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Alliance Catalyst Fund

The Monash Warwick Alliance encourages the development of joint research and education collaboration with the aim of mutually beneficial growth in the research and teaching excellence of both institutions. The Alliance Research Catalyst Fund has been established with the specific intention to foster new initiatives with high potential that combine complementary aspects of each institution towards novel research outcomes.

Congratulations to the following recipients who have been awarded funding in this round:

Using behavioural economics to improve sexual health

Behavioural economics is an exciting discipline that blends psychological insights into human behaviour to explain economic decision-making. Research has led governments to create ‘nudges’ to help improve decision making by finding ways to tweak human behaviour in attempt to improve their welfare in a predictable, easy and cheap way. With evidence that using ‘nudge’ messages has been effective in reducing alcohol use, improving enrolment in paediatric weight management programs and improving hospital appointment attendance, an exciting pilot project between the University of Warwick and Monash University’s Melbourne Sexual Health Centre is being explored.

The project will take place in two parts. Firstly, to help improve STI (Sexually Transmitted Infection) testing rates, the Central Clinical School at the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre will run a pilot project to evaluate whether reframing SMS reminder messages impacts on the return-rates of a high-risk STI client group.

Secondly, with Warwick Business School expertise running events known as ‘nudgeathons’ (a 1-2 day event where individuals or teams solve problems using behavioural economic principals), skills and knowledge will be shared to explore how behaviour economics principals can help improve health outcomes.

The collaboration is a win-win for both institutions. The University of Warwick will extend their behavioural economics activities into a new area, as well as to partner with the largest and most research active public sexual health service in Australia. Monash University will benefit from access to world-experts applying behavioural economic principals. Together, the collaboration will complement each other in demonstrating the application of behavioural economics in sexual health, and ultimately provide new insights to improve patient outcomes.

Principle applicants

Dr Jason Ong

Central Clinical School, Melbourne Sexual Health Centre

Professor Daniel Read

Department of Behavioural Science Group, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick

Co-applicants

Associate Professor Eric Chow, Central Clinical School, Monash University

Professor Ivo Vlaev, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick

Scale-up human eye model to investigate aqueous humour hydrodynamics

The inside of the human eye is divided into three sections called chambers. The chambers in front of the lens, named the Anterior and Posterior chambers, are filled with a clear watery fluid called the aqueous humor.

Glaucoma is an eye disease that is reported by the World Health Organisation to affect around 105 million people. In a normal eye the aqueous humor is continuously produced and drained. In glaucoma, structural changes in eye tissue restrict the outflow of aqueous humor from the anterior and posterior chambers causing the build up of pressure within the eye. Such increase in pressure can cause damage to the optic nerve which may lead to losses in the peripheral visual field. If left untreated, glaucoma can cause permanent blindness.

Studies of the movement of aqueous humor are rarely carried out experimentally due to the sensitive nature of the human eye to physical contact, which effectively rules out any invasive measurement techniques. Consequently, experimental studies involving the human eye are often carried out using donor eyes, in which the experimental conditions are difficult to control and are rarely available due to the difficulty in sourcing donor eyes.

With Alliance support, Dr Ean Hin Ooi, Monash University and Dr Isaac Kuo-Kang Liu, University of Warwick are leading a novel research team that combines different disciplines from science and engineering. They will seek to develop a scaled-up model of the anterior and posterior chambers of the eye which can be used to study the movement of aqueous humor under conditions that mimic healthy and glaucomatous eyes.

It is hoped that this study will facilitate the management of glaucoma by gaining a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the formation and development of the disease. This could potentially lead to the development of better diagnostic approaches for glaucoma and improved ophthalmic drug delivery to treat the disease. These are likely to reduce an individual’s loss of health-related quality of life as well as the personal and societal economic burdens.

Principle applicants

Dr Ean Hin Ooi

Senior Lecturer, School of Engineering, Monash University, Malaysia campus

Dr Isaac Liu

Associate Professor (Reader), School of Engineering, University of Warwick

Co-applicants

Dr Foo Ji Jinn,Senior Lecturer, School of Engineering, Monash University, Malaysia campus

Dr Ahmed Eissa, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Chemistry, University of Warwick

Interdisciplinary methodologies for futures research, experimentation and impact

Harnessing community expertise to understand food insecurity in local govenment

Food insecurity - the limited or uncertain availability of individuals’ and households’ physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe, nutritious and culturally relevant food - is a complex, persistent and multidimensional issue. Despite abundant food and relative wealth, food insecurity is increasingly experienced in high-income countries. Household food security is not consistently or robustly measured in Australia or the UK, but conservative estimates indicate that over 4% of Australians and 8% of people residing in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, are living in a food insecure household.

