How your donations are used

Simply put, every dollar donated to the Centenary Institute helps us to fund ground-breaking research into the causes, treatment and possible cures for cancer, cardiovascular and infectious diseases.

Your donations are used to:

• recruit and retain the best medical research scientists and to buy their supplies;
• buy state of the art equipment that allows new techniques to be pursued and research project times to be reduced; and
• help our scientists travel to conferences to build new global collaborations and ensure that the discoveries made at Centenary are shared research colleagues.

As a tax-deductible gift recepient, all donations to the Centenary Institute of $2 or more are tax deductible.

How do we know we're doing good science?

The Centenary Institute is committed to conducting world class research that will help people in Australia and around the world to live longer, healthier lives. We also understand that unless you can measure the impact you're having, a goal like that might not mean much.

Here are some of the measures we use to test the value of our work to the community.

Publications
When a discovery is made by a team of scientists it is submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. If it is deemed to have a valuable contribution to the global body of knowledge in that field then it is published. In 2009 Centenary published over 70 articles in peer-reviewed journals.

These published articles are referenced by other researchers when publishing their work. One measure of the impact that a published finding has had on its field is the number of times it is quoted in other journal articles. In a recent comparison against 16 other Australian medical research institutes, using the measure of average citations per paper, the Centenary Institute ranked second.

Grants
The peer review process for medical research grants ensures that only the most promising science receives funding and that duplication of research is avoided. In 2009 the Centenary Institute received $11.6M in peer reviewed funding from granting bodies.

In 2010 about 24% of Australian grant applications were funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council. Our success rate was almost 60% - more than double the national average.

Collaborations
By collaborating with colleagues in other Institutes, scientists at the Centenary Institute are able to harness the best and brightest minds to help solve the big questions in their field. In 2009 Centenary Institute was engaged in over 280 collaborative research projects in Australia and around the world.