MDHS Discovery Awards

The MDHS Discovery Awards recognise outstanding contributions towards the delivery of high-impact research and the building of a world-leading research community. They celebrate the research that helps achieve the goals of Advancing Health 2030, including recognition researchers, external partnerships, collaborations across disciplinary boundaries, and graduate research supervision.

These awards complement other forms of research recognition that arise through publications, external grants, early-career grants, fellowships, and academic societies.

Discovery Awards

  • Nominees must demonstrate a sustained record of high-quality graduate researcher supervision at the University of Melbourne, assessed relative to opportunity and disciplinary norms. They should exhibit exemplary supervisory practices that foster both research excellence and broader professional skill development. These practices should support graduate researchers to become well-rounded, independent, and successful in their chosen fields. This award is open to individual supervisors only.

  • Nominees will have demonstrated exceptional leadership in interdisciplinary research establishing or advancing impactful collaborations and programs that span multiple disciplines and typically involve partnerships across faculties or schools.

  • Nominees for this award should be early career researchers (less than 6 years’ experience) and will have an outstanding research achievement relative to individual and professional opportunity and career-stage.

  • Nominees for this award should be mid-career researchers (6-10 years’ experience) and will have an outstanding research achievement relative to individual and professional opportunity and career-stage.

  • Nominees for this award should be senior career researchers (more than 10 years’ experience) and will have an outstanding research achievement relative to individual and professional opportunity and career-stage.

Nomination criteria for Discovery Awards

Nominators should provide evidence to support the nomination in the respective award using the forms of evidence that best makes their case and demonstrate impact. These may include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Clearly outline the challenge or problem that the research is trying to address.
  • Research outcomes with demonstrated impact.
  • The membership of teams that contributed to the outcomes, including aspects such as inclusion of graduate researchers and early-career researchers and the presence of collaborators from diverse disciplines and organisations.
  • Evidence of testimony from beneficiaries of the research or activity.
  • Trajectories of research programs from conception to communication or deployment of outcomes.
  • Demonstrated alignment with Advancing Health 2030.
  • Demonstration and promotion with Faculty Values.
  • Preference will be given to initiatives that were conducted in, or came to fruition, over the last 12 months except for *Award for Graduate Researcher Supervision (Individual).

How to apply