ANU was founded 75 years ago in response to a global crisis the end of world war ii founded as
a resource to the nation today is no different now more than ever as Australia's national university
it is up to us to help navigate disruption as we emerge from another global crisis and to continue
to deliver on our critical mission. Food security is a societal problem, we've got a responsibility
to have enough food for each other, it's an environmental problem, we've got to do it with
the least impact on the planet and it's actually a global security problem by 2050 we've got to
increase production by about 60 how we're looking to do that is to increase the energy efficiency
of plants. To deal with climate change we need to decarbonise global energy industrial and transport
systems that's what we address in our research how can we decarbonise and how can we do it
in a way that is economically beneficial that aids with the renewal of our industrial systems and
how can we decarbonise in a way that benefits Australia's regional development my research
deals with religion and politics and i look at particularly how religion and politics affect the
middle east so the biggest challenge for Australia is managing this crowded horizon of risk that the
nation faces whether it's great power competition whether it's covert climate political violence
our research team builds and engineers components that can be used to improve crop productivity and
how crops perform in challenging environments and we build components that can be inserted
into separation technologies so you can turn waste liquids into valuable resources
if we want to transform the way that we use energy we need to use solar not just to produce
electricity but to produce energy for everything that we use in society and to do this we need
to make solar energy more efficient and cheaper so we're using new materials and nanotechnology
to create world-leading efficiency solar cells ANU Institute for Space is the front door to
ANU space capability and underneath the institute we have access to 42 research scores
and all of the space infrastructure that a u can bring to the table so we have experts on mission
specialists in everything from bushfire mitigation to advanced communications to
satellite design and to space law so what we're really doing in this intellectual property space
with our indigenous-led research is that we're creating those opportunities to really navigate
the space of difficult and complex systems that's what we do well in ANU we really are
great at problem solving we bring new technologies like virtual reality into the classroom because we
want to stimulate and engage our students we want them to be active participants in their learning
journey ANU isn't just any university it's the national university and that means we have a
whole set of responsibilities not just to our own scholarship and our own ideas but to our country
and to our citizens and to our region this is the place in the national capital where ideas and
research and thinking enmesh with the real world challenges of policy in a time of uncertainty the
university becomes especially important because you know our whole job is looking for truth so
we're sort of that's what we're trained for that's what we're trying to do we're trying
to draw connections between things we're trying to get good people together to work on problems
and we're trying to do it with a certain amount of critical distance from the day-to-day operations
so we can look for truth without getting wrapped up in a lot of the problems that say politicians
or other kinds of professionals might have to deal with so what we always do whether it's
through education or research or outreach is we bring people together we bring people together and
enable them to think differently about things so whether we bring students together who come from
different countries different religions different ethnic backgrounds they learn together they learn
to engage with each other they learn to understand the world from each other's point of view
and that's the critical thing that we do as a university and we encourage people to
think for themselves we give them the skills to think for themselves and we challenge them and
that enables us and should enable us i think to help shape new futures for all of us i
mean we're living in an extraordinarily terrible awful time in many many ways
but as a university we have an opportunity to shape the future in a new way and that is
incredibly important and really exciting ANU has a special mission as our country's first and only
national university we were established by an act of the federal parliament to be an intellectual
powerhouse that could respond to and solve major national and international challenges over the
past 75 years we have delivered for communities across Australia and our region and with our world
leading academics and our highly talented students we will continue to fulfill our founding mission.