Promoting Child and Carer Wellbeing and Placement Stability in Kinship Care. Kinship care is the fastest growing out-of-home care placement in Australia, yet least supported. This project aims to implement and evaluate an attachment and trauma-based program for kinship carers, explore its suitability for cultural adaptation for Indigenous families and co-design practical resources to promote program sustainability and trauma-informed practice. This project is Australia’s first randomised trial o ....Promoting Child and Carer Wellbeing and Placement Stability in Kinship Care. Kinship care is the fastest growing out-of-home care placement in Australia, yet least supported. This project aims to implement and evaluate an attachment and trauma-based program for kinship carers, explore its suitability for cultural adaptation for Indigenous families and co-design practical resources to promote program sustainability and trauma-informed practice. This project is Australia’s first randomised trial of a tailored program for kinship carers and expects to generate vital knowledge on evidence-based support. Via implementing an innovative program for kinship carers in statutory child protection, this project should build capacity for research-based practice and benefit family wellbeing and placement outcomes in kinship care.Read moreRead less
Does emotion regulation flexibility improve functioning in refugees? This project aims identify the mechanisms by which low-intensity interventions improve functioning in refugees living in low-and-middle income countries (LMICs). Despite these interventions being implemented with thousands of refugees worldwide, many refugees fail to respond. This project will lead to significant advances in knowledge regarding how and for whom low intensity interventions work. Expected outcomes include enhance ....Does emotion regulation flexibility improve functioning in refugees? This project aims identify the mechanisms by which low-intensity interventions improve functioning in refugees living in low-and-middle income countries (LMICs). Despite these interventions being implemented with thousands of refugees worldwide, many refugees fail to respond. This project will lead to significant advances in knowledge regarding how and for whom low intensity interventions work. Expected outcomes include enhanced capacity of NGOs to deliver effective interventions to refugees living in LMICs, and to tailor their services to those who are at greatest risk of not responding. Benefits include improved functioning of refugees living in LMICs, and enhanced capacity of Australia to meet its international refugee obligations. Read moreRead less
Regulation of lung immune-epithelial networks sensing environmental change. This study aims to uncover how lung epithelial cells engage with immune cells and determine their cellular and molecular wiring to ensure homeostatic maintenance and essential repair processes of lung tissues. Maintenance of lung epithelial-immune networks is essential to maintain normal lung tissue structure and function, and to induce immune responses to protect against microbial challenges or inhaled potentially toxic ....Regulation of lung immune-epithelial networks sensing environmental change. This study aims to uncover how lung epithelial cells engage with immune cells and determine their cellular and molecular wiring to ensure homeostatic maintenance and essential repair processes of lung tissues. Maintenance of lung epithelial-immune networks is essential to maintain normal lung tissue structure and function, and to induce immune responses to protect against microbial challenges or inhaled potentially toxic substances. Understanding this molecular program of epithelial-immune cell-mediated sensing/repair will be essential to understand how tissue-repair processes can be driven in the lung, an organ critical for respiration and thus life.Read moreRead less
The production, use and effect of social work research. This project aims to reform social work research to improve the quality and effectiveness of human services. The human services industry is vital to many people’s quality of life, but lacks innovation and struggles to demonstrate its effectiveness. Crucially for social work, research expands thinking about how to respond to social disadvantage. This project intends to examine the scope and quality of Australian social work research in child ....The production, use and effect of social work research. This project aims to reform social work research to improve the quality and effectiveness of human services. The human services industry is vital to many people’s quality of life, but lacks innovation and struggles to demonstrate its effectiveness. Crucially for social work, research expands thinking about how to respond to social disadvantage. This project intends to examine the scope and quality of Australian social work research in child protection, disability services, and aged care; assess the use of this research to the human services sector and its effect on generating innovation; and develop strategies to advance the production, uptake, and effect of social work research.Read moreRead less
Understanding the impact of missing family on forcibly displaced people. This project aims to investigate the psychological and social effects of having missing family on forcibly displaced people settled in Australia. This world-first project enlists a longitudinal mixed-method approach to compare those with missing family to those whose connections have been restored on key outcomes and coping strategies. Project outcomes will enhance the ability of Australian Red Cross and the International C ....Understanding the impact of missing family on forcibly displaced people. This project aims to investigate the psychological and social effects of having missing family on forcibly displaced people settled in Australia. This world-first project enlists a longitudinal mixed-method approach to compare those with missing family to those whose connections have been restored on key outcomes and coping strategies. Project outcomes will enhance the ability of Australian Red Cross and the International Committee of the Red Cross to understand and support the needs of families of the missing. This should provide significant practice and policy benefits for Red Cross’ humanitarian work in restoring family links in Australia and worldwide.Read moreRead less
