Seven Curtin research projects have been awarded more than $3.5 million in Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), for projects spanning black holes, home ownership, green hydrogen, artificial intelligence and more.

Congratulations to the following lead researchers:

• Carbon nanoparticles: a blessing and a curse for hydrogen production: Dr Jacob Martin (School of Electrical Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences) – awarded $524,518.
  This project will uncover how tiny carbon particles, formed when methane is turned into clean hydrogen, start and grow, to help design better catalysts and reactors to make hydrogen production more efficient.
• Passing the Keys: Homeownership Across Generations in Australia: Dr Christopher Phelps (School of Accounting, Economics and Finance) – awarded $436,886.
  This project explores how owning a home is transferred between generations, including help from parents (“the Bank of Mum and Dad”) and an emerging role for grandparents, to give clearer insights into how housing wealth shapes people’s life chances, helping guide future policies.
• Recovery of rare metals from e-waste through mechano-electrochemistry: Dr Jinyang Zhang (PhD student) – awarded $461,701.
  This project develops a new method to recover rare metals and plastics from e-waste in a single, efficient process to improve understanding of how to recycle these metals effectively to reduce environmental impacts, cut mining needs and improve community health.
• Where Are All Our Intermediate Mass Black Holes? How do galaxies grow?: Dr Kristen Dage (Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy) – awarded $529,579.

This project will use new observatories to search for signs of these black holes in 300,000 nearby star clusters. The work will help confirm – or challenge – a major theory about how galaxies and the Universe grew.

• Next-Generation Agentic AI System for Intelligent Infrastructure Monitoring: Dr Qilin Li (School of Electrical Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences) – awarded $516,678.
  An advanced AI system that can automatically monitor and assess infrastructure such as bridges and buildings by combining sensors, simulations and language-based reasoning could detect problems early, analyse risks in real time and make decisions without constant human input. This would improve safety, lower costs and help Australia lead in AI-enabled engineering.
• Mining Earth’s Memory – From Crustal Thickness to Mineral Prediction: Dr Janne Liebmann (School of Earth and Planetary Sciences) – awarded $528,526.
  This project will map how Australia’s crust thickness has changed over millions of years, a key factor in how minerals form. The team will develop a tool to track past crust thickness and create Australia’s first deep-time crust model. This will help identify areas likely to contain minerals and lowering exploration risks.
• Nonlinear scheduling optimisation for green hydrogen production: Dr Hoa Bui (Centre for Optimisation and Decision Science) – awarded $519,436.
  How green hydrogen plants schedule their operations could help them run more efficiently and at lower cost. Because these optimisation problems are large and complex, this project will create advanced algorithms to solve them and help identify the best strategies for Australian hydrogen production and advance key areas of research.

Congratulations to all the Curtin academics involved in this outstanding achievement. Read more about the projects in our media release.