[mjackson]

> With the $18,000 fellowship, Gan will collaborate with industry and researchers around the world to work on new breakthroughs for data storage devices, and also see how his existing research can be used on a larger scale to rapidly improve the capacity of optics-based information technologies.

$18K seems like a drop in the bucket for powering this kind of research. Dr. Gan needs someone to introduce him to Kickstarter.

[miahi]

I guess this is because the technology only solves one of the problems (getting a very narrow writing beam/point) and not the others, like: making the disk so stable that it doesn't wobble for more than a few nanometers during rotation; keeping the laser beam focused on the disk; figuring what kind of rotational and seek speeds (=read/write speeds) you can handle with these limitations; making everything small and ready for market.

[cgio]

Given Australia salary scales, this may be a typo, 180,000 would sound normal.

[vacri]

Nope, it's $18k, but it's not a wage. It is low (Australia doesn't have the money that US universities are awash in), but it's for things like international travel to conferences and the like.

http://www.swinburne.edu.au/media-centre/news/2014/08/victor...

[a_bonobo]

True, its a pure travel scholarship, with all likelihood the student won't even get to touch the money. It will all handled by the university's finance department (it was in my case). And $18k is huge for an Australian travel grant, they're usually just $2k to $5k, some examples:

$1.8k in Perth http://www.postgraduate.uwa.edu.au/students/funding/travel $1k to $2.5k at Uni South Australia http://www.unisa.edu.au/student-life/global-opportunities/tr... $2k to $3k at Ian Potter foundation http://www.ianpotter.org.au/travel

etc.