Macquarie Law School refugee advocate Associate Professor Daniel Ghezelbash (main picture) has beaten out almost 400 early career scholars and practitioners to be selected for the ABC’s Top 5 Humanities Media Residency. “I’m thrilled at this opportunity to work alongside Australia’s top journalists and learn how to better communicate my ideas to a broad audience,” says Daniel. “All my work is aimed at contributing to progressive social change and policy reform – winning the hearts and minds of the public is crucial to that mission.”

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$500k grant for MQ–UNSW–UTS alliance

A NSW Government’s Collaboration and Innovation Fund grant will provide Macquarie University, UNSW Sydney and UTS with $500K in funding for their newly formed partnership, NSW Equity Consortium: Imagined Futures. The project is underway,  seeking to build student and school capacities for accessing tertiary education,  targeting Year 7-9 students from Greater Western Sydney high schools which are under-represented in higher education.

At Macquarie, the collaborative project involves the Widening Participation Unit and academic staff from the School of Education. With the lockdown impacting students in partner schools within hotspot LGAs, Macquarie’s project team has pivoted quickly to deliver the program online. “Our aim during this challenging time has been to listen carefully and support teachers in the way that best supports their needs; care of the partner schools’ teachers is central to our approach,” explains Dr Janet Dutton, the program’s Content Lead.

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Brilliant times three

Three Macquarie inventions feature in The Brilliant’s list of 10 Aussie innovations that made the world a better place, including the revolutionary parasite detection technique developed at Macquarie in the 1990s and still being used by Sydney Water to protect residents from nasties such as cryptosporidium, giardia and legionella.

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A strong voice for First Nations peoples

Professor Bronwyn Carlson has been invited by the Minister for Women’s Safety Anne Ruston to be part of a new 13-member Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Council, established to inform the next National Plan to end family, domestic and sexual violence. The multidisciplinary Advisory Council includes advisors from across the health, community services, legal services, children and family services, and university sectors.

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Social justice defender makes Most Influential Lawyers list

Adjunct Professor George Newhouse, co-founder of Macquarie’s Social Justice Clinic, has been named in the Australasian Lawyer’s list of Most Influential Lawyers for 2021. “I’m honoured to be named alongside a group of talented lawyers making a ground-breaking contribution to human rights, but it’s a team effort and I would have achieved nothing without the hardworking team at the National Justice Project and the exceptional students at the Macquarie University’s Social Justice Clinic,” he says. “Our students have the rare opportunity to work on strategic casework that has profound implications and I can’t thank Macquarie University and the Dean of our Law School for their commitment to our innovative, leading-edge legal work.”

Grants

Professor David McAlpine, Academic Director of Macquarie University Hearing, has been awarded a prestigious Einstein Fellowship, worth €450,000 over three years. The project (entitled ‘Listen and learn—subcortical-cortical interactions in the emergence of statistical learning’) will explore how auditory memories are formed in the listening brain.

Macquarie Law School’s Dr Holly Doel-Mackaway is part of an international research team awarded $2,499,993 by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, with an additional funding of $2,521,000 from industry partners. The grants will support their work with the International and Canadian Child Rights Partnership (ICCRP) to undertake a seven-year project to advance children’s rights across five continents.  Dr Doel-Mackaway co-leads the Law and Policy Working Group for the project.