MNHS researchers successful in receiving 2026 ARC DECRA and LIEF grants
Credit: Adobe Stock, by ipopba.
Monash Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences researchers have been successful in receiving Australian Research Council (ARC) grants under the Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) 2026 scheme and the Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) 2026 scheme, valued at over $3.2million.
Monash University researchers overall received 25 DECRA awards worth $12.9 million, the highest amount awarded to any university in Australia, and were also awarded four LIEF grants valued at over $5 million.
The ARC’s DECRA projects foster collaboration with national and international collaborators to address critical knowledge gaps and deliver solutions that address economic, environmental, social, and cultural challenges to improve quality of life and drive sustainable progress for all Australians. The ARC LIEF scheme provides funding for research infrastructure, equipment and facilities to enable cooperative use by universities and industry.
Congratulations to our successful recipients.
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA)
Dr Rosanne Freak-Poli - School of Clinical Sciences at Monash Health
Project: Enhancing Social Prescribing. The project aims to enable the integration, long-term adoption, and scalability of social prescribing into Australia’s social system. Social prescribing links people to non-medical services and supports to improve their wellbeing and quality of life. The program will co-design evidence-based infrastructure to support long-term adoption and scalability. Expected outcomes include a secure data hub, enhanced evidence-based social prescribing programs to enable optimised resource allocation, and improved consistency of social services. Given the established cost-effectiveness of social prescribing, significant anticipated benefits include reduced welfare and economic burdens, as well as increased social connection and community wellbeing.
Amount: $530,079
Dr Anthony Kohtz - Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute
Project: Uncovering divergent hydrogen-dependent methane metabolism in novel Archaea. This project seeks to reveal broad new insights into non-traditional methanogens, by studying their enzymes and ecological roles in detail. By applying cutting-edge cultivation, structural biology, and multi-omic analyses, this project expects to unveil unique physiological strategies for methane production in non-traditional methanogens and their wider ecological roles relative to well-studied traditional methanogens. Expected benefits include basic knowledge on biological methane production, development of new tools for bioprospecting and comparative genomics of these ecologically relevant organisms, and knowledge of their ecology in wetlands and coal-bed methane wells, which are high methane flux habitats.
Amount: $530,079
Dr Yen-Zhen Lu - Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute
Project: Unveiling Myeloid Cells as Regulators of Nerve Innervation in Tissue Repair. The mechanisms that regulate peripheral tissue healing are not yet fully understood. My recent research, published in Nature in 2024, discovered that a neuro-immune axis plays a critical role in controlling skin and muscle healing in normal mice after injury. I found that nociceptor sensory nerve endings grow and infiltrate the tissue injury site and release neuropeptides, promoting tissue repair by locally regulating immune cells. These findings underscore the importance of nociceptor activation in skin and muscle healing. In this proposal, I aim to investigate how nociceptors are initially activated and regulated in injured skin and muscle, and how these mechanisms contribute to the regulation of tissue healing.
Amount: $529,878
Dr Thomas McLean - Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute
Project: The mechanistic basis of how bacteria respond to environmental change. The bacterial cell surface is the primary barrier that protects from external threats; however, it remains unclear how bacteria rapidly remodel this protective layer. This project aims to discover the mechanisms by which bacteria rapidly respond to changes in their local environment. The project expects to define these mechanisms using combinations of molecular analysis, cutting-edge nanoscale imaging, genome-wide profiling and AI-driven structural analysis. Expected outcomes are to understand this fundamental biological principle and advance our knowledge of bacterial cell biology and environmental adaptation. The findings from this project should provide significant benefits for the global research community and commercial biotechnology.
Amount: $511,024
Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF)
Professor John Carroll (project lead) - Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute
Project: The aim of this project is to develop advanced imaging technologies to allow long-term visualisation and recording of individual organelles and cells within complex multicellular structures such as embryos, developing tissues, organoids and iblastoids. Imaging technologies have driven major advances in the life sciences, but photo-toxicity has limited advances in sensitive multicellular systems. The technology we will implement reduces phototoxicity by using 2-photon microscopy and adaptive opticsn and an Airy beam scanning system enhances speed and resolution of imaging. This capability will lead to new discoveries in how organelles and cells interact to create functional multicellular systems.
Amount: $1,121,556
Find out more about the ARC DECRA and LIEF grant schemes.
About Monash University
Monash University is Australia’s largest university with more than 80,000 students. In the 60 years since its foundation, it has developed a reputation for world-leading high-impact research, quality teaching, and inspiring innovation.
With four campuses in Australia and a presence in Malaysia, China, India, Indonesia and Italy, it is one of the most internationalised Australian universities.
As a leading international medical research university with the largest medical faculty in Australia and integration with leading Australian teaching hospitals, we consistently rank in the top 50 universities worldwide for clinical, pre-clinical and health sciences.
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