Dear staff,
I am delighted to announce today that we have officially designated the UQ School of Pharmacy site adjoining the Princess Alexandra Hospital as the University’s fourth campus, to be known as ‘UQ Dutton Park’.
The decision to designate the site as an official campus was recently approved by the UQ Senate on the basis of the site’s growing strategic and operational significance to the University.
The new campus designation is also intended to publicly reinforce UQ’s role as an intrinsic partner in the nearby Boggo Road Innovation Precinct, which is home to a growing variety of R&D and innovation capacity across health, biomedical and environmental sciences.
This location (almost directly across the river from our St Lucia campus) has been an important UQ site since 2009, when the Pharmacy Australia Centre of Excellence (PACE) building was opened as a leading facility for pharmaceutical education and research. Today, the PACE building is home to the UQ School of Pharmacy, the Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences (QAEHS), a branch of the UQ library and UQ Health Care (Cornwall St Medical Centre).
In the years since PACE opened, the importance of that area to UQ has been amplified with the opening of the nearby Translational Research Institute (TRI) in 2013, which is now home to the Frazer Institute and the Mater Research Institute-UQ.
And we know that the site’s importance as a biomedical innovation hub will be bolstered in the coming years with the opening of the new Translational Manufacturing@TRI (TM@TRI) facility.
Naming the campus ‘UQ Dutton Park’ anticipates the completion of the Cross River Rail project and the adjacent Dutton Park station and is in line with the convention we have followed for St Lucia, Herston and Gatton.
In total, we have more than 300 UQ staff and 700 students currently based across these sites. In the short- to medium-term, we don’t expect there will be any significant changes for the staff at the newly designated campus. The campus designation will officially take effect from 1 January 2024, and I look forward to sharing more information about the formal transition in the coming month.
Recent grant recipients
I am also pleased to share that we’ve had some great success in recent research funding announcements.
Last Friday, Professor Gail Garvey and her team from the UQ School of Public Health secured almost $1 million from the MRFF’s Targeted Translation Research Accelerator (TTRA) initiative to pilot a healthcare model developed in consultation with First Nations peoples living with type 2 diabetes.
On Monday, we learned that UQ researchers had secured 39 awards, worth a total of $20.5 million, under the ARC 2024 Discovery Projects scheme. UQ was third in the nation, in terms of both number of awards and total funding secured.
And hot off the press today, we have been informed that 3 UQ applicants have been approved for funding support under the ARC’s 2024 Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) scheme. The successful bids were led by Professor David Fairlie, Dr Glen Harris and Professor Mehdi Mobli – and they secured combined funding of $3.34 million.
Also, further to the news I shared last week about 4 UQ projects receiving seed funding under Tranche 1 of the Australia’s Economic Accelerator (AEA) scheme, another 8 UQ-led projects have been awarded more than $1.5 million in Tranche 2 of the scheme. This seed funding will support collaboration with industry partners to progress research and technologies for the benefit of the resources, agriculture, forestry, and fisheries sectors.
Congratulations to all of the successful applicants – and I wish you every success with your projects.
Celebrating our alumni
Last Thursday night, we hosted the annual ‘Courting the Greats’ event – a celebration of the achievements and impact of the remarkable individuals who were named as UQ Alumni Award winners in 2023.
Once again, it was a brilliant occasion – and really uplifting to hear our alumni talk about the formative impact that studying at UQ had on their lives and their careers. I’d like to convey my congratulations to all of the Award recipients, including the 2023 Alumnus of the Year, Professor George Mellick.
And speaking of high-achieving alumni, congratulations to Jeremy Hunt who has been named as Queensland’s Rhodes Scholar for 2024. Jeremy completed a Bachelor of Science at UQ in 2019 and is currently completing his final year of studies for a Doctor of Medicine at UQ. He will use his Rhodes Scholarship to study public policy and digital health at the University of Oxford.
Finally, I just want to highlight that Universities Australia is currently accepting entries for the Shaping Australia Awards, which celebrate the contributions that people working within universities make to Australia and the lives of Australians. Entries are open until Monday 20 November.
I hope you enjoy the rest of the week.
Best wishes,
Debbie
