College of Health and Medicine

CHM Research Strategy

The College Research Strategy was endorsed by the College Management Team in May. A copy can be found on the College intranet. The purpose of the strategy is to have a document that can guide our research activities, our strategic investment and our researcher development program. We have identified core themes of research activity, as well as research flagships. It’s important to note that the Research Strategy is a working document, and the intent is that it will be further developed and refined once both the accompanying Global and Learning and Teaching Strategies for the College are developed. This will ensure that as a College we are supporting the development of Excellence in the Scholarship of Learning and Teaching and strategically nurturing and building our international partnerships.  In collaboration with our colleagues in Marketing and Communications we will also be developing a shortened version of the Research Strategy that is appropriate for sharing with external partners. In parallel with the formulation of the Research Strategy we have also developed Research Capacity Scoping Documents for the Flagship Research areas of Dementia and Obesity. These will be circulated next month. Thanks again to everyone who contributed to the development of these documents. It has been quite a job, but I hope that this work will now serve as a foundation to help us achieve the vision and purpose of our College to ‘transform health outcomes through health-professional education and world class research that is of global importance and local relevance – leading to healthier, longer and better lives.’

Support for Research Infrastructure

Mark Bennett our Director of Research Development is in the process of developing our ten-year Research Infrastructure plan. This has had us visiting a number of our campuses touring and scoping out our infrastructure needs. The annual call for infrastructure support has now taken place. This process allows us to allocate dedicated infrastructure funding from the operating budget. This year we had $900k to allocate across our research and learning functions in the College. Proposals were considered and ranked by a committee consisting of nominees from each of the four units of the College. Eleven bids were funded, and funds across the units are approximately as follows: School of Health Sciences $428k; School of Medicine $408k; Wicking $45k; Menzies $45k.

The top three bids requesting funds over $300k were also identified and will now be considered by the University Capital and Infrastructure (Research) Committee. As a part of the development of the ten-year plan we will be considering our ongoing freezer/storage, microscopy and animal services needs across the College. This forward planning will also allow us to develop teams and proposals for the ARC LIEF scheme and other equipment grant opportunities. I will also be working with the Central Science Laboratory (CSL) to make sure they have a clear view of the College’s needs and how they can support our research and also the other College ADRs to look for opportunities to strengthen our infrastructure proposals through cross-College collaborations. The Director of the CSL, Evan Peacock, will be visiting MSP soon to give a seminar about the CSL’s current capabilities and future plans.  We will ensure that this seminar is available via videoconference.

Research Enhancement Program (REP)/Small Grant Scheme

This funding is allocated by the Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor, Research. REP Funding is provided for strategic research purposes that assist with achievement of the CHM research strategies and research targets for the 2018 Vice-Chancellor’s Annual Review. This year, after input and discussion from the broader community, the College Research Committee agreed to distribute the funds across three schemes – support for new Cross College Collaborations, support for development of our Early Career Researchers and also Senior Researchers developing ARC and NHMRC funding applications. These priorities are important enablers of our College Research Strategy, investing in researcher development, collaboration and connection to our research themes and flagships.

A call for proposals went out and we received 50 applications across the three schemes, which was a great outcome. These were all assessed by the members of the Research Committee and blinded scores were collated by our Research Services Manager, Che. $173k was allocated across ten research projects, with a further $193k committed by the College Management team, supporting an additional eleven projects. Funds distributed across the units are approximately as follows: Menzies $250k; School of Medicine $60k; Wicking $50k; School of Health Sciences $10k.  Congratulations to those who received funding, we look forward to seeing the development of your research into strong external funding applications.

If your application was unsuccessful this year, please do not be disheartened. There were many great proposals and I encourage you to work with Che and his team to look for other funding opportunities for your research. Success rates were relatively consistent across the four units of the College, however there was considerable variation in the numbers of applications. This indicates a need for us to sharpen up our grant writing skills. To this end, Che and I, and an external expert in this space, Dr Alan Crosier will be holding a series of grant writing workshops to support people to develop those skills. Dr Alan Crosier is a writing consultant with experience in NHMRC and ARC schemes. He has extensive experience working with researchers on grants in medicine, pharmacology, exercise physiology, psychology and biology. We will be particularly targeting our Launceston campus, and recognizing different needs, both advanced and intermediate/beginner workshops will be run. Watch out for the workshop announcements, at this stage they are scheduled for November. Please keep in mind that this was the first time running the REPs scheme as a College and we are learning all of the time. How we distribute these research enhancement funds and how we assess applications will be open to consideration and feedback for next year’s round.

