Hidden acknowledgements: a funding and authorship trail
On 31 December 2025 an investigation in an Australian masthead reported that the Australian National University (ANU) has co‑authored physics papers with researchers affiliated to Russia’s National Research Nuclear University MEPhI and the Kurchatov Institute while those projects acknowledged Australian Research Council funding and a U.S. defence‑linked contract. The reporting flagged more than $1 million in ARC and U.S. defence‑related support across several recent metasurface papers and suggested a substantial portion was U.S. Department of Defence funding. The underlying academic publications list ANU and Russian co‑authors and include explicit funding acknowledgements that name an ARC discovery grant and a U.S. contract routed via the International Technology Center Indo‑Pacific (ITC IPAC) and the U.S. Army Research Office (contract FA520923C0023).”
What the papers actually say
Notably, the academic acknowledgements identify a U.S. Army Research Office (ARO) contract rather than a U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) award. That detail matters because the Australian reporting named Air Force laboratory funding as part of the U.S. contribution; the primary research files instead show the ITC IPAC route and ARO contract cited repeatedly in the published acknowledgements. In short: the grant recipients disclose ARC and U.S. defence‑linked support, but the specific U.S. office named by the newspaper differs from the contract cited in the peer‑reviewed papers.
Why the collaborations raise policy and security questions
Metasurface research sits at the intersection of fundamental optics and engineering with potential dual use. The papers describe techniques to control circular dichroism, polarization and other properties of light with subwavelength nanostructures — capabilities that can be translated into tighter encryption channels, compact sensing systems, or, in principle, technologies relevant to signature control and stealth. That technical versatility is why government research programs and defence laboratories often fund work in this area, and why national security agencies treat some collaborations with extra scrutiny. The Australian domestic intelligence chief has repeatedly warned that foreign intelligence services target defence‑relevant research and AUKUS‑related projects; that broader security environment is the context for the questions being asked of university partnerships.
At the same time, cross‑border authorship and shared datasets are routine in optics and condensed‑matter physics. International teams raise the quality and throughput of research; co‑authorship with a named individual at a Russian university does not automatically equate to direct involvement with national weapons programs. But some Russian institutes — including parts of MEPhI and the Kurchatov research centres — historically work closely with Russia’s nuclear complex and with closed‑city research centres such as Sarov and Snezhinsk. That institutional overlap is what spurred the alarm in reportage: affiliations on the author list that link, at least administratively, to organisations embedded in Russia’s state nuclear and defence ecosystem.
University policy, government oversight and the 2022 pledge
ANU publicly pledged in March 2022 to “suspend all links with institutions in Russia” after Russia’s large‑scale invasion of Ukraine; the university’s campus statements and op‑eds from senior executives made that position clear. The discovery of co‑authored papers and recurring acknowledgements of ARC and U.S. defence‑linked contracts has therefore prompted questions about how that suspension was interpreted and implemented in practice and whether the university’s internal approvals, national security checks and grant reporting correctly captured the risks. In response to the reporting, ANU told the newspaper that it maintains frameworks and practices to counter foreign interference and works with Australian government agencies on risk assessments.
Separately, the Australian Research Council operates within a framework where ministerial approval can be applied to grant recommendations on national security, defence or international relations grounds. Parliamentary materials and recent legislative changes reaffirm that, in designated programs and in cases where security concerns arise, the Minister for Education may withhold approval or order a review. That means a recommended grant is not invisible to national security review, and the minister retains a residual power to intervene in exceptional circumstances. How, and whether, those tools were used in specific instances is not disclosed in the academic acknowledgements; formal ministerial statements have not been published to date in relation to the identified papers.
Sanctions and individual status
The Kurchatov Institute and several Russian research entities have been designated on Australian and allied sanctions lists in recent years. Those designations relate to institutional links in the Russian state scientific complex and are separate to individual researchers’ academic affiliations. The newspaper’s reporting states the particular Russian scientist named in the collaborations is not personally sanctioned; the Australian sanctions legal instrument and lists identify entities such as the National Research Centre Kurchatov Institute among designated organisations. That distinction — institution vs individual — is central to legal and policy assessments because sanctions prohibitions and export‑control rules operate differently depending on whether an entity or a named person is designated.
Where the public record is clear — and where it isn’t
- Clear: peer‑reviewed papers list ANU, MEPhI and Kurchatov/Shubnikov affiliations and cite ARC DP210101292 and an ITC IPAC/ARO contract (FA520923C0023) in their acknowledgements. These are public, citable parts of the scientific record.
- Less clear: how university governance treated the 2022 suspension pledge in practice for these collaborations; whether each grant underwent a specific national‑security review and what findings those reviews produced; and why some press accounts cite AFRL funding while the papers cite an ARO contract. Those are administrative details that do not typically appear in publication acknowledgements and so require disclosure from funders or university grants offices.
- Open question: whether the technical results create a material national‑security risk beyond ordinary scientific publication. The dual‑use potential of photonics is real, but turning lab‑scale demonstrations into operational systems involves engineering steps, controlled facilities, and often classified work — so publication alone does not equate to immediate transfer of weapons capability.
Why this matters beyond headlines
The episode is a case study in how globalised science, national security, and public accountability interact. Universities compete for talent and grants, and the peer‑reviewed literature is the ledger of collaboration — but when collaborators are connected to state institutions that sit inside sanctioned or defence complexes, the public policy stakes rise. For governments, the tradeoff is between open exchange that drives scientific progress and the need to protect sensitive expertise, infrastructure and materials from being misused. For universities, the questions are about transparency, due diligence, and whether research approvals and grant reporting adequately capture geopolitical risk. For the public, there is a straightforward expectation that taxpayer money should be spent in ways consistent with national security and foreign‑policy settings.
At the time of publication of this piece, the primary, citable documents remain the academic papers and their acknowledgements, the ANU statements from 2022 on suspending links with Russian institutions, and Australia’s sanctions instruments. