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So coming to Melbourne it's obviously a much bigger city compared to Cork.
What is it, 4 million versus 300,000 so it's certainly, in terms of scale, it was
a lot different.
Like the way Melbourne is set up with the individual suburbs and kinda collectively
around the big city. So each of the individual suburbs do have a nice feel to them.
At the moment I'm living in St Kilda / Elwood so as you go into
Coles you go, 'Oh man, I'm back in Cork.'
Yeah there's a lot of Irish people definitely in St Kilda at the moment,
which is good. In terms of research focus areas it definitely falls within advanced materials
and devices so generally what we do is develop new materials
with more often then not for a specific application in mind. In terms of
that, you can develop water treatment, removal of contaminants from water
and also, probably, the other main area would be lithium metal batteries
using particular solvents called ionic liquids to improve
safety, durability life time of that particular technology.
One of the attractions of RMIT is that it's a smaller university
compared to some of the bigger ones here in Australia.
So the opportunity to setup your own way of doing research, your own research group
is definitely attractive. Kinda do it the way you want to do it.
You kinda set things up the way you think they should be
correctly done in terms of
research direction, how the research is carried out
also the types of students you want to get involved in that research
and also who you collaborate with.
So that freedom of choice to carry out good research
was definitely a big attraction.
One of the biggest things i did notice was the collective use of
instrumentation is particularly useful. Everyone in the school has free access to
this high end instrumentation and it's not always the case in other
places that you do research. There's individual budgets for machines and things like that.
So all this very good equipment certainly makes research a lot easier.
So I have been fortunate to win an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship.
Having the VC Fellowship before that certainly
helps in winning those types of fellowships later on.
And again you're judged on your track record
a lot with those externally funded research fellowships.
So demonstrating that you've actually won one competitively
with a university certainly aids in achieving those outcomes later on.