The federal government yesterday made available $365 million in funding to all states and territory governments for a host of projects including the creation of swimming microrobots, antivenoms from jellyfish and galactic mapping of distant eight billion year old universes.
Under the Australian Research Council (ARC) National Competitive Grants Program, 1154 research grants were awarded to universities for 2007 Discovery and Linkage Projects and smaller schemes, Discovery Indigenous Researchers Development, Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities, and Linkage International.
Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop said 380 organizations are pledging an additional 177 percent on government funding for successful Linkage projects, totalling $105.4 million in cash and in-kind.
"When an independent organization invests in an ARC-supported research program, it can be confident that it is committing its hard-earned dollars not only to a worthwhile project, but to a project undertaken by some of Australia's best researchers," Bishop said.
The programs received a record 4834 applications with government funding increasing up to 12 percent for Discovery Projects ($334,267 per project) and 9 percent ($285,745 per project) for Linkage Projects.
Funds will be supplied over five years and will be split between NSW ($124.2 million for 383 projects), Vic ($83.3 million for 272 projects), WA ($21.7 million for 74 projects), SA ($18.5 million for 71 projects), Qld ($65.6 million for 197 projects), Tasmania ($8.3 million for 24 projects), Northern Territory ($631,967 for four research projects) and the ACT ($42.5 million for 129 projects).
Projects include Monash University's 'Asymmetrically twisted structures to form high-power rotary micromotors for in-vivo swimming microrobots' project, 'Understanding how the brain uses sensory information to guide reaching and grasping movements', and Swinburne University's 'The last 8 billion years of cosmic evolution'.