. The Scholarship will be terminated:

I. on resignation or withdrawal of the recipient from their research degree,
II. upon submission of the thesis or at the end of the award,
III. if the recipient ceases to be a full-time student and prior approval has not been obtained to hold the Scholarship on a part-time basis,
IV. upon the recipient having completed the maximum candidature for their degree as per the University of Sydney (Higher Degree by Research) Rule 2011 Policy,
V. if the recipient receives an alternative primary stipend scholarship. In such circumstances this Scholarship will be terminated in favour of the alternative stipend scholarship where it is of higher value,
VI. if the recipient does not resume study at the end of a period of approved leave, or
VII. if the recipient ceases to meet the eligibility requirements specified for this Scholarship, (other than during a period in which the Scholarship has been suspended or during a period of approved leave).

b. The Scholarship may also be terminated by the University before this time if, in the opinion of the University:

I. the course of study is not being carried out with competence and diligence or in accordance with the terms of this offer,
II. the student fails to maintain satisfactory progress, or
III. the student has committed misconduct or other inappropriate conduct.

c. The Scholarship will be suspended throughout the duration of any enquiry/appeal process.

d. Once the Scholarship has been terminated, it will not be reinstated unless due to University error.

11. Misconduct

a. Where during the Scholarship a student engages in misconduct, or other inappropriate conduct (either during the Scholarship or in connection with the student’s application and eligibility for the Scholarship), which in the opinion of the University warrants recovery of funds provided, the University may require the student to repay payments made in connection with the Scholarship. Examples of such conduct include and without limitation; academic dishonesty, research misconduct within the meaning of the Research Code of Conduct 2023 (for example, plagiarism in proposing, carrying out or reporting the results of research, or failure to declare or manage a serious conflict of interests), breach of the Student Charter 2020 and misrepresentation in the application materials or other documentation associated with the Scholarship.

b. The University may require such repayment at any time during or after the Scholarship period. In addition, by accepting this Scholarship, the student consents to all aspects of any investigation into misconduct in connection with this Scholarship being disclosed by the University to the funding body and/or any relevant professional body.

12. Other Conditions

a. Where the scholarship is co-funded by the Faculty of Science and external research grants, the successful recipient may be required to comply with other conditions related to the research grant such as intellectual property, confidentiality, publication and acknowledgement requirements. Where applicable it will be outlined in the scholarship offer letter and these requirements may be as follows:

I. Intellectual Property - Where indicated, the successful recipient of this Scholarship must complete the Student Deed Poll supplied by the University of Sydney to cover any jointly created Intellectual Property during the course of the project.

II. Confidentiality - Where indicated, the successful applicant is required to keep all confidential information disclosed by the funder organisation or the University of Sydney confidential and ensure it is not disclosed to a third party without the prior written consent of the University of Sydney or the funder organisation as appropriate, or as required by law.

III. Publications and Acknowledgement - Where indicated, the successful scholarship recipient must acknowledge the support of their scholarship in any media, publications or presentations arising from the research. This must include where applicable, acknowledgement of funding source and comply with their guidelines.
 

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