Funding boost for international research partnerships

The Australian government has announced it will provide $3.5 million for projects to commence in 2008 under the Australian Research Council's (ARC) Linkage International scheme.

"The Linkage International scheme provides support to researchers to participate in and build international research networks and collaborations that will help them advance their expertise and enhance Australia's standing in the international research community," said the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop.

"In this round, the government is funding researchers to work in a diverse range of disciplines with leading experts in the United States of America, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, China, South Korea, Sweden, Austria, France, India and Italy."

Australian researchers will work with international researchers to:

• collect new data on magnetic storms in the earth's magnetosphere to understand how they disrupt and damage electronic systems (The University of Newcastle with University of California and the US National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration).
• produce very stable frequencies in the underused, extremely high frequency band — important for space communications and navigation technology — to create higher bandwidths and faster transmission rates (The University of Western Australia with University of Limoges, France).
• investigate how scrapie, a disease of sheep similar to mad cow disease, reaches the nervous system of sheep and develop strategies to combat future outbreaks (The University of Melbourne with University of Bologna, Italy).
• study limitations to the peripheral vision of the eye, particularly as a result of refractive surgical intervention, to improve detection and diagnosis of ophthalmic disease (Queensland University of Technology with The University of Manchester, UK).
• refine predictive models of climate change to assess the likely impact on the sustainability of Australia's forests (University of Western Sydney with Griffith University and The Macaulay Institute, Scotland).
• develop satellite remote sensing techniques to find and map archaeological sites such as the World Heritage sites at Angkor, Cambodia (The University of Sydney with the University of Venice, Italy).