Outstanding research achievements in the fields of agricultural and veterinary sciences, and environmental sciences, at Charles Sturt University (CSU) have received the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence in 2007.

 

CSU Vice-Chancellor and President, Professor Ian Goulter, said he was delighted by the strength and variety of practical research being undertaken at the University and congratulated the latest individual and team Research Excellence award winners.

 

“I am proud that CSU researchers are at the forefront of a range of scientific research which highlights a key objective of CSU’s mission to ‘conduct strategic and applied research of an international standard’,” Professor Goulter said.

 

Associate Professor Gavin Ash from the CSU School of Agricultural and Veterinary Sciences received the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Individual Research Excellence for his outstanding contribution to innovative research in plant pathology, identifying and determining the risk posed by diseases in crops and exploring innovative approaches to the management of diseases and weeds.

 

Since beginning his career at the CSU Wagga Wagga Campus in 1990, Professor Ash has attracted more than $4.2 million in research funds, written for over 150 publications, including book chapters, journal articles and conference proceedings, and supervised 38 postgraduate students. In the last five years Professor Ash has authored 27 refereed publications and gained 27 research grants.

 

The winners of the 2007 Vice-Chancellor's Team Award for Research Excellence are Associate Professor David Watson, Dr Ian Lunt, Dr Gary Luck, and Dr Peter Spooner from CSU’s School of Environmental Sciences, and Dr David Roshier from the University’s Institute for Land, Water and Society (ILWS).

 

This multi-disciplinary team, working as part of the ILWS Ecology and Biodiversity Group based on CSU’s Albury-Wodonga Campus, is studying drivers of biodiversity change in production landscapes.

 

Their research aims to understand key processes that threaten biodiversity in landscapes that have many functions, so that biodiversity conservation can be integrated with agriculture to maximise how ecosystems work over the long-term.

These researchers are committed to addressing real-world problems, and engage closely with stakeholders and end-users such as farmers to ensure it is relevant to them. 

 

The team’s contributions place it at the forefront of ecology and conservation biology internationally. This is illustrated by research income totalling more than $2.1 million, including eight highly competitive Australian Research Council grants, and papers published in pre-eminent scientific journals including Bioscience, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and Nature.