UC receives over $1m in new research grants

Ed O'Daly and Claudia Doman

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2 November 2011: The role of technology in maintaining work-life balance and the factors keeping older Australians out of the workforce will be investigated in two of the new University of Canberra research projects to win funding yesterday.

A total of four prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC) grants worth more than a million dollars were awarded to the University yesterday.

Dr Sergey Sergeev leads one of the four UC research projects awarded ARC grants

John Campbell, associate dean of research of the Faculty of Information Sciences and Engineering, received $210,000 to lead a project entitled Productivity and work-life balance in technology-enabled virtual work environments.

This ARC Discovery grant project will help understand the impact of technology on work-life balance.

Professor Campbell said at times, professionals could find that their work and home lives were in conflict – with work interrupting family time or personal responsibilities disrupting the working day.

“Sometimes the very technologies designed to improve our work-life balance can do exactly the opposite,” Professor Campbell said. “This project is about finding ways to ensure technology is a help and not a hindrance in maintaining a healthy balance.”

Professor Campbell and his team will develop guidelines to improve organisational and individual outcomes for professional knowledge workers who use technology extensively in their interactions with others.

Baby boomers in the workforce

Alan Duncan, director of the University’s National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM), will lead a research team to investigate how baby boomers can be excluded from the workforce in the project: Understanding and preventing workforce vulnerabilities in mid-life and beyond.

Thanks to $374,823 of ARC 'Linkage' funding in the next three years, Professor Duncan and his colleagues will study involuntary non-participation and under-participation in the labour market by mid-life Australians.

The team for this collaborative venture includes partners from the University of Melbourne, the Brotherhood of St Laurence and Jobs Australia.

“The social impacts of premature labour force withdrawal are substantial for mature age Australians, and we are genuinely excited that the ARC has given us an opportunity to explore such a critical social and economic policy issue,” Professor Duncan said.

“Findings will provide crucial information about trajectories and experiences which can be used to design more effective employment policies, programs and services for this vulnerable cohort”.

The team will use quantitative and qualitative approaches to understand pathways and outcomes so as to inform policy and practice responses.

Mathematics and IT outsourcing research also awarded grants

Complex mathematics with the potential to unlock the mysteries of the quantum realm is the focus of Sergey Sergeev’s successful bid.

The Moscow-born mathematician and his research team will be able to deepen our understanding of cross-relations between geometry and integrable systems.

Dr Sergeev and his team were awarded $315,000 in ARC Discovery funding to develop advanced mathematical methods to analyse a large set of classical integrable systems.

“We believe that elementary quantum particles – such as the electron, proton and neutron—are solutions to quantum equations,” Dr Sergeev said. “Unfortunately, we don’t know these equations and this research is an attempt to find out what they are.”

He explained, however, that once the solutions to the equations are found, it’s hard to foresee their application.

“When Albert Einstein proposed his famous equation of E=mc² in 1905, he never imagined it would lead to the atomic bomb,” Dr Sergeev said.

“This grant will help us expand our research capacity and continue investigating fundamental mathematics.”

Byron Keating from the Faculty of Business and Government will lead a project to improve IT outsourcing decisions.

Professor Keating and his colleagues were awarded $255,000 in ARC 'Discovery' funding for their project: The impact of strategic alignment on IT outsourcing success in a complex service setting.

This research will improve the performance of Australian industry by investigating how strategically well aligned IT outsourcing investments can lead to improved performance and greater competitive advantage.