Higher Degree Research Scholarships

We will be having a small mid-year scholarship round. There are five remaining scholarships that were allocated to the College and are yet to be awarded to students. There may also be further scholarships to be allocated from the Division of Research. The College round is open now and will close on July 31^st. The scholarship applications will be assessed and ranked by the members of the College Research Committee. In line with the University’s HDR scholarship policy assessment we will consider:

1. the applicant’s academic merit, research outputs, research experience, professional experience and other means of demonstrating their research preparedness;
2. the alignment of the applicant’s proposed research project with University, College and School research priorities;
3. the synergies between the applicant’s skill-set, the research project, and the proposed supervision team’s skill set and research objectives; and
4. the evaluation of the applicant contained within the referee reports.

Also in alignment with the University policy we will prioritise applicants who have not already completed a Doctoral degree or equivalent and have not previously held an Australian Government or University-funded Postgraduate Research Award. A further critical criteria for this round is that the student must be able to commence before December 31^st. Candidates unsuccessful in this round may be eligible to apply for the next round to be held in December. This will be our first scholarship allocation as a College. We hope that we will be able to work with the Graduate Research Office to iron out any bumps in the process so that we can be as quick as possible with making offers at the end of the year. Please work with interested candidates to help them prepare the best applications possible. For questions please contact our preadmissions support person Louise Trenerry at GraduateResearch.CHM@utas.edu.au and more information regarding the application process can be found on the University’s Research Degrees site.

More on Researcher Development

A number of Researcher Development Opportunities will be advertised and offered over the next couple of months. A Researcher Development Framework has been developed for our College with input from the Research Committee members.  Some of these sessions will be delivered by the Central University team and others will be by our College staff and Hub. Watch out for the announcements as we hope that as many as possible can take advantage of sessions being held on grant writing, impact and engagement, supervising students, leading teams and many more. There are also some really great online researcher development resources available that I encourage you to take advantage of. We recognise that researcher development looks different across our different units and so we will be doing our best to tailor our offerings.

Publication Strategy

Analysis of our ERA (Excellence in Research Australia) data points to a need to shift our publication strategy from one that focuses on the ‘quantity’ of publications to one that carefully considers ‘quality’ and impact. To help with this decision process our publication officers in the Hub, Louisa and Nicky, have developed a tip sheet. Also on publications, many people have asked about funding support for publication of research in Open Access Journals. A number of the units within the College already offer funding support towards this, and we will be developing a College wide approach. It’s hard to find a one size fits all approach to this issue, and there are often many reasons why Open Access may be the best place for certain work. Until we have consulted more broadly with our research community and developed an approach I would encourage researchers to have the conversation of ‘who will pay’ with their Head of School/Centre/Institute or Research Head well before the bill arrives!

Research Website Update

The CHM Research Website is in the final stages of development. Some of you may have been asked to share snippets of your research story to be added to the video content. Thanks to those who have contributed. We are hoping that the website will be a vehicle for sharing research news, advertising our research capability to our partners and external collaborators and a means for attracting high quality Higher degree research students.

Funding opportunities, rebuttals and other news from our Hub

The great news in research is that there are always plenty of grants to apply for! Further details can be found in the Research Hub Newsletter. In NHMRC news, the Project rebuttal stage is upon us! The UTAS NHMRC team (led by Che and Jo) have prepared a fact sheet for rebuttals and are running informal workshops to assist with the rebuttal process – please go along with questions or comments about your assessor comments, to discuss your approach, or to assist others. Also keep an eye out for an NHMRC roadshow run by myself, Jo, Che and the team – coming soon to a venue near you. This will be a summary and update on the new NHMRC schemes, as well as development activities. Please come along if at all possible, we all have a lot to learn about the new schemes and how we can best position our work to be successful.

As always please feel free to send questions and feedback to myself, Mark or the members of the College Research Committee – Professor Lisa Foa (School of Medicine), Associate Professor James Fell (School of Health Sciences), Associate Professor Anna King (Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre) and Professor James Sharman (Menzies Institute for Medical Research).

Happy Researching.

Tracey

Professor Tracey Dickson

Associate Dean Research, College of Health and Medicine