Every Day Matters: Reducing School Non-Attendance in Autistic Students. Autistic children miss one day a week of school, three times more than their peers. This significantly impacts their learning, wellbeing and later, their vocational outcomes. This project aims to identify the factors that put autistic children at increased risk of missing school and map the supports and interventions used to reduce school non-attendance. Expected outcomes include an autism-specific model of the how and why s ....Every Day Matters: Reducing School Non-Attendance in Autistic Students. Autistic children miss one day a week of school, three times more than their peers. This significantly impacts their learning, wellbeing and later, their vocational outcomes. This project aims to identify the factors that put autistic children at increased risk of missing school and map the supports and interventions used to reduce school non-attendance. Expected outcomes include an autism-specific model of the how and why school non-attendance is elevated for autistic students. It is anticipated that this model make the important step of enabling teachers and professionals to identify which autistic children are most at risk of absenteeism and select the best strategies to support a positive and beneficial return to school.Read moreRead less
High Predictive Performance Models via Semi-Parametric Survival Regression. This project will develop novel statistical models for high prediction performance. When applied to help doctor to treat patients, these models allow the users to include gene or other biomarkers for predicting effectiveness of a treatment. When applied to risk management in finance, these models are capable to include an organization's or individual's ongoing finance status to predict, for example, the probability of or ....High Predictive Performance Models via Semi-Parametric Survival Regression. This project will develop novel statistical models for high prediction performance. When applied to help doctor to treat patients, these models allow the users to include gene or other biomarkers for predicting effectiveness of a treatment. When applied to risk management in finance, these models are capable to include an organization's or individual's ongoing finance status to predict, for example, the probability of or time to loan default. Innovative computational methods will be developed for fitting these models. Compared to traditional prediction method, this approach allows greater flexibility while being superior in terms of statistical accuracy and bias. Extensive analyses of healthcare data from diverse fields will be undertaken.Read moreRead less
Communicating to promote engagement in using electronic medical records. This reflexive ethnographic and co-design project aims to examine how patient and family participation occurs with health professionals in using the electronic medical record within hospitals, especially for patients with complex needs. Its significance involves working with patients and families to consider how they could take part in decision making activities across transitions of care and influence health care activitie ....Communicating to promote engagement in using electronic medical records. This reflexive ethnographic and co-design project aims to examine how patient and family participation occurs with health professionals in using the electronic medical record within hospitals, especially for patients with complex needs. Its significance involves working with patients and families to consider how they could take part in decision making activities across transitions of care and influence health care activities. Outcomes are new knowledge and practices about how communication occurs with the electronic medical record and strategies adopted for effective engagement. Benefits are increased understanding of how and under what circumstances, engagement can take place in using the electronic medical record.Read moreRead less
Personalised Learning for Per-pixel Prediction Tasks in Image Analysis. AI-assisted image segmentation & synthesis are very challenging and usually require pixel-level labelling (per-pixel prediction) that is costly to obtain. The small amount of labels makes it difficult to train an “optimal” unified model for varied data as conventional methods did. This project aims to develop a new paradigm “personalised learning” to tackle this problem, where each image could be dealt with a model tailored ....Personalised Learning for Per-pixel Prediction Tasks in Image Analysis. AI-assisted image segmentation & synthesis are very challenging and usually require pixel-level labelling (per-pixel prediction) that is costly to obtain. The small amount of labels makes it difficult to train an “optimal” unified model for varied data as conventional methods did. This project aims to develop a new paradigm “personalised learning” to tackle this problem, where each image could be dealt with a model tailored to individual characteristics. The success of this project could significantly advance the fundamental research in image analysis. Expected outcomes include new knowledge and algorithms for image analysis, which could benefit fields like biology and archaeology, where labeled images are hard to attain and scarce.Read moreRead less
Investigating a new way in which diet impacts animal biology. This project aims to investigate the importance of a new way in which diet can alter animal biology. High fat or high sugar diets increase the binding of products of metabolism to chromosomes, which can completely alter the way that DNA is packaged and read. This project will use cell culture, rodent and fly models to identify the regions of the genome that are most affected by the new process. The project will also determine whether ....Investigating a new way in which diet impacts animal biology. This project aims to investigate the importance of a new way in which diet can alter animal biology. High fat or high sugar diets increase the binding of products of metabolism to chromosomes, which can completely alter the way that DNA is packaged and read. This project will use cell culture, rodent and fly models to identify the regions of the genome that are most affected by the new process. The project will also determine whether the cell is harmed, or in fact harnesses the process to control development or metabolism. This project has implications for our understanding of the ways in which genes interact with the environment especially in times of change.Read moreRead less