Strategic Investments in Research (STIR)

Aims to make major funded research programs more productive and extra competitive for awards and/or future renewal. The Fund aligns to the University’s Looking Ahead Strategic Plan 2020-2025 to ensure investments are supporting researchers in areas of key strategic capability and growth. The themes for investment will be focused on the University’s Engagement Priorities.

Provides funding for proof-of-concept work to pursue a new line of research or collaborative partnership to help research teams become competitive for external funding. The Fund aligns to the University’s Looking Ahead Strategic Plan 2020-2025 to ensure investments are supporting researchers in areas of key strategic capability and growth. The themes for investment will be focused on the University’s Engagement Priorities.

Provides support for strategic recruitment or retention of key researchers at the University of Newcastle. This opportunity supports the development of a package to attract or retain high performing researchers at the University of Newcastle. This includes the recruitment or retention of Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Council fellowship recipients.

To assemble the collective ‘intelligence’ important to the establishment of a ‘Living Lab’ in one of the four Engagement Priorities of the University of Newcastle Looking Ahead Strategic Plan 2020-2025.

This opportunity supports organised events that identify complementary research strengths and explore potential collaborations; develop high potential, innovative research ideas that require multiple disciplines; facilitate new and enhance existing collaborations among University researchers; generate ‘competitive intelligence’ to identify gaps in the current body of research, access future funding opportunities, and generate insights on next steps.

Opens August 2021

To provide funding for research equipment that cannot feasibly be acquired through national funding, and that supports cutting-edge infrastructure of critical mass. This fund will support equipment purchases of a collaborative nature that represent the needs of, and have an impact beyond, a single research group. Funding includes support for the acquisition, repair, replacement, or upgrade of critical infrastructure equipment and/or the purchase of new equipment that provides a new capability for advancing the research, scholarship and creative activity at the University.

To provide support for researchers to travel to present and facilitate engagement with their research as well as support for the dissemination of scholarly activity through traditional and non-traditional means (e.g., publication, performance, or exhibit) writing and/or creative work in fields where external funding is scarce, along with article processing charges (APCs) levied by peer-reviewed open access journals.

This fund provides a contribution towards travel expenses and may be used to fund expenses including, but not limited to, production of programs or other page charges, subscription fees, articles published in a journal, and materials needed for exhibit. Preference will be given to those outputs that can demonstrate a significant impact of the work on the field, the intended audience, and the quality or rank of the journal/show/series. Some documentation of the situation is required (e.g., invitation letter, page charge, description, etc.).

The support competitive applicants to leverage external competitive fellowships, or to fund salary gaps in partnership with Faculties where they exist i.e.: the pre-award application to external research fellowships and philanthropic opportunities to increase competitiveness or meet eligibility requirements for external schemes.

Many research fellowships (e.g., Australian Research Council (ARC)), research grants (e.g., Medical Research Future Fund, ARC, National Health and Medical Research Council), and philanthropic opportunities (e.g.: Ian Potter) require co-investment from the University in order to increase competitiveness or meeting eligibility requirements. Many awarded research fellowships will not provide for 100% of the salary costs of an academic. This opportunity provides a source of funding to support these applications.

The Summer Research Internships provide promising undergraduate and honours students the opportunity to participate in a small piece of research with a high performing research team.

The opportunity is designed to support and facilitate the research pipeline by encouraging and supporting students to gain valuable work- integrated-learning in a high performing research team at the University of Newcastle. Funds will be awarded to an Academic(s) who will recruit a current University of Newcastle student to work with their research team, and who will provide mentorship, research training, and supervision of the student over the course of the internship period. The alignment of the proposed research program with the Engagement Priorities of the University of Newcastle Looking Ahead Strategic Plan 2020-2025 will be considered.

Additional funds will be available to support special requests for research support made to the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research and Innovation. This fund supports request for research support, in a strategic area of importance or strength to the University, as per the Engagement Priorities of Looking Ahead Strategic Plan 2020-2025. As per negotiation with the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research and Innovation the request must not be better aligned with an existing research investment scheme or opportunity.