December 2025 – January 2026 Highlights
Recognising excellence at the Deakin Vice-Chancellor’s Awards
The 2025 Vice-Chancellor’s Awards Ceremony was held at the Waurn Ponds Campus on 3 December 2025. It was a spectacular event filled with celebration, appreciation, and a strong sense of Deakin community. Congratulations to Institute members:
- Professor Jane Speight who received the Vice-Chancellors Award for Academic Leadership and Contribution.
Recognising and celebrating the contribution made to enrich the experience and enable the growth, success and wellbeing of our communities: our students, our staff, and our friends, alumni and partners so they can achieve their personal and professional goals, while also contributing to the success of the university as a whole. - Professor Bodil Rasmussen who received a Deakin service award for 30 years of dedicated service and contribution.
- Dr Emily Tomlinson, Fiona Kumar, Sara Aryal, Dr Monica Schoch were awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Team of the Year for Transforming Nursing Education: a course-wide approach to embedding generative AI literacies.
Congratulations to:
- Professor Angela Dew on the publication of her new book “Refugee journeys to Australia: Safety, Security, and Support for People from Syria and Iraq with Disabilities”. The book is based on research funded by a Deakin University Faculty of Health mid-career fellowship and highlights the experiences of people with disability and their family members from Syrian and Iraqi refugee backgrounds who have resettled in Australia over the past decade. https://lnkd.in/g5xs6gKt
- Deakin Distinguished Professor Tracey Bucknall, Christian, T, Hutchinson, AM, McBean, L, Nouman, M. for being awarded a Digital Health CRC Limited grant for $327,570 for their project titled: Translating AI-generated Fall Prevention Models to Inform Organisational Decision-Making.
- Professor Kathryn Backholer for being awarded an Ian Potter Foundation grant for $600,000 for her project titled: ‘#DigitalYouth – Phase 2: Policy Evaluation in the Context of the Social Media Minimum Age Act’. Read more in an article titled: Over $1.39 million in new funding for Deakin health research
- Dr Muyiwa Omonaiye, Deakin Distinguished Professor Julie Considine, Professor Bodil Rasmussen, Dr Sharon Atkinson-Briggs, Dr Elizabeth Holmes-Truscott, Prof Chris Gilfillan, Ms Kate Corrigan on being awarded a Diabetes Australia Research Program Grant for $100,000 for their project titled: Improving care and outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples with Type 2 diabetes mellitus in Eastern Melbourne
- Dr Bernard Asare for being awarded a Diabetes Australia grant for $100,000 for his project titled: Shifting the Curve: Modelling the Case for Earlier Intervention in Type 2 Diabetes
- Deakin Distinguished Professor Alison Hutchinson for being awarded a Dementia Australia (Alzheimer’s Australia) Vic Inc grant for $90,000 for her project titled: Training needs analysis for continuous quality improvement to build capacity and capability of the aged care workforce; Pilot Feasibility Study.
- Professor Pubudu Pathirana for being awarded a CRC grant for $3 million, for his project titled: From blood to slurry: Airflow engineering to cut waste and enable new technologies.
Visiting Academics
- Professor Birgit Kopainsky, Director, System Dynamics Group, University of Bergen, Norway
- Associate Professor Mona Jeffreys, Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
- Dina Renathe Løland, PhD student at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences
Read more about the opportunities to learn from and connect with our visiting academics.
Recent Conference presentations
- Deakin Distinguished Professor Alison Hutchinson was a Keynote Speaker at the 2025 ANZFPS Conference (11th Biennial Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Falls Prevention Conference) in Sydney, presenting a paper titled “Using machine learning to determine falls risk among hospitalised adults”.
Go back to the February 26 Newsletter
