In late 2003 the ARC announced a new funding scheme to establish research networks to support some of Australia’s key research areas. The aim of this scheme was to increase interactions and collaborations between researchers working in these key areas by providing funding to support joint workshops, conferences, short and long-term visits, distinguished international visitors, etc.

The Networks scheme consisted of a two stage process – an initial seed-funding round to establish potential networks that would then move through, or amalgamate to form larger networks in a second full networks round.
In the initial seed-funding round, we submitted a proposal to establish the ‘Young Investigators Network on Next Generation Electronic Devices’, which aimed to bring together and support early career researchers from a wide variety of disciplines (physics, chemistry, biology and engineering) who are working on developing new electronic devices – an area with strong economic and technological opportunity for Australia. This network had seven members from various schools at UNSW, as well as members from CSIRO, University of Queensland, Australian National University, University of Newcastle, University of Wollongong and Flinders University. Our proposal was one of around 120 networks to receive seed-funding from the ARC, however, given that only around 20 networks would survive the next round, it was clear that our network would need to amalgamate with other seed-funded networks to remain viable.

For the full networks round we decided to amalgamate with three other seed-funded networks in closely allied areas of research – the Australian Semiconductor Nanotechnology Network, The Nanoparticle Network and The Australian Network on Microelectronics, Optoelectronics and Micromechanical Systems – to form the ARC Nanotechnology Network, a bid led by Prof. Jagadish from the Australian National University. Ultimately, this larger bid was one of only 24 networks funded and we were awarded $1.9M of funding across 5 years for 2005-2009. As the chief investigator on the ‘Young Investigators Network on Next Generation Electronic Devices’’ bid, Dr Adam Micolich was invited to be on the management committee for the Nanotechnology network.

The ARC Nanotechnology Network (ARCNN) is now becoming established with an office and two administrative personnel based at ANU. In 2005 the network will run a one and a half day postgraduate symposium to be held in conjunction with the Australian Workshop on Nanotechnology at the University of Western Australia in July 2005. This symposium is to provide a forum where postgraduate students working on nanotechnology research can present their work, meet other students and researchers, and interact with other research groups in Australia. The ARCNN also plans to support nanotechnology-related conferences and workshops, in addition to organizing its own events, as well as provide support for short and long-term collaborative visits for Ph.D. students and early career researchers within Australia, support for distinguished international visitors and perform a number of educational and outreach activities on nanotechnology.

Adam Micolich, Michelle Simmons
and Alex Hamilton