Earlier this year DSTG Lead for Human Performance, Dr Nick Beagley hosted a visit at Fisherman’s Bend a delegation from the ACU. From ACU included Dr David Opar and Industry Professor Andrew Condon.
David Opar is the Director of the Sports Performance, Recovery, Injury & New Technologies (SPRINT) Research Centre, and is the Associate Professor in Exercise Science at the School of Behavioural and Health Sciences at ACU, and last year was awarded a Defence Science Institute (DSI) grant for his “Does anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury impair the molecular pathways responsible for building muscle?” project.
Andrew Condon is ACU’s Industry Professor Veterans and their Families and has recently been appointed as ACU’s first Industry Professor. ACU have established a Student Veteran Support Program that began with 20 veterans in 2019 and has now grown to 200 veterans, mostly in Brisbane, but now is being scaled nationally to increase student veteran numbers at ACU campuses in NSW, Victoria and the ACT.
The ACU Student Veteran Support Program includes a direct entry program for veteran students with an ATAR allocated based on their military training achievements, a 2 week Student Veteran Transition Program to set veterans up for success as a student, and a package of student support services to assist veterans through a successful higher education pathway into a new career. The human science courses at ACU are proving to be the most popular for Student Veterans at ACU, and thus Andrew was keen to learn about potential DSTG student research opportunities for veteran students who are likely to be highly motivated to do project work on DSTG related projects. Dr Nick Beagley also pointed out a growing pool of veteran human science graduates would be something DSTG recruiting would likely be keen to follow up on.
Learn more about the Veteran Support Program here.
Image credit : ACU (Left : David Opar, Nick Beagley, Andrew Condon, and Mark Patterson.)
