Deakin named a 2025 'Fast Mover'

Each year, the magazine highlights Australia's research leaders and the institutes at the forefront of knowledge.

Deakin has been listed as one of 15 'Fast Mover' universities, whose research outputs – in quality and quantity – have grown by more than 5% in the last year.

The magazine also named Deakin as the leading research institution in the world in the fields of Academic and Psychological Testing and Higher Education.

Deakin's excellence in education research was further acknowledged with Deakin Distinguished Professor David Boud from the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning named the world leader in Higher Education Research.

The magazine recognised Deakin's broad research excellence, naming the University as Australia's leading institute in 13 fields of research and eight Deakin academics as leaders in their fields.

In addition, Research Fellow Ben Wood from Deakin's School of Health and Social Development has been named one of only eight 'Rising Stars', early career researchers whose work is recognises as the best in their discipline.

Deakin Vice-Chancellor, Professor Iain Martin says a key achievement of Deakin has been the university's work to boost the benefit of its research to industry and the community on top of traditional academic measures of success, such as number of publications and citations.

'There's a lot of discovery-based work going on in the lab. But at the same time there's an awful lot of industry-facing activity,' he says.

Deakin leads Australia across 13 research categories

Deakin was named Australia's leading research institute in 13 categories across Engineering and Computer Science; Health and Medical Sciences; and Humanities, Literature and Arts.

• Evolutionary Computation
• Religion
• Textile Engineering
• Wood Science and Technology
• Child and Adolescent Psychology
• Nutrition Science
• Film
• Academic and Psychological Testing
• Diplomacy and International Relations
• Higher Education
• Human Migration
• Military Studies
• Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies

Deakin research experts in the spotlight

Each year, The Australian names the top Australian researchers in 250 fields of research over eight disciplines, with the aim of highlighting the excellence and relevance of Australia's research effort.

Eight Deakin researchers were named leaders across four disciplines:

• Chemical and Material Sciences:
  • Electrochemistry – Maria Forsyth
• Engineering and Computer Science:
  • Computer Hardware Design – Van Thanh Huynh
  • Fuzzy Systems – Gleb Beliakov
• Humanities, Literature and Arts:
  • Literature and Writing – Alyson Miller
  • Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies – Zouhir Gabsi
  • Religion – Ihsan Yilmaz
• Social Sciences:
  • Higher Education – David Boud
  • Human Migration – Fethi Mansouri

About the 2025 Research magazine

Every year since 2018, The Australian's annual Research magazine has presented a picture of Australia's best research.

Talent discovery and research analytics firm League of Scholars analyse publicly available data about researchers and their work to create the lists of top research performers.

The top 250 lists are created using an 'impact score' that takes into account the quality and quantity of research. The impact score is equal to the number of citations for papers published (by the individual or the institution) in the top 20 journals of each particular field in the past five years.

This year, the magazine has selected the 'Rising Stars' of Australian research, one from each major discipline, by looking at researchers with the highest annualised H-index in their discipline that are less than five years into their research career.