The National Health and Medical Research Council announced $526m in new funding yesterday rounding out a big year for the usual research institutions.

Yesterday’s grants bring total competitive grant funding for the year to $734m out of a $783m total, (and that’s without separately allocated Medical Research Future Fund money).

The year’s big winners were pretty much the usual big winners. UniMelb and Monash U secure $103m each in project grants, followed by UNSW ($82m), Uni Queensland ($57m) and Uni Sydney ($52m).

It was also a good year for the University of Newcastle, winning $23m, which compared strongly to Uni Adelaide’s and $ UWA’s $21m each.

In the Institute sector Murdoch Children’s received $34m and Walter and Eliza Hall $30m.

The success rates for competitive grants across the year was 19.5 per cent. Big institutions, making 50 or more applications that did well are Deakin U (67 applications 23.9 per cent successful), Monash U (673 and 21.5 per cent), Murdoch Children’s Institute (132 and 31 per cent), UNSW (388 and 23.2 per cent), Uni Queensland (433 and 20.6 per cent), Uni SA (100 and 20 per cent) and Walter and Eliza Hall (126 and 31 per cent).

Overall year success rates for projects with female chief investigators (19.4 per cent) and male Cis (19.7 per cent) were in-line but the gender skew in applications ensures that 110 more projects led by blokes got up (532 to 423).