This Hallmark Research Initiative is led by the Australian Laboratory for Emerging Contaminants (ALEC) at the University of Melbourne, and is bringing together a diverse group of researchers to investigate the societal impacts of microplastics and per/poly-fluoroalkyl substances in everyday life (so called “forever chemicals”). The Melbourne eResearch Group are working with the ALEC team, the departments of population health, and maths/statistics to develop a unified data dictionary of PFAS databases, in support of developing a sustainable Australasian Biomonitoring Platform.

The T1DNSP project is a collaboration with the University of Sydney. It focuses on supporting a clinical trial comparing 3 different screening models across Australia for feasibility, acceptability & cost-effectiveness of patients at risk of type-1 diabetes. One model is a heelprick genetic risk score in newborns with a follow-up for high risk kids at 1y. The 2nd model is a saliva genetic risk score in infants (~6months old) with a follow-up for high risk kids at 1y. The 3rd model is a dried bloodspot test in 2-3yo & 5-6yo. Each model will be implemented in a different geographical area across Australia. The project aims to screen ~12,500 kids, with follow-up of ~1200 kids. Outcomes will include screening results, uptake & recall rates, process evaluation, costs, psychological impact etc.

The ASPIRE project focuses on establishing a national spinal registry to explore the use of spinal implants across Australia. This project is a collaboration with St Vincent’s hospital, Musculoskeletal Health Australia (https://muscha.org), Medical Technology Association of Australia https://www.mtaa.org.au, Australian Orthopedic Association https://aoa.org.au/, Spine Society of Australia https://www.spinesociety.org.au/, Neurosurgical Society of Australia https://www.nsa.org.au/, and many private hospitals and insurers. The project builds upon the previous Australian Spine Registry (https://www.spineregistry.org.au/).

This project is a collaboration with Western Health and other hospitals. It focuses on optimised use of steam sterilisers in hospitals. These sterilisers are huge consumers of energy, yet the targeted and coordinated use of sterilisers remains under-explored.

This project is a collaboration with researchers in the Centre for Health, Exercise and Sports Medicine (https://healthsciences.unimelb.edu.au/departments/physiotherapy/chesm) in the Department of Physiotherapy at The University of Melbourne. The focus of the KneeCare project is to develop a mobile application that can help individuals with their weight loss, where the individuals suffer from osteoarthritis.

Non-invasive ventilation (NIV) is a critical support for people with Motorneurone Disease (MND). An issue that occurs frequently with such ventilators is a concept called Patient Ventilator Asynchrony (PVA) – this is when the ventilator falls out of sync with a patient’s breathing pattern, effectively causing a mismatch between the breathing efforts of a patient and breath delivery by the ventilator. As most NIV happens during sleep, these mismatches frequently wake the patient up, which has an outsize impact on their quality of life, and therefore life expectancy. Optimising ventilator settings to prevent this requires time-intensive manual analysis by highly skilled clinical specialists. This is the focus of the PVA project.

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in many application areas. The SkyOwl platform is focused on using LLMs to help in training air pilots. Through LLMs, realistic interactions that would typically occur between pilots, control tower and indeed other pilots can be simulated to assess how trainee pilots deal with particular situations.

This project focuses on developing and delivering a large Cloud-based data lake for a diverse collection of data sets related to potential chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks from state and non-state based actors. This data lake will then use advanced AI to explore how advances in such technologies can be used to extract further insights from the data to inform what-if case studies that are to be dealt with by defence.

This project focuses on the application of AI for surgical interventions. Leveraging state of the art neural networks, the goal of the project is to identify urological organs, surgical devices, e.g. clips, scalpel, and ultimately be able to identify optimal surgery procedures. This is a collaboration with the Department of Surgery at The University of Melbourne.

The PhD-Match system is designed to help university students discover potential research supervisors who align with their academic interests and research goals. This can be used for guidance, collaboration, or simply a starting point for a student’s research journey.