ACGR Award for Excellence in Promoting Industry Engagement in Graduate Research
The ARC Centre for Medical Implant Technology (CMIT) of The University of Melbourne was named as winner of the 2022 ACGR Award for Excellence in Promoting Industry Engagement in Graduate Research.
Led by Professor Peter Lee, the CMIT team includes Associate Professor David Ackland, Dr Jia-Yee Lee and Ms Meg Belmonte.
Open to individuals or teams of HDR supervisors, coordinators or professional staff, the ACGR award recognises innovative and transformational engagement between higher degree research candidates and industry partners.
The ACGR judging panel commended the CMIT team for enabling close and innovative collaboration between graduate researchers and industry partners in the Medtech sector.
Working in a dedicated workspace CMIT’s 10 graduate research candidates receive guidance from clinicians and industry engineers. Their innovative PhD projects are developed by industry partners, allowing them to gain significant industry-ready skills in research translation, ethics, medical device development and medical device regulations.
The judging panel recognised the CMIT team as an outstanding example of how cutting-edge research and research training can directly benefit industry by addressing critical needs, as well as benefitting the community through improved patient outcomes.
Examples of the CMIT team’s research outputs and innovations include the development of improved spine-fusion implants, the evaluation of personalised jaw prostheses, the creation of computer models of human shoulders for virtual clinical trials, and new implants to treat hip joint replacement surgery for the orthopaedics industry.
One of the PhD candidates led the design and prototyping tools development for Australia’s first Therapeutic Goods Administration approved 3D printed nasal swab for COVID-19 diagnostic testing. Over 1,500,000 of these swabs have been developed and used in COVID-19 testing during the pandemic.
Special commendations were also announced for Professor Justin Gooding of The University of New South Wales as well as Professor Yongsheng Gao and ARC Research Hub for Driving Farming Productivity and Disease Prevention at Griffith University.