It is well-documented that those experiencing food insecurity compromise on quantity and nutritional quality of food, go without food, experience anxiety, stress and social isolation. Food insecurity impacts the physical, social and emotional health of the population across the lifespan and specifically the development and educational attainment of children and adolescents, making it a serious public health issue. There are multiple influencing and interrelated factors that contribute to food insecurity. The major predictor of food insecurity however is low income for purchasing food and other commodities in a household.

The responsibility for ensuring food security at any government level is at best limited and this challenge is intensified due to the associated factors listed above cutting across multiple government departments. In Australia and the UK the dominant response has been to provide people with emergency food relief through the charitable sector, for example via food banks. There has been an unprecedented expansion of the charitable food sector in response to an increased usage of food banks. However, charity does not address the causes of food security and is powerless to prevent households from falling into food insecurity or help them escape it.

Through the Monash Warwick Alliance Dr Sue Kleve and Dr Martine Barons will focus on engaging with policymakers, experts by experience and front-line workers to ensure every aspect of the causal pathways for food insecurity is taken into account properly within the statistical modelling. They will do this both in Cardinia Shire, Victoria and Warwickshire, UK to compare and contrast the systems and experiences. The eventual aim is to build an integrated food security decision support system for addressing food security at national and local levels. The system will combine various sources of data (on income, housing, employment and food costs) to produce a robust and transparent way in order to provide a score for each potential policy change. This will enable Governments to make evidence-based policy decisions that will address the source of food insecurity.

Principle applicants

Dr Sue Kleve

Lecturer, Dept of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food, Monash University

Dr Martine Barons

Director of the Applied Statistics & Risk Unit, University of Warwick

Co-applicants

Dr Julie Brimblecombe, Associate Professor, Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food, Monash University

Professor Jim Smith, Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Warwick

Penicillin binding proteins and peptidoglycan structure in Clostridium difficile

To survive in hostile environments, some bacteria produce a dormant and resilient cell form called a spore which can survive for many years in unfavourable environments. However, our understanding of how this process occurs is limited.

Spores of pathogenic bacteria are the vehicles of disease transmission and initiation, and once ingested or inhaled can cause catastrophic infectious diseases. The human pathogen Clostridium difficile is one such spore-forming pathogen that causes severe gut disease and diarrhoea in humans and animals that have been treated with antibiotics.

The rate of human C. difficile infection (CDI) has increased almost exponentially over the last decade with many new strain types emerging. Notably, in 2013 the Centers for Disease Control USA classified C. difficile as the most important antibiotic resistance threat to healthcare.

Strategies to prevent or reduce spore production from pathogenic spore-forming bacteria such as Clostridium species would be invaluable for infection control and treatment purposes.

Professor Dena Lyras, Monash University and Professor David Roper, University of Warwick are joining forces to share research and expertise in a study which will contribute to our understanding of the metabolically important sporulation process and how antibiotic usage changes this fundamental bacterial process following recent discoveries in this area.

These research outcomes will have substantial national and international impact including yielding a deeper understanding of the long-lasting detrimental impact of antibiotic use. The future outcomes of this work will provide economic benefits, reduce environmental microbial contamination promoting better health of animals and humans.

Principle applicants

Professor Dena Lyras

Professor, Department of Microbiology, Monash University

Professor David Roper

Professor, School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick

Co-applicants

Dr Sheena McGowan, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Microbiology, Monash University

Dr Matthew Jenner, BBSRC Future Leader Fellow, Department of Chemistry, University of Warwick

Dr Yogitha Srikhanta, Research Fellow, Department of Microbiology, Monash University

Shaping the Future of Freedom

Beyond Autonomy: Understanding How New Social, Scientific and Technological Influences are Shaping the Future of Freedom

In today’s world, the modern concept of individual autonomy is increasingly at risk from a number of external factors including extremism, surveillance, big data and climate change. Yet a sense that we have been freed from past oppressions through the evolution of a government system in which law-abiding citizens are afforded a degree of freedom remains fundamental in shaping our individual and collective sense of who we are and what we wish to become, and to the collective identify of modern Western societies. As a result of these external pressures, we need to reconsider how we think about freedom.

To address this issue, researchers will bring together a cross-disciplinary group from the arts, humanities, social and economic sciences. The group will draw on expertise and knowledge from the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub, Global Terrorism Research Centre and Monash SoDa Labs, as well as from the Warwick Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts, and Centre of Cultural & Media Policy Studies. The project is the first of its kind to address philosophically the unprecedented and interconnected social, scientific and technological factors that have created the contemporary crisis of freedom, and to develop new understandings of freedom better adapted to the contemporary world.

The project will host two interdisciplinary workshops and involve the development of a new framework that will understand how expectations of liberation shape experiences of, and attitudes to, freedom across interrelated social, technological and scientific domains. They will also develop a new account of freedom that will be better adjusted to the complex environmental, technological and social realities that increasingly characterise twenty-first century Western society. These workshops aim to provide a rare opportunity for a broad range of scholars to discuss a question that cannot be contained within any single disciplinary framework.