La Trobe University researchers have been awarded almost $7 million in Australian Research Council funding to pursue research addressing challenges ranging from climate change to drug-related harm and antimicrobial resistance.
Six researchers have been awarded a total of $6,972,636 through the Australian Research Council's 2026 Future Fellowships scheme.
Future Fellowships provide four-year fellowships to outstanding mid-career researchers to undertake high-quality research in areas of national and international benefit.
The funded projects seek to explore topics such as Australia's gestural lexicon, the integrity of the nation's institutes and biodiversity resilience.
La Trobe University Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Innovation Professor Chris Pakes said the outcomes reflected the quality and breadth of research being undertaken across the University.
"This is a strong endorsement of the calibre of our researchers and the importance of the issues they are addressing," Professor Pakes said.
"These fellowships give outstanding researchers the time and support to pursue ambitious research with the potential to make a lasting contribution. We are immensely proud of these six researchers who are tackling some of the most pressing challenges facing society."
Funded projects
Dr Adrian Farrugia, School of Psychology and Public Health
$1,166,977
This project aims to develop an innovative approach that will reduce the harm related to young Australians' drug use. It is expected to generate urgently needed new knowledge on the relationship between the priorities that currently guide harm-reduction responses and young people's own concerns about and experiences of drug harms. Through a collaborative process involving novel theory, sophisticated methods and consultation with experts, service providers and young people, the project intends to produce new responses that engage directly with young people's perspectives, making them more relevant and effective.
Dr Ruth Gamble, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
$1,154,964
The Asia-Australian Monsoon Zone is home to half the world's population, a growing majority of carbon emissions and an increasingly erratic climate. Its shift to renewables is vital but complex. To understand this challenge, this project aims to produce the first study of the zone's 20th century energy transitions. It expects to show how historical forces shaped interconnected energetic systems - climate, fuel, food-labour, plantations, industries - creating unequal socio-ecological impacts that hinder renewable adoption.
Dr Lauren Gawne, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
$1,153,709
This project aims to document Australia's national ways of gesturing, providing the first detailed documentation of the multimodal features of Australian English. This will focus on gestures that can be used without speech (emblems). This project will incorporate our gestural history and the rich influence of diverse communities on this gestural lexicon, including migrant Australians, regional Australians and Auslan signers.
Professor Andrea Carson, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
$1,328,959
The project aims to address the escalating global threat that electoral misinformation poses to public trust, democratic legitimacy and social cohesion using innovative survey experiments to test countermeasures to reduce misinformation belief and strengthen democratic resilience, including the novel use of AI chatbots. It will deliver the first global systematic study assessing effective ways election authorities can fight election misinformation and distrust.
Dr Katherine Harrisson, School of Agriculture, Biomedicine and Environment
$1,002,459
This project aims to increase the uptake of genetic rescue in conservation by addressing uncertainties around the long-term impacts of mixing divergent species on key evolutionary processes linked to viability. This project expects to advance knowledge of how hybridisation shapes persistence over many generations using whole genomes, population viability models and historical samples from a rare natural experiment.
Dr Wenyi Li, School of Agriculture, Biomedicine and Environment
$1,165,568
This project aims to develop new and efficient methods for the rapid molecular design of membrane-active peptides that can target specific bacterial membranes. These methods are expected to overcome the challenges of high costs of production, time-consuming synthesis, instability, and determining membrane activity, which have limited their development to date. This novel approach is expected to create peptides that target specific membranes in various bacteria.
