Development
Research Support Scheme
The Numbers
The Research Support Scheme (RSS) provides financial support for ACEMS Research Fellows and Associate Investigators and aims to increase cross-node collaboration between our early-career researchers.
The Research Support Scheme funds small to medium size research projects aligned with the Centre’s four Research Themes, as well as providing funding for extended research visits around Australia and overseas, funding for media, outreach or stakeholder activities, and for students to undertake these activities. Researchers can request up to $20,000 per annum, per application to support their research project.
ACEMS particularly encourages early-career researchers to apply to gain experience with writing grant applications, developing and monitoring research project budgets, supervising a research assistant, and administering successful research projects.
In 2021, the Centre approved four new applications for funding worth a total of $46,719, bringing the Centre’s total investment in the Research Support Scheme to $278,415 (with $168,042 in external co-funding) across 36 projects since the scheme’s establishment in late-2017.
A total of five new projects commenced in 2021, bringing the total number of active projects to 11 during 2021. Many of these projects involved investigators from multiple ACEMS nodes as well as other institutions from around Australia and overseas.
2021 Research Support Scheme Projects
| Project Title | Lead Investigator | Co-Investigators | Project Dates |
|---|---|---|---|
| Big time series data and randomised numerical linear algebra** # | Fred Roosta (UQ) | Ali Eshragh (Newcastle), Glen Livingston (Newcastle), Michael Mahoney (UC Berkeley), Asef Nazari (Deakin), David Woodruff (Carnegie Mellon University) | Feb 2020 – Oct 2021 |
| Exploiting composite likelihoods for likelihood-free problems** | Clara Grazian (UNSW) | Chris Drovandi (QUT) | Jan 2021 – Jun 2021 |
| Finding minimum label spanning trees using cross-entropy method** | Radislav Vaisman (UQ) | Matthew Roughan (UoA) | Apr 2020 – Apr 2021 |
| First passage properties of Markov additive processes and related multivariate processes* | Oscar Peralta Gutierrez (UoA) | Eric Cheung (UNSW), Kais Hamza (Monash), Jae Kyung Woo (UNSW) | Jun 2021 – Aug 2021 |
| Improved algorithms for environmental monitoring network design problems** | Radislav Vaisman (UQ) | Mar 2020 – Jul 2021 | |
| Mathematical modelling of COVID-19 cluster surveillance** | Andrew Black (UoA) | Sophie Hautphenne (UoM) | Jun 2020 – Jan 2021 |
| Modelling of environmental and climate extremes* | Boris Beranger (UNSW) | Kate Saunders (QUT), Alec Stephenson (CSIRO) | Apr 2021 – Nov 2021 |
| Modelling seagrass dynamics using hybrid strategy combining deterministic process-based and DBN models** | Paul Wu (QUT) | Benoit Liquet (QUT), Martin Marzloff (IFREMER), Kerrie Mengersen (QUT), Heloise Muller (IFREMER) | Jul 2019 – Oct 2021 |
| Quantum variational Bayes and quantum descriptive statistics* | Minh Ngoc Tran (USyd) | Scott Sisson (UNSW) | Apr 2021 – Sep 2021 |
| Stochastic analysis of the COVID-19 population** # | Ali Eshragh (Newcastle) | Saed Alizamir (Yale), Peter Howley (Newcastle), Judy-anne Osborn (Newcastle), Joshua Ross (UoA), Elizabeth Stojanovski (Newcastle) | Jul 2020 – Dec 2021 |
| To understand the properties of echo chambers on social media* | Mehwish Nasim (UoA) | Lauren Kennedy (Monash), Lewis Mitchell (UoA), Adam Sparks (USQ) | Apr 2021 – Jun 2021 |
* Applications approved in 2021.
** Applications active in 2021 but approved in previous years.
# Funding relinquished in 2021 due to COVID-19 related disruptions.
Due to the repeated and ongoing disruptions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, several projects were rescoped and funding was redirected to support other project activities. For example, significant travel and workshop funding was repurposed for hiring a research assistant and extending project scope and timelines.
In some cases, the challenges due to COVID-19 resulted in some activities being reduced and thus some projects being underspent. However, unspent Research Support Scheme project funds were redirected to the Centre’s new Research Sprint Scheme which supported 21 sprint projects.
While the COVID-19 pandemic created challenges for some Research Support Scheme projects during 2020 and 2021, the scheme has been incredibly successful. It provided additional support and opportunities for new students and early-career researchers, facilitated research workshops and seminars, led to the preparation and submission of papers to peer-reviewed journals, enabled travel for collaboration where possible, and importantly, supported many new cross-node collaborations that will continue after ACEMS concludes.