Discovery Projects: where the money goes

There’s good news for 660 research teams in yesterday’s Discovery Projects announcement – but with a 23 per cent success rate there’s bad news for 2200 more

How much money: The Australian Research Council reports the government will provide $284m of the $387m requested by successful bids. (Funding all applications would have cost the Commonwealth $1.64bn).

Where the money went: For grant-share it was pretty much the Group of Eight, as usual. Monash Uni (83), UNSW (72), Uni Melbourne (65), Uni Queensland (62) Uni Sydney (58), ANU (55), Uni Adelaide (27) and UWA (27).

Macquarie U was the only other university winning more than 20 grants, with 23.

The ATN did distantly ok, with UTS (20) RMIT (17), Uni SA (five) and Curtin U (11).

Most bang for application buck: The success rate for big-winners (say 20 grants) is; ANU 33 per cent, Uni Queensland 25 per cent, Monash U 27 per cent, UNSW 24 per cent, Uni Sydney 24 per cent, UWA 24 per cent, Macquarie U 22 per cent, Uni Adelaide 22 per cent, Uni Melbourne 21 per cent, UTS 20 per cent.

Some disciplines did well: Biological science research had over 100 grants and engineering just under. ICT people picked up 50.

Others didn’t: It was a bad outcome for education – on the day bad PISA results were all over the media, researchers scored just two grants.


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