Empowering international partnerships and tech development

In the latest iteration of the GCF, Australian and South Korean teams were supported to advance a wide range of projects across medical technology, hydrogen, artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and more.

Over 12 months, GCF support allowed Australian researchers to build relationships with Korean industry, and Korean researchers with Australian industry. Mutually beneficial and leveraging infrastructure, skills and ideas from each team, these projects are the first step in collaborations that will last for many years to come.

Dr Ann-Na Cho from the University of Sydney studies human brain tissue, in particular lab-grown tissue that can be used to study brain cancers and potential treatments. Through a GCF project, she and her team worked with a Korean-based biotech company Nanobiosystems to advance nanomanufacturing techniques that enable their new “Brain-on-a-chip” technology. At the conclusion of the project, Dr Cho says, “the outcome that makes us most hopeful is the establishment of a realistic pathway towards scalable, human-relevant neurotechnology that can improve how neurological diseases and treatments are studied.”

She outlines also that the project provided a platform for much more than simply scientific collaboration: “What was most surprising was how a focused biomedical engineering project could become a platform for cross-national dialogue and institutional partnership-building.”

Chanoh Park from Queensland-based robotics startup RoviPro collaborated with Professor Soohwan Kim’s research group at Kwangwoon University to advance technology for autonomous, AI-driven robot fleets for use in large automated environments such as manufacturing, logistics and agriculture. A fruitful relationship that has taken them from prototype to proof-of-concept, with interest in their software and hardware from partners all over the world, this project has helped boost a promising Australian R&D opportunity.

Dr Park says, “The most surprising part of the project was discovering that the value of the system was not limited to end users. At the beginning, we expected that the strongest interest would come from factories, warehouses, farms and other organisations that directly operate robots. However, after showing the system to different types of stakeholders, we realised that there is also very strong demand from robot manufacturers and system integrators.”

The eight 2026 GCF projects:

• Renewable energy and resources
  • Offshore Wind Farm Cable Watch, Patrick Cha – EOS Australia P/L
  • Enabling Mobile PV Recycling: Regulatory Investigations and Pathways, Moonyong Kim – UNSW Sydney
  • Battery R&D for Optimised Electrification of 100-Tonne Mining Trucks, Clayton Fraklin – Electric Power Conversions Australia
  • Scalable Hydrogen-on-Demand Systems Using Advanced Membrane Technologies for Global Deployment, Matthew Hill – Monash University
• Robotics
  • Multichannel AI(LLM)-Driven Robot Fleet Control System, Chanoh Park – RoviPro
  • A Serious Game to Simulate AI and Robotic Platforms for Assisting Shipyard Transporters, Russell Brinkworth – Flinders University
• Biotechnology
  • Ammonia-Responsive Contraction Actuator for Smart Food Packaging, Shima Jafarzadeh – Deakin University, Waurn Pond
  • Building an ecosystem for Bio-Mimetic Nanotopography for Scalable Lab-grown Human Brain Tissue, Ann Na Cho – The University of Sydney

These examples are just a few of the great outcomes from the Global Connections Fund. Partnerships created here will carry forward into improved technology, new businesses, and from there, advances in how we live, care for our health, and operate modern businesses.