Research without boundaries Dr Louise HitcHcock excavating goLiatH

P roblems, crises, shocks and the like cut across precedent, tradition and protocol. And their size and complexity defy understanding, let alone resolution by existing disciplines. It is here that interdisciplinary conceptualisation and research is emerging as an innovative response. Yet as Professor Liz Sonenberg, Pro ViceChancellor (Research Collaboration) and Chair of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, explains, such co-operation across and between disciplines still rests on the fundamental and expanding strength of the individual disciplines themselves. “No-one can predict the issues that science and society will consider most pressing in the decades to come,” Professor Sonenberg says. “But if we look at some high-priority issues of today, such as food security, biomedical ethics, and global energy demand, it is increasingly evident that research is more and more crossing the boundaries between disciplines.” Discussing recent interdisciplinary research initiatives at the University, Professor Sonenberg observes: “The strength of the University lies in its disciplines and will continue to do so, but increasingly there are opportunities and incentives for academics from different parts of the University to work together. “The Research Institutes initiative is part of the University’s strategy to promote a greater degree of discussion across the campus and to harness our disciplinary strengths to work on problems of substantive societal impact. There are currently five Melbourne Research Institutes – Broadband Enabled Society, Energy, Materials, Neuroscience and Sustainable Society – with a small number still in development. “Each Institute brings together researchers from across the University to form teams to tackle complex issues in new ways. Our ambition is to build a portfolio of such institutes that will demonstrate the breadth of the University’s research activity, and increase community accessibility to some of the remarkable achievements of our researchers. Institute leaders include the University’s very best interdisciplinary communicators.” Professor Steven Prawer, Director of the Melbourne Materials Institute (MMI) is adamant that the unpredictability of our current environment has to be approached with openness and flexibility by researchers. “When people ask me what I am going to do next at the Institute I tell them that if I knew the answer to that we shouldn’t have an Institute because the whole value of the Institute is to bring about what we call random collisions – get people together, let them interact,” Professor Prawer says. “Every bit of experience tells us that these random collisions will result in wonderful new outcomes. “Most of the new ideas that are there come about because people from different disciplines get together and start to think about the bigger picture. The Melbourne Research Institutes represent a fantastic new opportunity to galvanise these new ideas and turn them into reality. “My passion now is to allow other peoples’ research to happen.” Materials research, for example, is a large canvas. “Materials are the great enabling medium: they carry the electrical pulse of the Internet, they deliver drugs to heal the human body, they capture the energy of the sun to create sustainable power,” Professor Prawer says. “Advances and innovations in materials science are essential if we are to solve the great problems of our age – in communications, medicine, energy and sustainability. “These problems have no simple solutions: they are big, complicated and multi-faceted.” The MMI brings together world-class researchers from across the University’s strengths in materials science and engineering, building an interdisciplinary perspective to unlock solutions to these intractable problems. The MMI has four focus areas – Nanomedicine, which explores the interface between biological and inorganic materials, synthesising nanotechnological drug delivery systems for precise delivery; Quantum Technologies, where harnessing powerful and previously untapped principles of quantum mechanics allows the development of new materials and devices for quantum information science and technology; Materials Processing, which explores the interaction effects at the particulate level which might give us the ability to re-grow or replace damaged or diseased human tissues or provide clean water for the world; and Materials for Energy, which is identifying and fabricating new materials that can meet the requirements for new energy technologies. In tandem with its interdisciplinary philosophy, the MMI uses a partnership approach in its research projects. “The change in the philosophy of the University has been to ask not what we can do but rather what we ought to be doing for the good of society and also for the good of science,” Professor Prawer says. “The best way to find out what is important is to talk with people who have needs and problems that need solving. “We’ve done that by partnering with the electric car company Better Place Australia where we have a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Better Place needed to understand the effect on the Australian electricity grid of the mass adoption of electric vehicles. We have world-class modelling capacity and expertise in grid technologies. Bringing these two together has resulted in an ARC Linkage grant to investigate this problem. “We’ve also partnered with the Defence, Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), whose mission is to ‘future proof’ our defence forces. We asked the question: What do they need in order to make our soldiers safer and make our defence forces more effective and more efficient? This has resulted in a partnership with seven key research themes being pursued by UoM staff in collaboration with DSTO staff. “And with Bionic Vision Australia, we asked what was the fundamental science problem in building the Bionic Eye prosthesis. Our answer was to use cutting-edge diamond technology to deliver light signals to the brain which will be instrumental in the bionic eye prosthesis and the next generation of bionic devices.” Professor Prawer describes these relationships as “ten-year deep partnerships” to ensure the University’s continued role as a provider of relevant influence. “The value proposition is that collectively the Institutes are the forum by which the University can conceptualise the new generation of research to make sure that what we do is relevant, needed, cutting-edge and internationally competitive,” he says. each institute brings together researchers from across the university to form teams to tackle complex issues in new ways the complexity of problems facing humanity calls for a broad and multidisciplinary response. to succeed, however, each of those disciplines must maintain depth and excellence. Shane Cahill reports on the university’s responses to these twin challenges.