Profile
Monash is the youngest member of the Group of Eight, the coalition of Australia’s most prestigious research-intensive universities. The university’s youthfulness shows through in the way it approaches education and research. It isn’t wedded to convention, which means students are offered a first-class education while being encouraged to become agents of change.
Monash has five local campuses throughout the state of Victoria, two international campuses – one in Sunway, Malaysia and another in South Africa and international study centres in the People’s Republic of China, Italy and India. That is more campuses across the world than any other Australian university and Monash’s new alliance with the University of Warwick (UK) has further expanded the University’s global footprint.
Named after engineer, military leader and public administrator Sir John Monash, Monash University was established by an Act of Parliament in 1958. Since the first students began their studies at the university’s foundation campus in 1961, Monash has grown to become Australia’s largest university.
Indeed, the concept of transformation lies at the heart of the Monash philosophy. For students, researchers and staff, that philosophy is not only about transforming their own lives but also making a difference to the lives of others.
Partnerships – local and global
Monash has a strong track record of long-term, successful relationships with industry, government and the community. Its partnerships and engagement programs range from close links with immediate neighbours to groundbreaking collaborations with organisations across the world.
The Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IITB) and Monash University, Australia have joined forces to create a unique Joint Venture (JV) research academy (“The Academy”) that aims at enhancing research collaborations between Australia and India. The Academy aims to attract the best talent – students as well as academic and research staff – to work on goal-directed, crossdisciplinary grand-challenges. Research scholars are supervised by the best minds from IIT Bombay, Monash University and Industry Partners of The Academy along with participation from Industry. Since The Academy is under-pinned by a PhD Agreement between IIT Bombay and Monash, students will receive a dual-badged PhD degree from IIT Bombay and Monash University, thereby providing another distinct value proposition that would help attract the best students into The Academy.
Significant research breakthroughs
Monash researchers have been leaders in areas like IVF and reproduction, road safety, malaria and influenza treatment, and stem cells for many years, and in some cases, decades.
In the last twenty years alone, Monash researchers have:
- designed and synthesised a drug which would be released as the breakthough anti-flu pharmaceutical product, Relenza in 1999.
- developed a single, oral-dose cure for malaria, effective in laboratory conditions (2004). Today, the new drug is in the second phase of clinical trials on humans and promises to be cheap, easy to manufacture and quick to administer.
- worked out how to deactivate the digestive enzyme in our bodies used by the malarial parasite to sustain itself (2009). This discovery is also being used to develop drugs to treat malaria.
- discovered a potential new treatment for breast cancer (2010). Over four years, their research team analysed more than 400 human breast cancer tissue samples. They found that more aggressive breast tumours were less likely to be accompanied by the presence of a protein known as INPP4B. They then created an antibody to INPP4B, which easily detects the protein in biopsies.
- demonstrated that nerve stem cells could be derived from human embryonic stem cells in the laboratory (2000). They later showed that, outside of the laboratory, human embryonic stem cells could develop into nerve cells, raising the revolutionary prospect of treating a range of diseases from Parkinson’s through to Alzheimer’s and diabetes.
Reputation
University Rankings
Monash is ranked:
- in the top one per cent of world universities – 83rd in the world – according to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (2014–2015)
- in the top 150 world universities, with an estimated rank of 115th according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities 2014.
Leaders from the world’s most successful companies consistently rate Monash as a preferred university from which to hire graduates. Global Employability Rankings, 2011–2013, New York Times
Ranked 33rd in the world from which to hire graduates (Global Employability University Rankings, 2014)
The Good Universities Guide 2015 awarded Monash five stars for:
- staff qualifications
- student retention
- research intensivity
- research grants.
Top one per cent of business employability education providers. Monash is the only Group of Eight university with triple crown international business accreditation within the Faculty of Business and Economics:
- AACSB
- EQUIS
- AMBA.
Discipline Rankings
Monash is ranked:
- the best university in Australia for chemisty, engineering*, and computer science* (*ranked equal first)(Academic Ranking of World Universities, 2013)
- 46th in the world for clinical, pre-clinical and health (Times Higher Education, 2014–2015)
- 44th in the world for arts and humanities (Times Higher Education, 2014–2015)
- 48th in the world for engineering and technology (Times Higher Education, 2014–2015).
Monash is a member of the Group of Eight, an alliance of leading Australian universities recognised for their excellence in teaching and research. Group of Eight universities produce graduates who find full-time employment sooner, begin on higher salaries, and are more likely to move onto postgraduate studies than graduates from other Australian universities.
Ambition
Monash is a university of progress and optimism. It sees a brighter future as more than just possible – it is something for which the university is directly responsible; something it can help to create.
It is the university’s role to tackle the big questions and meet the challenges the future holds. Above all, the university will achieve this through education and investigation, which is why Monash has an ambition to become one of the world’s top research and teaching institutions.
The university’s people are its most valued asset. Monash academics are among the very best in the world, its professional staff are revolutionising the way the university operates as an organisation and the success of its students continues to be limited only by the extent of their own imaginations.
The Monash global footprint is the broadest of any Australian university and the university will continue to engage with the world on all fronts, including research, teaching and collaborative partnerships. The university seeks to be more than an agent of community action and development,
however – Monash wants to embed itself in the communities that it serves.
