The ASMR is pleased to announce new partnerships with three leading organisations across health and medical research.
Avant Foundation
Avant drives transformational change in healthcare through medical research, medical education and health programs. Avant’s work is built around three objectives: supporting research that improves quality, safety, sustainability and professionalism in the practice of medicine; funding programs that help medical practitioners improve patient care and health outcomes; and assisting doctors who face disadvantage in pursuing their medical or healthcare studies.
For Australia’s medical researchers, this means real backing at both ends of the career pipeline. Avant Foundation Member Grants are open to all Avant members, with a particular focus on early career doctors as well as practices holding an Avant indemnity policy, giving emerging researchers a genuine entry point into funded research.
Avant Foundation Research Grants, meanwhile, provide up to $100,000 to organisations pursuing research that advances quality, safety and sustainability in medicine, with a special focus on health systems. In both cases, Avant is looking for projects grounded in the evidence base and genuinely capable of shifting how medicine is practised.
We know how hard it is for good research to find funding in Australia. Avant’s focus on career progression and practice-level change fills a gap our members feel keenly, and we’re proud to partner with an organisation putting real resources behind it.
The Burnet Institute
The Burnet Institute is one of Australia’s leading medical research and public health institutes. Since its beginnings at Fairfield Hospital in 1986, Burnet has built deep expertise across life sciences, public health and international development, driven by a simple but demanding belief: that access to medical research and health programs shouldn’t depend on who you are or where you live. That conviction was forged during the HIV epidemic of the 1980s, when stigma stood in the way of effective response as much as the virus itself and it still shapes how Burnet works today, in direct partnership with the communities most affected by the health issues it researches.
Today Burnet’s team of more than 600 staff and students works across some of the most pressing global health challenges, with a footprint spanning Australia, Papua New Guinea, Myanmar and Vanuatu. This is exactly the partner our members need standing alongside them. Health equity isn’t a footnote to good research; it’s often the hardest and most necessary part of the job, and Burnet has spent almost 40 years proving it can be done well. We’re glad to have them join the ASMR partner network.
The Florey
The Florey is the largest brain research centre in the Southern Hemisphere. For over 50 years, The Florey has been building the knowledge base behind neurological and psychiatric conditions, drawing on deep expertise, collaboration and world-class facilities to translate discovery into treatments that improve the lives of people living with brain and mental health conditions. As global urgency grows around finding causes, interventions and cures for conditions affecting the brain, The Florey’s work sits squarely at the frontier of that effort.
This partnership supports ASMR’s mission to advance health and medical research across Australia, with a particular focus on Early Career Researchers (ECRs) and campaigning for stronger government support for the sector.
Brain and mental health research remains chronically underfunded relative to the scale of need, and the researchers doing this work deserve partners willing to back both the science and the people carrying it out. We’re proud to have The Florey join us in that effort.