President's Column

摘要

I have recently returned from a nonlinear optics conference held in southern Mexico. It was pleasant to catch up on the latest research developments in an exotic location but my colleagues reported a number of worrying trends which will be familiar to researchers in Australia. Firstly the number of delegates attending the meeting was much lower than in previous years, due to the difficulty in sourcing travel money. Secondly, there were many reports that competitive research grants were becoming harder to get with success rates for some schemes much less than 10%. World class research activity requires international collaboration and grants and travel money are both key to supporting these types of research links. Of course, there are no easy solutions to these issues which will probably persist for a long period of time. The Australian sector is better off than many other places, due to the funding that flows from our strong international student market. However, on the flip side, it is much more costly for us visit our international collaborators, due to the tyranny of distance.