Our team has a lot of experience with science communication and teaching, and we provide university courses every semester. But many people can’t dedicate several months to learn a new subject, or might prefer to learn about a specific topic instead. If you’re interested in learning more, we offer workshops across a range of topics:

• Advanced presentation skills
• High-stakes decision making
• Biases in human judgement
• Cognitive and human factors in forensic decision making
• Improving human performance and decision making

We can present these topics in a variety of formats including research seminars, interactive workshops, and intimate masterclasses.

We have a long history of conducting research to help external partners solve hard problems. We pride ourselves on work that is rigorous, collaborative, transparent, and amenable to scientific scrutiny. For example:

• We worked with The Reserve Bank of Australia on the perception of banknote security features.
• We designed an incentive system for reporting lost passports for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
• We prepared a report on nudges for Empirica Research on behalf of Victoria Road Safety.
• We worked with the National Institute of Forensic Science to develop forensic assessments and materials.
• We published reports on AI and mindfulness for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
• We conduct quarterly operational command decision making courses for the Queensland Police Service.

This research is important and impactful, but rarely leads to published papers due to confidentiality agreements, so we usually conduct this sort of project as “contract research.” The advantage is that it can be set up and performed quickly with the help of our very capable partnership managers at The University of Queensland.

Another possibility is to build a long-term collaboration funded in part by the Australian Research Council (ARC). The Linkage Project scheme provides between $50,000 to $300,000 per year for 2 to 5 years. One condition is that the partner organisation(s) provide a 25% minimum cash contribution combined with an in-kind contribution. For example, if you were willing to contribute $12,500 cash per year for 4 years along with $50,000 in-kind per year, then the ARC would provide $50,000 cash per year for the four years of the project.

This ARC Linkage scheme is rather competitive, but we have been very successful in the past. For instance, we received $332,000 from the ARC for a project titled, “Forensic reasoning and uncertainty: Identifying pattern and impression expertise” and $364,188 to “Create perceptual experts in Australia’s policing and security agencies”. Each of these projects involved nearly every major police agency in Australia.

The disadvantage of this sort of project is the lengthy delay in preparing the grant application and applying to the ARC before the project can begin. The advantage is that the scheme provides outstanding value for money.