Our new National Health and Medical Research Council Centre of Research Excellence for Stroke Innovation and Translation officially began in March 2023 and will run for 5 years. This national initiative includes some 20 grant holders from 12 Universities and Medical Research Institutes from five States, and in partnership with the Stroke Foundation.

The CRE funding will allow us to seed fund the next generation of stroke trials, help support new recruiting sites, capacity build our workforce and ensure the very best collaboration between all our major stroke organisations: Stroke Foundation, Australian Stroke Alliance, Australian Stroke Clinical Registry (AuSCR), The Florey, Australian Stroke Coalition, Australian and New Zealand Stroke Organisation (formerly the Stroke Society of Australasia) and State and Territory Stroke Clinical Networks.

Our Lived Experience Advisory Group are a vibrant and growing group of consumers who are working with the CRE to help ensure the very best organisation and ideas are part of our DNA. The CRE’s first consumer prize was awarded to Dr Sarah Wallace, University of Queensland for her outstanding consumer facing presentation at the joint Smart Strokes/SSA conference in Melbourne in August. Sarah is an NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow and speech pathologist with a fantastic portfolio of research for those with aphasia.

We are delighted to announce our first call for applications for CRE funding. We are offering grants up to $50,000 to seed fund new innovative stroke trial projects (see our application form). The deadline for submissions is 31st March 2024. To apply for these grants you also need to be an affiliate or grant holder of the CRE, but the affiliate application can done at the same time as the grant application.

Our first new CRE stroke trial recruitment site is Townsville and we are delighted to be able to capacity build in this important regional area.