GEMOC ARC National Key Centre

Director's preface

This report summarises GEMOC’s 2005 activities including research, technology development, strategic applications and industry interaction, international links and teaching (at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels). The report is required as part of GEMOC’s formal annual accounting to the Australian Research Council (ARC). The ARC acknowledges GEMOC as a continuing ARC National Key Centre while GEMOC attracts sufficient income to fund its activities and achieve its annual goals, and submits an Annual Report fulfilling ARC reporting requirements.

This is the second year of a fully electronic GEMOC Annual Report available from our website (www.es.mq.edu.au/GEMOC/) as a downloadable pdf file or in html format and by mail as a CD. We have had a mixed reception to this fully digital delivery, but the costs of hard copy production are very high and we prefer to direct those resources to research support. Later this year we will have a consolidated version of all GEMOC’s Research Highlights over 10 years collected together in digital form, as for the Annual Report, and we will notify you when this can be downloaded from our website.

GEMOC’s second Federation Fellow, Professor Bernard Wood arrived in mid 2005 and has now set up a fully operational high-pressure experimental laboratory. This provided new and complementary resources for the Geochemical Analysis Unit in GEMOC which in many ways is the “power station” of most of GEMOC’s research programs. The array of high technology instrumentation and clean laboratories (see the section on Technology Development) provides a wide range of geochemical (especially in situ) analytical capabilities. As well as serving GEMOC researchers, it hosts collaborative partner researchers from most national universities and a wide range of international research visitors.

GEMOC continues to attract a healthy annual income diversified across government competitive schemes such as the Australian Research Council, collaborative projects with partners from the mineral exploration industry (an increasing income stream), value-added consulting (for the mineral exploration industry and relevant technology development industry), strategic alliances with technology and instrument manufacturers, commercialisation ventures (such as marketing of GLITTER software with New Wave Research), and international links and alliances that provide reciprocal resources. Macquarie University has also provided significant support.

As this Report is being finalised, Macquarie’s new Vice-Chancellor, Professor Steven Schwartz, has announced that GEMOC is one of five CORES (Concentrations of Research Excellence) at Macquarie University and will be allocated a significant number of new academic positions over the next year, related to our new strategic plan of research being formulated as “Earth and Planetary Evolution”. 2006 promises to be the start of an exciting new phase of GEMOC.

 

Suzanne Y. O'Reilly

[Back to top]