Great News – CQUniversity in ERA 2012

Over forty years ago Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong went to the moon. They became famous and basked in the limelight of success. I think however that everybody now acknowledges that thousands of people contributed to that successful moon landing (conspiracy theorists aside). In fact it can be argued that the American people through their taxes contributed to the success.

Today we have learnt that CQUniversity research efforts have been judged as outstanding by the Excellence in Research Assessment exercise carried out by the Australian Government. In two years since the last exercise our research output and quality have increased immensely. This time round we rated as having research that is well above world standard in two divisions and three sub divisions. We also had another sub divisional area that was at world standard –so without getting technical –let’s just say this is fantastic!

We congratulate our ‘rock star’ researchers (our Collins’, Aldrin’s and Armstrong’s) for this result – we are all so proud of you.

Equally I also want to congratulate everyone within the University who has made this remarkable achievement possible - the cleaners who cleaned up after research events, the finance people who sorted out the money issues, the grounds people and caterers who put up the signs and catered for research events, the People and Culture folks who helped with recruitment, the facilities staff who helped build the research facilities, the librarians who did the literature searching, the graduations staff who worked with the research students, the media and communications people who got the message out there, the marketing staff who recruited the students etc, etc. Then of course there are the people who were directly involved with supporting the researchers - their technical staff, the ITD people who provided the computer support and the folks in the research office that did all the paper work, administration and support. Then there are my senior colleagues – the Deans, Associate Deans, PVCs and DVCs. In particular we owe a great debt to Chad Hewitt and former DVC Academic & Research Jennelle Kyd.

I also want to congratulate all our teaching staff – particularly those who decided to become teaching scholars. By doing this you contributed to this result as much as anyone.

It is also important to recognise the engagement between CQUniversity and our Regional Engagement Committees who have all played a very important part in this success by showing us what needed to be researched.

A special mention must also go to our fellow Regional University Network counterpart SCU who is now ranked 10 up from 25 in 2010 – this is outstanding - you are an example of how important regional universities are to our nation.

In conclusion, CQUniversity has done a lot over the past 18 months in terms of research that did not contribute towards this result, so I am very confident (and excited) that in a few years’ time we will do even better as we move toward our goal of being a GREAT university.

This is a wonderful early Christmas present.