ITRI offers exciting new opportunities for research growth

By Alfred Deakin Professor Xungai Wang

During my time at Deakin University, I have seen a commendable growth in the University's research profile.

An important component of that is the work done at the Centre for Material and Fibre Innovation (CMFI), mostly housed in the Geelong Technology Precinct.

When CMFI was officially formed in 2006, Professor Peter Hodgson was the inaugural director and I was the deputy director. The Faculty of Science and Technology has provided very strong support for CMFI over the years.

It was a highly successful partnership as we brought in large research grants that supported many new researchers, and some of the researchers subsequently took up academic positions within the Faculty.

I watched with a mixture of pride and satisfaction as early career researchers joined us from all over the world then made names for themselves.

We all move now to the next step forward. The CMFI will continue to exist, but as a large centre within ITRI.

It is both an honour and a huge challenge to be heading up the new centre under the new structure now that Peter Hodgson has been appointed Director of Research for ITRI.

Peter and I have developed a powerful friendship as well as a wonderful research partnership since we came to Deakin a decade ago, recruited with the goal of changing the way the University’s research was perceived, particularly in technology and engineering.

Our colleague and friend, Professor Saeid Nahavandi, joined Deakin around the same time and has played a key part in this process. Saeid now heads the highly successful Centre for Intelligent Systems Research (CISR) within ITRI.

I see the partnership with Peter and Saeid continuing afforce in the future. We also expect the same sort of partnerships to form with the newly appointed senior researchers and the Executive Director of ITRI.

Having all this brilliant expertise and facilities under the one roof, so to speak, offers all sorts of synergies for our research and administration. It also provides even better opportunities for the multi-disciplinary research we have been promoting at Deakin for many years now. In fact, a key objective of setting up ITRI is to ensure the whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

In the old CMFI, we held our weekly research seminars – and played out table tennis tournaments - to learn what our colleagues were doing and to look to see how we could assist them. This is now happening ITRI-wide, so frank exchanges of research information and fresh ideas now happen amongst material and fibre scientists, the experts in haptics and robotics, and those in the biosciences from BioDeakin.

I thank all my friends and colleagues within ITRI for taking on the extra work and challenge associated with ensuring the smooth operation of the new Institute in the first year.

I reckon in the years that lie ahead, as we get more resources and a better understanding of what all the members of ITRI do, and how ITRI fits within the University’s overall structure and research strategy, our successes will continue.

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