New research to drive advances in neonatal health, architecture, technology, schools and desalination

04 January 2022

UniSA has been awarded $2.5 million for ARC Discovery projects to start in 2022.

World-leading advances in measuring fetal blood flow, new virtual reality tools to foster innovative architecture, and a better understanding of chatbot technologies will be the focus of three UniSA research projects starting in 2022.

The projects are among seven successful UniSA Discovery Grants announced in late December by the Federal Government, totalling $3 million.

Details of the five-year projects are:

Professor Janna Morrison will lead a $686,263 project to measure blood flow from the umbilical cord to the fetal brain to understand how changes in oxygen delivery affect brain metabolism.
Professor Lester Rigney will lead a $367,168 study to better understand cultural diversity in schools so that curriculums can be adapted to reduce inequality.
Associate Professor Haolan Xu will lead a $405,000 project to develop a solar-thermal desalination system to simultaneously produce clean water and generate electricity.
Professor Anthony Elliott will use his $423,799 grant to investigate how chatbot technologies can improve the retail and services sector and benefit the economy and society more generally.
Professor Jun Ma will lead a $210,000 project to develop nanomaterials encased in elastomers to improve composite manufacturing, particularly underwater monitoring of infrastructure and personalised health monitoring.
Professor Bruce Thomas will lead a $455,000 project to create new virtual reality tools to support free-form architectural concepts known as parametric design. Parametric tools are an emerging design technology but currently available only on traditional desktop computers. This project will allow designers to use VR instead.
Professor John Hayball will collaborate on a $529,846 project led by Professor Krasimir Vasilev (Flinders University) to better understand how surface nanotopography affects inflammatory responses. Their findings are expected to provide a breakthrough in the next generation of biomaterials.