2. Award for Research Engagement and Impact

This award recognises excellence by researchers who have achieved, or are currently achieving, outstanding economic and/or societal impacts.

The Winners are: Associate Professor Alexandr Simonov (School of Chemistry) and Associate Professor Carly Cook (School of Biological Sciences)

The Nominees are:

Associate Professor Carly Cook, School of Biological Sciences

Associate Professor Carly Cook’s research focuses on evidence-based conservation and developing decision support tools to help environmental managers integrate the best available science into conservation decisions. Throughout her career, Carly has worked closely with environmental managers to identify where decision-support tools could have the greatest impact. Her research has developed robust approaches to evaluate the design and management of protected areas, now used across Australia and internationally. She has revealed gaps in how environmental managers define conservation success and their failure to link monitoring data to management action. Developing tools that address these critical challenges, her research supports managers set clear criteria for success and determine when and how to act in response to negative outcomes. These tools are used by Australian and New Zealand governments and have been adopted by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to identify global examples of best practice in protected areas.

Associate Professor Alexandr Simonov, School of Chemistry

Associate Professor Simonov is a current ARC Future Fellow specialising in electrochemistry and photo/electrocatalysis. He has been working at the Monash School of Chemistry since 2012 as a postdoctoral fellow (2012-2015), senior research fellow (2015-2018), lecturer (2018-2020), and senior lecturer (2021-present). His major research ambition is to design effective ways to generate and use renewable electricity for the sustainable energy and chemistry technologies that directly support the Monash Impact 2030 initiative and are of key strategic importance to Australia. Associate Professor Simonov is internationally renowned for his innovations in the development of methods for the generation of green hydrogen and ammonia from renewables, some of which are currently being translated into practical processes through collaborations with industry partners including Woodside Inc, Wesfarmers, Fortescue Future Industries and Energys P/L. In 2021, he co-founded, together with Professor Doug MacFarlane, a spin-out company Jupiter Ionics P/L to commercialise sustainable ammonia production technologies developed under their leadership.

Professor Adeline Su Yien Ting, School of Science, Malaysia

Professor Ting’s research is in applied microbiology. Her four grants by MOHE supported initial fundamental research studies which produced significant results for industry engagement. This led to partnership with the agroindustry through three industry grants which centred on new transformative ideas for oil palm research. Adeline focussed on bridging the knowledge gap in several key areas; the new role of suppressive soil to control oil palm disease (2018-2024), discovering new biomarkers via metabolomic studies for pathogen-plant-soil interactions (2021-2023), and in exploring the impact of microbial consortium on oil palm (2022-2028). These collaborations also integrate omics technology into an otherwise conventional field, to reveal greater insights of microbial-plant-soil interaction. New concepts are established that are aimed at transforming the conventional oil palm practices. This partnership has led to the training of one PhD student (staff from industry), one Post-Doctoral Researcher, and a total of three publications to date.