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Volume 7, Edition 2 – March 2011 |
ATN in PROFILE
The ATN has announced a new Doctoral Training Centre designed to help address Australia’s need for researchers who are both engaged with industry and who possess the associated skills to be effective and productive beyond conducting research itself. It is calling for its brightest maths PhD candidates to signal their interest in being involved in the centre, intended to allow PhDs to undertake research programs and engage with industry from the very beginning of their degree.
Presenting at the 2011 ATN Symposium, Lesley Thompson, Director: Research Base for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, UK (EPSRC), highlighted the importance of ensuring PhD quality, embedding impact, and the benefits realised by Doctoral Training Centres in an increasingly limited budget environment.
The ATN has applauded the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) 2010 exercise for highlighting the success of our most research‐intensive universities, as well as drawing attention to how many of Australia’s younger universities are performing at or well above world class levels in a range of key discipline areas. ERA outcomes can give Australia confidence that there is a cohort of next-generation research intensive universities that will build and nurture capacity in the national research and innovation system.
With ERA results showing both a group of long-established, research-intensive institutions and a strong, upcoming group of young, ‘Market Challenger’ universities with growing research capacity, the big question now becomes what we now do with the ERA results, how they will affect research funding priorities and what the future of Australia's research and innovation sector will look like.
While the ATN has welcomed ERA and the way that it has highlighted Australia’s research excellence, it strongly believes that there are important aspects of Australian research that are not fully encapsulated by ERA. As such, the ATN proposes a new measure be introduced to bridge that gap.
The ATN congratulates Professor Linda Kristjanson, Deputy Vice‐Chancellor, Research and Development at Curtin University, who has recently been announced the new Vice‐Chancellor of Swinburne University of Technology.
All ATN universities have been awareded the EOWA Employer of Choice for Women citation in the 2011 round. This award is given to organisations who have demonstrated their commitment to gender equality in the workplace by meeting rigorous criteria across seven different aspects of employment.