Congratulations to the ANFF-NSW@UNSW team for winning the UNSW Faculty of Engineering Professional and Technical Excellence Group Award. The ANFF-Team is a diverse international team which was nominated for their world class skills and commitment to enabling world-changing research at ANFF-NSW@UNSW. Their know-how in nanofabrication processes, tools, infrastructures and operations successfully delivers new research capabilities to the Australian innovation community at UNSW and beyond, including the recent addition of $1M of RIIP funded tools in the 2020/21 with more in store for 2022.
The ANFF-Team at UNSW delivers around 15-20,000 hours/year of usage of ANFF tools, backed by face-to-face training, to support over 350 researchers to achieve safe and successful research outcomes. The research innovations empowered by the ANFF Team has produced >500 publications acknowledging ANFF-NSW since inception (with >10,000 citations), including more than 40 publications in the Nature/Science grouping of journals (5 in 2021). These acknowledged publications also verify that the ANFF-Team supports over $140-200M of ARC and NHMRC grants, including: 4 CoE’s (CQC2T, FLEET, CBNS, Exciton Science), 3 Laurette fellows, 6 Future Fellows, 5 DECRA’s, and 15 Discovery Projects. Even during the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic ANFF-NSW@UNSW remained open to support research throughout the pandemic. This was made possible by the ANFF-Team’s continuous adaption to implement upgraded COVID-safe protocols and engineering controls, such as live tracking of lab occupancy, to secure access to ANFF’s high-impact research facilities.
Overall the ANFF-team supports researchers across the discovery chain from early career researchers and start-ups to world-leading researchers across academia and industry, enabling Australian innovation to compete and collaborate on the world stage.
