The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) recently announced the recipients under its Ideas Grant Scheme.
This follows the announcement of the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects scheme’s 2020 funding recipients.
Among the successful institutions is the University of South Australia, which has secured $7.6m in funding. The funding UniSA received is part of a $437m grant which will cover 495 ground-breaking health and medical research projects.
The $7.6m will cover nine UniSA researchers who will be focusing on various health issues such as developing new software which will help balance daily activities, discovering a possible cure for schizophrenia and developing an injectable antibody therapy to heal burns from “inside out.”
Taking the largest share of the funding at $1.39m is the research led by Associate Professor Albert Juhasz which will look into how man-made PFAS chemicals are absorbed in the bloodstream and how this could be a health threat.
Meanwhile, Curtin University is set to receive $1.77m to fund a study which seeks to look into the high prevalence of Vitamin D deficiency among Indigenous Australians.
Curtin also received another $2.26m under the NHMRC Clinical Trials and Cohort Studies grant program for a study which will explore early indicators of cognitive impairment for babies below three months for earlier intervention.
Curtin University Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research Professor Chris Moran said parents of some 3,000 babies will be using a smartphone app to help them identify if their child has any cognitive impairments.
Responding to government concerns
The University of Wollongong (UOW) is set to receive $3.3m to cover four of its approved research proposals.
One notable study will be focusing on how children’s brain development is affected by mobile phone radiofrequency electromagnetic energy (RF-EME).
The study, which will receive $1.26m in funding and run for five years, will provide evidence and guidelines for the development of safety standards for wireless products amid the foreseen speedy roll-out of 5G technologies in 2020.
This coincides with the Federal Government becoming more critical on how mobile phones and other electronic devices are affecting children in and outside the classroom after a report found that children are increasingly spending more time on mobile devices.
“Childhood and adolescence are a critical period of brain development that could be sensitive to environmental exposure, including to [RF-EME],” Professor Chao Deng, head of Antipsychotic Research Laboratory, said.
“Particularly given the large increase in new RF-EMF technologies in today’s society, it is crucial to better understand the effects of RF-EMF on brain development and behaviour. Therefore, this innovative study will address a critical health concern.”
Other approved researchers from UOW were:
- The ethical, legal and social impliations of adopting machine learning for diagnosis and screening, which has been awarded $823,476.
- Designing new anti-viral drugs gainst herpes, which will receive $636,368
- A research which will look ingto the molecular changes which turn into deadly skin cancer, which has been awarded $597,622