Participate in the UTS Collaboration Scheme

From left to right: A/Prof Louise Cole, Prof Rachel Landers, Dr Claire Richards, A/Prof Fanny Salignac, Deborah Cameron

Hosted by the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, participants heard about the outstanding achievements of two previous Scheme participants. 

In welcoming guests to the launch event, Professor Anna Cristina Pertierra, Associate Dean (Research), said that the initiative is important for UTS because it creates new and innovative collaborations. 

“What's great about this internal Scheme is how it brings people together from many different parts of the university, building a store of deep sector knowledge,” she said.  

“The most attractive projects to assessors are those that would not be possible without all the different collaborators coming from each of their different disciplines, Faculties and perspectives.” 

Associate Professor Fanny Salignac, Director of Research at the UTS Transdisciplinary School, was previously awarded funding for a project that sought to chart academic women’s transitions out of parental leave and address structural issues of gender inequality. 

With the goal of creating better support to women preparing for and returning from parental leave, Fanny and her team wanted to understand how existing institutional rules and practices support or work against academic parents, and women in particular, as they navigate returning from parental leave.  

What's great about this internal Scheme is how it brings people together from many different parts of the university, building a store of deep sector knowledge.

While parental leave policies are one of the most established approaches to providing support, the focus remains on the duration and gender-equal sharing of the leave rather than the formal and informal measures to support re-entry and retention after parental leave. 

Through conducting interviews with 60 birthmothers and 15 policymakers across Australia, France and the UK, the team was able to conduct a cross-country comparison and identify national differences in our approach to supporting academic mothers. 

Findings from the project suggested that, too often, women feel they cannot have both a career and children.  

“That is something we very much wanted to explore in this project: the fine line between having a career while not compromising family-life,” said Fanny. 

During the project, the team used feminist institutionalism to look at formal and informal rules. They found that while HR-related rules can provide support, informal rules such as the assumption that you must take 12 months maternity leave may undermine women’s choices. 

“What the Collaboration Scheme has enabled us to do is work as a very wide, international team conducting a pilot study that is giving us strong foundations on which to build future funding applications and future projects as well,” Fanny explained, adding that the team will now extend and scale up the project to include all parents, not just mothers. 

Bringing microscopy to life 

With a focus on creating engaging science stories for young children, teachers and families and promoting women in STEM, the second project discussed at the Collaboration Scheme launch is entitled: The Wonderful, Fluorescent, Massive World of Tiny, Invisible Things. 

Using documentary, animation and microscopy, this multidisciplinary collaboration shares the scientific research of UTS scientists using advanced microscopy technology to generate Australian science narratives with significant public engagement value. 

The team transformed and anthropomorphised cellular microscopy images, including those of PhD graduate Dr Claire Richards who works on the placenta and uses bioprinting techniques. 

“Being part of this scheme has done wonders for my communication skills. Not just in terms of how we can engage with collaborators across Faculties, but also with the children we were aiming to connect with through this project,” said Claire. 

“Hosting a microscope and animation event with Vivid Sydney was a particularly fun opportunity for the team to share our project and individual research with kids. This collaboration has been a special chance to become the scientist that I couldn’t see as a young girl.” 

Associate Professor Louise Cole, Director and Facility Manager of the Microbial imaging Facility in the Faculty of Science at UTS, described how anthropomorphising the microscopy data acquired by the scientists informed the storytelling, from understanding the feelings researchers have towards their microscopic images to their passion for how their discoveries would help others. 

“Carmine Gentile’s cardiac culture model is like studying a heart attack in a dish. This concept lends itself easily to the idea that he is mending broken hearts,” Louise explained. 

Deborah Cameron described how the animation team of four directors met with the scientists in the lab, looked at their work under the microscope and talked to the researchers until they really understood their passion for their work as well as what it was that these scientists were studying.  

We were inspired by four words that came up over, and over again: investigate, discover, illuminate and understand. 

“As animators we live in a world where we are challenged to create character and world building and immersive environments where the audience can engage and be part of that world," Deborah said, adding that the team applied the same kind of principles that they always apply to animation work. 

“We were inspired by four words that came up over, and over again: investigate, discover, illuminate and understand. This allowed us to anthropomorphise their images and create characters that we have combined with the personality of the scientist.” 

For example, Deborah said that when Claire Richards went ‘down’ the microscope, she told the animators that she felt that she was going into a bigger world, not a smaller world.  

“And that’s the animation challenge: imagining a world that is true to the scientist. It’s an imaginary space.” 

Louise said that when she and Professor Rachel Landers first met to discuss making an application to the Collaboration Scheme, they realised the strength of the project was in its true collaboration between researchers in the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. 

“We could see that it required significant input from all parties involved,” said Louise. “The project would not have been successful without each of our expertise and dedication.” 

Rachel agreed, adding that the project brought together award-winning filmmakers, animators and scientists, as well as schoolteachers and students, to co-design a unique and transformative way of communicating science to children.  

“The main aim was to educate children about the extraordinary work being done in modern science, and to break down stereotypes, biases and assumptions,” she explained.  

“We wanted to embolden young people, particularly girls, to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.”  

“Collaboratively, we have created a research-driven, user tested suite of innovative educational audio-visual content that reveals the ‘invisible’ world of microscopy for STEM learners aged 11-12 using a ground-breaking combination of animation, narrative and anthropomorphisation.” 

The resulting instructional science communication videos are now on the global film festival circuit, presenting a fun and engaging way to communicate science. 

Along the way of the project life cycle, you are seeing different types of opportunities come to you, and also to everyone in the team, because we're all from different disciplines.

At the heart of each of these projects is co-design. Fanny’s team ran workshops to allow the space for everyone to collaborate in terms of putting ideas together and coming up with a plan of action in terms of what the team would do, the outputs that they wanted to create, and where they want to take them. 

“Along the way of the project life cycle, you are seeing different types of opportunities come to you, and also to everyone in the team, because we're all from different disciplines,” Fanny explained. 

“It’s very dynamic. A lot of things are happening, and it very much is a matter of, how do you reconcile working on together from different disciplines, from different countries as well, in my case, and what do you put? What is your priority? And that priority is decided as a team.”  

About the UTS Collaboration Scheme  

The internal UTS Collaboration Scheme is designed to enhance opportunities for cross-disciplinary research and support UTS research teams to forge new collaborations across faculties and disciplines, including external partnerships leading to future applications for external funding. 

Applicants must contain researchers from at least two UTS Faculties or Institutes and are encouraged to think about the different ways they can use funds to foster collaborations that would not otherwise be possible with existing resources and networks.

Applicants​​​​​​​ are encouraged to use the Collaborator Finder tool to assist building cross-faculty teams. 

Applications open 21 October 2024 and close 5 pm, Wednesday 4 December 2024. 

For more information visit the Collaboration Scheme Sharepoint.