MUSSE

Pictured left to right: Professor Frank Larkins, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Global Relations), Professor Glyn Davis, Vice-Chancellor, Ms Helen Hayes, Director Knowledge Transfer, and Mr Ian Renard, Chancellor, at the Vice-Chancellor’s Knowledge Transfer Awards and Symposium held at the Melbourne Law School on Thursday 25 September.

By Genevieve Costigan

Adolescents, AFL players and a rural community are among the groups benefiting from projects awarded Excellence Awards in the second year of the Vice-Chancellor’s Knowledge Transfer Awards.

Five award-winning knowledge transfer projects were presented to a large audience at the Vice-Chancellor’s Knowledge Transfer Awards and Symposium held at the Melbourne Law School on Thursday 25 September.

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Glyn Davis, presented the 2008 Knowledge Transfer Excellence Awards which celebrate the diversity and depth of knowledge transfer at the University.

The five Excellence Award winners were Associate Professor Erica Frydenberg for her programs to help adolescents develop resilience and coping skills, Associate Professor John Fitzgerald for his work with the AFL and the AFL Players’ Association to develop a national AFL alcohol policy, Professor Stephen O’Leary for the development of virtual reality simulation for ear surgery, Mr Jason Benjamin and Mr Michael Piggot for the Howship project of photographs of Benalla, and Associate Professor Marimuthu Palaniswami for the monitoring of the Great Barrier Reef using distributed sensor networks.

In his opening address, Professor Davis said the awards event recognises that knowledge transfer sits properly and appropriately alongside teaching and learning and research as a core mission of an institution like the University of Melbourne. “It’s about what brings people to this institution and keeps them here.”

Director of Knowledge Transfer Ms Helen Hayes said: “The awards present an opportunity for the University to celebrate some of the wonderful knowledge transfer projects we are involved in. These projects also work very well as examples which demonstrate how to conduct knowledge transfer. They provide inspiration for others.”

During the project partner panel discussion at the awards event, Dr Ian Atkinson from Queensland Cyberinfrastructure Foundation, a partner in the Excellence Award–winning project Monitoring the Great Barrier Reef Using Distributed Sensor Networks, said that knowledge transfer recognised the third pillar of what universities do.

“I’ve been telling a number of people in different universities that I was coming down to this event, and they were all kind of gobsmacked, and I’ve been showing people the Knowledge Transfer website and there are lots of deans and deputy vice-chancellors looking over it at the moment in Queensland… it’s just a wonderful idea,” he said.

“It’s something that really isn’t recognised in most universities, I suspect. It’s recognised when it becomes a big successful project, but not in this initial genesis phase, and I think that’s where it’s enormously valuable – in fact I think the rest of the sector has a lot to learn from this,” Dr Atkinson said.

After the presentation of the excellence awards, commendations and project grants, three parallel sessions were held which examined various aspects of knowledge transfer.

The session Going Global: International Partnerships looked at some of the practical considerations in establishing knowledge transfer projects with international partners. Another session examined some of the opportunities and practical considerations in working with Indigenous communities, and the largest session revolved around strategies for building research and teaching programs with partners.

Dr Pippa Grange from the AFL Players’ Association, who worked with Associate Professor John Fitzgerald on the award-winning project ‘An AFL alcohol policy’, felt that the “standout difference” of working with the University of Melbourne was the teamwork approach.

“Lots of really decent pieces of robust research come to us each year, but they remain research, they remain quite esoteric, even when there’s an acknowledged way that that will inform our programs. But there hasn’t necessarily been the depth of teamwork in “how do we really make this happen for you?… Melbourne University has been involved right the way through,” Dr Grange said.

For information about the award winners and the award ceremony visit: www.knowledgetransfer.unimelb.edu.au