Congratulations to nine Centre Researchers awarded funding through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects Scheme.  The nine MACSYS researchers are named in a total of nine different projects. Centre Director Trevor Lithgow, Deputy Director Jennifer Flegg, and Chief Investigator Wenjie Zhang are each named as part of two different Discovery Projects.

Here are a list of the funded projects that involve Centre Researchers, followed by grant funding amount:

• Evolutionary rewiring and controlled remodelling of bacterial cell surfaces – Prof Trevor Lithgow ($1,106,912)
• Hidden in plain sight: an investigation into telomere phage biology – Prof Trevor Lithgow ($901,450)
• Universal multi-scale population modelling with applications to biology – Prof Jennifer Flegg  ($607,594)
  • Collaborators: Dr Mark Flegg; Dr Rebecca Chisholm
• Harnessing the Holobiont: Can We Evolve Microbes to Influence Their Hosts? – Prof Mike McDonald, Chief Investigator (Monash) ($652,206)
  • Collaborators:  Associate Professor Vanessa Wong, Dr Harsh Raman
• Efficient Bayesian analysis by exploiting fast approximate models – Prof Chris Drovandi, Chief Investigator (QUT) and Dr David Warne, Associate Investigator (QUT) ($542,799)
  • Collaborators:  Dr Leah South; Assoc Prof David Nott; Assoc Prof Ben Lambert
• Advancing Data Quality Management with Graph-Enhanced Foundation Models – Prof Wenjie Zhang, Chief Investigator (UNSW) ($735,911)
  • Collaborator:  Dr Xiaoyang Wang
• Embracing the Standard: Scalable Subgraph Search by Graph Query Language – Prof Wenjie Zhang ($590,526)
  • Collaborators: Prof Lu Qin, Dr Dong Wen
• Bridging biological boundaries: modelling to explore the role of interfaces – Assoc Prof James Osborne and Dr Stuart Johnston, Associate Investigators (Univ of Melbourne), Prof Jennifer Flegg ($683,466)
  • Collaborators: Dr Yohan Davit, Dr Saskia Freytag
• Health, Biological Fitness and Environmental Diversity – Prof Charles Pence, Associate Investigator ($600,146)
  • Collaborators: Dr Pierrick Bourrat, Prof David Raubenheimer, Emeritus Prof Paul Griffiths, Emeritus Prof Cynthia Beall

Feature image:

• Top row: Trevor Lithgow, Jennifer Flegg, Mike McDonald
• Middle row:  Chris Drovandi, Wenjie Zhang, David Warne
• Bottom row:  Stuart Johnston, James Osborne, Charles Pence