Research profile

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.

Our approach is also distinctive. Our size and compact main campus make meaningful collaboration between disciplines a reality. This is a significant advantage in a world that now recognises that many problems are not the province of any one discipline, but 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
• areas of research focus.

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

We are clear about the areas of research in which we will specialise, and support them by ensuring that they have the resources to continue and grow.

Our approach involves:

• identifying and supporting an areas of research focus
• 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.