The ANU Grand Challenges Scheme funds transformative research with the potential to radically change our understanding of, and responses to, the world’s most intractable problems. It’s an ambitious and broad reaching initiative designed to fund long-term programmes of research not typically supported by external competitive funding.

Many academics from Research School of Psychology are involved in the submission “Building Brighter Futures: Child and youth mental health, well-being and resilience in the 21^st Century”. There are significant challenges in 'being young' in today’s world. Children today are living in societies that are complex in ways that previous generations could not have imagined and are not fairing well (e.g., political disengagement, being overweight, stress, self-harm, substance use, risk-taking behavior). There is a growing consensus that there has been an under-investment in young people today and that more needs to be done to “enable this vital age cohort to survive, thrive, and transform their world—and ours” (Ban Ki-moon, 2016. P. 2357). But what needs to be done to solve this grand challenge of building brighter futures?  The submission includes interested parties from the Centre for Mental Health Research, Centre for Social Research & Methods, Crawford, National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Psychology, School of Regulation & Global Governance. Leave your comments on the Grand Challenges Portal. 

Research School of Psychology's Boris Bizumic and Michael Platow are members of Migration’s role in transforming society, Michael Platow is a member of Closing the loop in food production for healthy people and a healthy planet and The Grand Challenge of Negative Emissions, Rhonda Brown is a member of End of Life Care; a flagship for the next generation framework for knowledge discovery in healthcare, Michael Smithson is a member of A Wellbeing Ecological-economy ALLiance (WE-ALL), Dirk Van Rooy is a member of The Web as an Inclusive and Safe Space and Deborah Apthorp is a member of Emptying the trash collaboratively and Achieving Knowledge Credibility in a Post-Truth World