Research is a core activity at Flinders. We believe investigation and enquiry are essential to an academic institution. We aim to be known locally, nationally and internationally as a research university. For our size we are consistently one of Australia's most successful research universities.

Flinders researchers offer expertise across a wide range of contemporary issues and problems. Our size and compact main campus make meaningful collaboration between disciplines a reality. This is advantageous because there are problems that are best tackled by multidisciplinary teams.

Research is carried out across:
•    all disciplines in the university's 4 faculties, which also offer support and supervision for postgraduate research students
•    a number of specialist research centres

Over $9 million of our funds are allocated each year to support our research program, which involves around 700 academic staff, as well as full-time research staff, general staff – in the areas of technical support, research administration and staff development and training – and about 900 higher degree research students.

The majority of our research is funded through external research grants. In recent years we have focussed strongly and successfully on winning support for projects involving industry partners.

Our approach involves:
•    identifying and supporting areas of strategic research.
•    providing continued support for outstanding individual researchers and small groups of outstanding researchers.

We believe that conducting research, and training research higher degree students makes it possible for us to:
•    continually re-invigorate and extend the boundaries of our academic disciplines
•    explore and establish cross disciplinary approaches to academic enquiry, leading in some cases to the identification of new disciplines.

Flinders Partners, the commercial arm of Flinders University, provides services relating to research partnering and the commercial application of research expertise, capabilities and facilities at Flinders University.

The Research Services Office can help connect those who require research services with appropriate capability at Flinders.