Vision splendid for Deakin Research
To illustrate his vision for research at Deakin University Professor David Stokes points not to a whiteboard or a power point presentation, but rather to a photo of a case of beautifully preserved butterflies of many shapes and sizes.
“Look,
it is a very exciting time to be part of the great growth spurt that research
is undergoing at Deakin,” the University’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor
research smiles.
“We’ve come a long way in the 30 or so years since our university came into existence and particularly over the past 10 years when Deakin has emerged as a significant player in research Australia and overseas. But it is what lies ahead that will make us even more attractive. “
And this is where his butterflies come in.
“What I would like to see, and what the rest of the university wants to see, is a research framework built around three iconic research colleges,” Professor Stokes says.
“One of these would be something like the Frontier Science and Technology Research College, and another would take in Health and Well-being, an area in which we already do so well, particularly on our Burwood Campus in Melbourne.
“The third Research College would encompass the arts, sociology and business and law and be called something like Strengthening Australia Society Research College. This College would be home to the Alfred Deakin Institute, given his great interest in these matters, especially while Prime Minister of Australia.
“Getting the names just right is all part of a fine-tuning program that we are all engaged in at the moment, but the concept of the three major colleges is already well entrenched in everyone’s thinking at Deakin.”
“Within these colleges we could have something like 20-25 research clusters and a few iconic research institutes. Butterflies come in many sizes and shapes, just like these research clusters would, but in the end, they are all butterflies.
“I have been using a few diagrams to illustrate to just what I have in mind, and I use the picture of a collection of butterflies.
“The wonderful thing is when I show the butterflies to our researchers and our administrators, they see the framework and where their fields of work fit into the framework and they are becoming increasingly enthusiastic about being part of this structure.
“So we have this great unity of purpose emerging about where our research should be going.
“It will be multi-disciplinary, we will work across the faculty borders to come up with solutions to problems that industry or the community is facing.
“A very important word in all this is partnerships. We will have partnerships within the university so that engineers can work easily with chemists, or lawyers with nutritionists.
“The problem of obesity can’t be solved within one faculty or one laboratory. It requires good research about what we eat, but as Professor Boyd Swinburn and his colleagues point out, it will also require legislative force, and that’s where the lawyers come in.
“At Deakin, these people are already working together.
“We want partnerships, too, with industry. That’s why we are so excited about this latest development at the Geelong Technology Precinct, and the Proof of Concept space we are building.
“It’s one thing to have an idea, but for industry and our scientists to work together under the one roof, collaborating openly on a daily basis, until the idea is not just proven, but ready for commercialisation, now that’s something really important.
“And that’s what we will have now thanks to the $6 million from the State Government through the Regional Infrastructure Development Fund (RIDF) and $7 million that Deakin has put in to expand the GTP.
“One point I want to make that the GTP is not the building that exists at the moment, but potentially the whole 360 hectares of land on the Geelong Campus at Waurn Ponds where we are creating what we call
“The Silicon Valley of the Southern Hemisphere”. We see this as a more than achievable goal.
“The silicon valley in San Francisco was built around the computer industry. Ours will be built around the new generations of manufacturing industries via the unification of our strengths in biosciences, advanced materials and intelligent systems.
“Geelong and the GTP will be central to this but our other campuses at Burwood and Warrnambool will also have a role.
“That is another of the beauties of Deakin, we are a regional university, but we do have a major metropolitan presence, so we can understand the needs of people in rural Australia as well as those in the cities.
“The Deakin Commitment to regional Australia is something so evident in our medical school which is also new to the Waurn Ponds campus.
“It will address the need to have more doctors in rural Australia, while also adding enormously to the sorts of things we can do in medical research.
“Something else that is very exciting about the way our research is growing nationally and internationally is what we are calling DIRI, the Deakin India Research Institute.
“The Indians have taken a look at our research model that says we will work with industries, the corporate sector, government and the general community, and they like it.
“There will be lots of synergies between Australia and India, just as Alfred Deakin predicted in the 1890s when he wrote his book, Irrigated India.
“We will have Indian researchers come to Deakin, and Deakin researchers going to India, further enhancing the global feel of the university and especially the GTP.
“Increasingly we are able to attract some of the best minds from around the world because they like the way we do our research, because they like the multi-national feel of the place and because of the lifestyle.
“Geelong is close to some of the best beaches in Australia, in many cases our researchers can live no more than a 10-minute walk from the campus.
“While it is a regional city, Geelong has everything you would find in a major capital city, including a number of world famous schools, a hospital that is itself a leading research institution and so on.
“So I guess you might say when I put all these things together, I put all the butterflies on the same page, I get tremendously excited about what lies ahead for Deakin in research.
“Even better, my colleagues are all feeling the same.
“In the past 10 years we have got better in the way we do research at Deakin. In the next 10 years we will improve on that many times over again.”