Research stories

With the festive season upon us, I hope you all take this well-deserved opportunity to rest, recharge, and enjoy time with loved ones—whether it’s relaxing by the beach, gathering around the Christmas table, or simply taking a quiet moment to reflect on the year gone by.

Looking ahead to 2025, I couldn’t be more excited about the future of research at SCU. I know it will be a year filled with fresh ideas, groundbreaking research, and discoveries that will make a lasting impact. I can’t wait to see what you will achieve next!

Enjoy this special edition of Research stories, and please keep sharing your research news with us at research.content@scu.edu.au. Your stories inspire us all and deserve to be celebrated far and wide.

Wishing you and your families a joyful Christmas, a relaxing summer break, and a bright and inspiring New Year. Thank you for making 2024 such a fantastic year—I can’t wait for all that’s to come in 2025!

Warmest festive wishes,

Professor Mary Spongberg
Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor

Safety is another advantage of using this type of automation – as seen with his development of an autosampler for preparing samples for gas analysis, which reduces the risk of human injury from traditional multi-needle manifolds that are often covered in toxic chemicals. Dr Cavalho’s students routinely use this innovative technology today, with great success and zero needlestick injuries since it was introduced.

But perhaps the greatest advantage of this type of innovation is the opportunity to develop new analytical techniques without having to invest in costly new equipment.

A case in point is Dr Cavalho’s development of a fraction collector specifically for stable isotope analysis, which enables measurement of carbon isotopes in carbohydrates – something generally only possible with expensive specialised equipment.

His experiments with lab automation have also led to Dr Cavalho developing a technique that measures carbon isotopes in organic carbon in deep sea water samples, which was previously impossible for Southern Cross University to undertake in-house.

Dr Cavalho’s conviction to the future of AI-assisted automation is such that he also contributes to the adoption of open-source hardware by scientists around the world by editing two high-profile international journals (HardwareX [Elsevier] and Hardware [MDPI]).

You can read more about Dr Cavalho’s journey (and that of other early adopters) into enhancing research techniques with AI in Can robotic lab assistants speed up your work?, which was recently published in nature.

These competitive skills-based video games have a huge global participant base, with a single esport – League of Legends – boasting around 200 million monthly users in 2023. The worldwide popularity of esports rivals that of physical sports such as baseball and NFL, and is gaining on the world’s leading sport: football (soccer).

In the light of this burgeoning prominence and newly-minted Olympic status, it’s somewhat surprising to learn that, unlike traditional physical sports, there are no specific mental health guidelines in place to protect esports players.

However, that’s about to change now that international men’s health charity Movember has awarded a grant to Southern Cross University Senior Researcher Dr Dylan Poulus to develop esports mental health guidelines.

Aimed at protecting the wellbeing of hundreds of millions of esports players around the world, these new guidelines will ultimately form a research-backed ‘best practice’ guidebook for organisers, coaches and other professionals to use to promote mental and physical health amongst the growing ranks of esports players.

This project builds on Research Lead Dr Poulus’s previous work with the Manna Institute on mental health in regional and remote areas as, in addition to skill, esports are about connecting a geographically dispersed participant community.

With evidence that today’s young men are increasingly using gaming and esports for social connection and relaxation as well as entertainment, it’s anticipated that this research will identify coping strategies that resonate with that demographic.

As a part of this project, Dr Poulus recently delivered a workshop on stress and coping to world-elite players of Counter-Strike 2 in Copenhagen, where participants brainstormed strategies for protecting mental health and improving performance while competing.

This isn’t Dr Poulus’s only foray into this specialised field of research, with the Australian Institute of Sports (AIS) recently awarding its first-ever grant to investigate esports to Southern Cross University. This work will tailor the AIS’s existing high-performance systems for traditional sports to suit esports players – and hopefully to prepare Australia’s first gold-medal-ready esporters, too.

We can’t wait to hear more!

In a world-first international literature review of the nutritional status of world defence personnel, the National Centre for Naturopathic Centre’s Dr Jessica Bayes found dietary intake rated only poor-to fair. This was chiefly due to a combination of low intakes of fruits, vegetables, wholegrains, seafood, plant protein and nuts, and high intakes of added sugars, trans fats and processed meat.

An identified suboptimal intake of nutrients – particularly fibre, essential fatty acids, vitamin A, vitamin E, folate, magnesium, zinc and iodine – was equally concerning, considering their importance to ensuring military readiness, optimal performance, recovery after training, physical exertion and injury prevention.

These findings are of particular concern in the light of established links between nutrition and mental health, and the existing increased risk to mental health from challenges and stressors specific to military life.

While these results will need to be embedded into military education to optimise the uptake of healthy eating habits by defence personnel, the signs that this will succeed are promising. An earlier study has found that military personnel are already looking to treat chronic physical and mental health conditions with dietary supplements and complementary treatments.

Dr Bayes is now building on her recent findings by exploring the link between diet quality and mental wellbeing in Australian ex-serving defence members in a study funded by The Australasian Military Medicine Association (AMMA). If you’d like to learn more about it or participate in a survey to inform the new study, please click here.

Professor Burton – the world’s fifth most-cited scientist in the Environmental Mineralogy field – will lead the research project ‘A new paradigm for aluminium geochemistry in acid sulfate environments’, with external colleagues Associate Professor Luke Mosley and Professor Robert Fitzpatrick.

The project aims to deliver a new understanding of the mineral-water interactions that control aluminium geochemistry in highly acidic, sulfate-rich water that is often released by mining of coal and metal ores, drying of wetlands during droughts, and drainage of coastal floodplains.

To do this, the researchers will combine advanced synchrotron-based techniques with novel field studies and laboratory experiments to allow more accurate modelling of aluminium geochemistry. In turn, this will improve capacity to protect valuable water resources by predicting and controlling aluminium fate.

Well done, Professor Burton! We’re looking forward to hearing more news of this significant project as it progresses.

The Science article highlights research led by Dr. Liam Lachs, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Climate Change Ecology and Evolution at Newcastle University, and co-authored by Dr. Marine Gouezo and several others collaborators from five institutions. The study investigates how adaptation via natural selection may influence the future persistence of coral populations to warming oceans. With evidence that heatwaves in the oceans are becoming more frequent, triggering coral bleaching mortality events, thereby reducing coral abundance over large scales, this study shows that corals may be able to adapt if global warming is limited to a maximum of 2°C. Above that, coral adaptation is predicted to be too slow to keep up with the rate of warming and coral loss.

This research showcases Dr. Gouezo's PhD work on coral larval dispersal and connectivity, conducted while based in Palau, Micronesia, located in the western Pacific Ocean. During this time, she worked with the Palau International Coral Reef Center and was enrolled as an offshore student with Southern Cross University. The article underscores the ongoing international collaborations Dr. Gouezo has fostered as an early-career scientist, transitioning from her PhD research to her current postdoctoral research with Professor Peter Harrison.

This research, which simulates coral reef ecosystems and explores how corals may adapt to an uncertain future, emphasizes the urgent need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and improve reef management strategies. While decarbonizing the atmosphere remains a global and political challenge, Dr. Gouezo’s research focuses on refining local reef management efforts, particularly through optimizing coral recovery and scaling up coral restoration efforts to ensure surviving corals have a chance to adapt to an uncertain future.