University of Melbourne academics Professor Ary Hoffmann and Professor Paul Mulvaney were among 15 of Australia’s best researchers that were awarded the Fellowships worth around $3.1 million each.

The Fellowships are designed to support team-based research tackling urgent and complex issues. Each Fellow will lead a team of postdoctoral and postgraduate researchers in a project delivering significant benefits to Australia and the wider world.

Professor Hoffmann works in the Departments of Genetics and Zoology and is an international authority on environmental stress monitoring, controlling pests and predicting how species will respond to climate change. His group’s project, based at the Bio21 Institute, will focus on maintaining environmental health under the combined stresses of climate change and human population pressures.

“The Fellowship will help us to develop guidelines for sustainable agricultural production as well as biodiversity protection in threatened environments like the Australian Alps and freshwater ecosystems.”

He says insects and other invertebrates perform essential services like pollination, pest control and soil turnover, and provide food for wildlife.

“These services are under threat, and ways of maintaining them and protecting biodiversity need to be developed.”

“In order to safeguard environmental services, we will identify the genetic and evolutionary mechanisms that insects use to deal with environmental changes and the processes that promote evolutionary resilience,” he says.

Professor Mulvaney from the School of Chemistry and Bio21 Institute, and co-director of the University’s Centre for Nanoscience and Technology, is world-renowned for his work in nanotechnology.

Professor Mulvaney and his group will explore the practical limits for plasmonics: the manipulation of light using metal nanostructures. In particular, the expected outcomes include the optical detection of single electrons, the detection and monitoring of chemical reactions one molecule at a time, and demonstration of light-driven logic gates.

Plasmonic systems will enable scientists to observe chemical reactions at the single molecule level, which will open up important applications in biosensing and environmental monitoring, says Professor Mulvaney.

"This ARC Fellowship will ensure Australia is at the forefront of one of the most exciting new fields of nanotechnology.”

Professor Peter Rathjen, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Melbourne says the fellowships acknowledge the outstanding quality of Professor Hoffmann and Professor Mulvaney’s research programs and their contribution to the store of human knowledge.

“We are privileged to have such high-quality researchers at the University whose work will deliver substantial benefits to society.”