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2018 Golden Graduates Morning Tea
Get PDFThe attached powerpoint and pdf document were prepared to commemorate the 2018 Golden Graduate's morning tea celebratio
Queensland University of Technology: Annual Report 2018
Get PDFThroughout 2018 QUT continued to
live true to its identity as a university
for the real world, adhering to the
highest standards in education and
research, and engaging with industry,
government and the community to
improve the lives of individuals and
society.
It has been a year of transition, with a
new Vice-Chancellor, a new Registrar,
and a minor reorganisation in the
university executive associated with
a new position of Vice-President
(Business Development). Yet it has
also been a year of stability and
consolidation, with the university
community building on the remarkable
legacy of financial security, academic
achievement and common purpose
bequeathed us by former Vice�Chancellor Emeritus Professor Peter
Coaldrake and his team.
Along with other higher education
providers, the structural environment
in which QUT operates continues to be
challenging. Features of the operating
environment to which QUT responded
in 2018 included geopolitical factors
and changes to the funding model.
Geopolitical and diplomatic
developments presented some
challenges to international
engagement during 2018, with
potential to disturb student recruitment
and research collaboration. With
relatively modest proportions of
international students, however, QUT
was less exposed to these issues
than most across the sector, and our
positive long-term relationships with
overseas institutions and government
agencies helped ensure we were not
impacted materially.
The pause in growth of Commonwealth
Supported Places mandated in the
Australian Government’s Mid-Year
Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO)
in December 2017 caused an abrupt
reduction in enrolment against
forecast (of an estimated 10,000
places) and therefore revenue (to an
estimated value of 330
million nationally, hypothecated
to a distribution of supplementary
funding to certain rural and regional
universities, as well as revelations of
Ministerial intervention in Australian
Research Council grant processes,
have challenged the confidence of
the research sector in the open,
transparent and merit-based allocation
of public research funding. Along with
our peak body, Universities Australia,
and other universities, QUT continues
to advocate for the preservation of a
stable, fair and rigorous peer-review
system, in accordance with world’s
best practice.
It became apparent during 2018 that
QUT’s interests would be best served
by amicably departing the Australian
Technology Network (ATN) in order
to maximise our opportunities to
collaborate more widely across the
sector and to put forward our own
policy perspectives to government,
industry and international partners.
We continue to work fruitfully with
the remaining ATN members where
mutually beneficial, and are continuing
to completion a number of ATN
projects in which we collaborate.
Despite these challenges in QUT’s
operating environment, QUT had
significant achievements during
the year.
QUT occupies a strong position in the
Top 20 Young Universities in the World
in the 2019 QS Top 50 under 50, and
top 300 in the Academic Ranking of
World Universities.
Rankings are not as illuminating
as stories, however, and 2018 has
seen literally hundreds of stories of
individual and team accomplishment
among QUT staff, students and alumni.
Our achievements across research,
learning and teaching, and
professional practice are neatly
exemplified by accolades earned by
QUT people at the intersection of
all three domains. In April, Creative
Industries alumna Dr Emily O’Grady,
then a QUT PhD candidate, was
awarded the coveted Vogel Literary
Award for her novel The Yellow
House, the fiction component of her
practice-led doctoral thesis in creative
writing. In November, Professor
Dietmar Hutmacher was recognised
for pioneering the field of 3D printing
in medicine with the 2018 Ramaciotti
Medal for Excellence in Biomedical
Research.
QUT has long-standing research
performance across a breadth
of fields. This year Associate
Professor Makrina Totsika broke
new ground in the study of novel
antimicrobial therapies for multidrug
resistant bacteria, and Professor
Matthew Dunbabin was part of the
Larval Restoration Project team
that undertook world-first coral
restoration on the Great Barrier
Reef. The Australian rated QUT’s
Entrepreneurship research number
one nationally in its Research
Supplement in September,
recognising our long-standing
commitment to research, teaching
and nurturing Australia’s next
generation of entrepreneurs.
Our teachers have continued an
enduring tradition of teaching
excellence, recognised time and
again through national accolades and
international plaudits. Indeed, close to
650 of our academic and professional
staff have been made Fellows of the
UK’s Higher Education Academy. The
Faculty of Law and QUT Business
School were both named in the top
100 in their disciplines globally in
this year’s Times Higher Education
rankings, with the Faculty of Education
featuring within the 101–125 ranking
band, an achievement that will only be
strengthened with the opening of the
new Kelvin Grove Education Precinct
in 2019.
True to our real-world identity, student
learning takes place at QUT through
a sophisticated blend of classroom,
online, and work-integrated learning.
We opened access to high-quality
education and are addressing
workforce needs through QUT
Online, QUTeX and free MOOCs in
partnership with FutureLearn. QUT’s
work-integrated learning success is
internationally recognised, ranking
within the top 25 in the world for
Employer-Student Connections in
the 2019 QS Graduate Employability
Rankings.
QUT contributed 16 athletes to the
Gold Coast Commonwealth Games,
representing Australia, Papua New
Guinea and Malta and bringing
home an incredible haul of 12 gold
medals, six silver and two bronze.
We also launched Australia’s first
official university eSports program,
the brainchild of two undergraduate
psychology student founders—
Michael Trotter and Dylan Poulus—
who are daring to rethink the way we
learn through the process of ‘reverse
gamification.’
Our commitment to equity and
excellence can be seen in the
continuing growth of the QUT
Learning Potential Fund. Now in
its twentieth year, the LPF has
contributed over 17 000 scholarships
and bursaries to assist students in
financial need to access high-quality
higher education. The LPF endowment
passed 1.6 million—including an incredibly
generous $1 million from our 2014
QUT Alumni of the Year winner, Greg
Creed. The LPF is substantially driven
by the QUT staff giving program,
in which over 700 QUT staff make
routine payroll deductions to benefit
students in need, as well as a range of
other philanthropic causes. The long�standing generosity of our staff was
recognised as the ‘Best Public Sector
Program’ at the 2018 Workplace
Giving Excellence Awards.
We have recently committed to a
new Master Plan, with community
engagement at its heart. Our campus
integration throughout the Kelvin Grove
Village is unique in Australia, and the
continuity of our campuses with the
Brisbane CBD, State Parliament and
the Herston health precinct positions
QUT as a core element of the state’s
knowledge corridor.
This work of renewal continues
at the strategic level as well, as
we embark on an update of the
university’s guiding document, the
Blueprint, to more clearly capture
the pre-eminence of our academic
purpose in everything we do at QUT.
We are proud of the progress QUT
continues to make and the standing
we enjoy in the community. We
know they are entirely a function of
the quality and dedication of our
students and remarkable alumni,
as well as the energy, commitment
and achievements of outstanding
academic and professional staff at
all levels across the organisation. We
wish to acknowledge in particular the
members of QUT Council for their
guidance and support of the university.
We commend this report to all
colleagues, partners and stakeholders in the university
