About Grand Challenges

Scientia Professor Rob Brooks is the Lead of the Grand Challenges Program. He is bringing to life a program to lead debate and inform policy concerning the complex challenges of the 21st Century. 

A hundred years from now, will you be taking a pill or using your own cells to cure disease? This is just one of the predictions from four futurists who imagine how some of our biggest challenges will play out.

As UNSW turns 70, what will the world look like when we fast forward another 70 years? Explore the future our researchers have envisioned in this series of short talks for restless minds. 

It’s a really critical time in terms of shaping the future. People seem to think the future is something that just happens to us.

What we don’t understand often looks dangerous. But to cope with inevitable and accelerating change, we need to go beyond technophobia and moral panic and dive into what seems dangerous.

In a first-time collaboration, UNSW’s outreach program ASPIRE joined forces with Grand Challenges to give Year 10 students a closer look at how the university confronts the greatest issues facing humanity.

UNSW's inaugural UNSOMNIA event asked our expert researchers "What keeps you up at night?". Find out in this fast-paced program of thought-provoking presentations.

UNSOMNIA returned in 2017 to ask ten of our biggest thinkers "What needs to change?".  Their ideas evoked a series of talks covering everything form sex to civility.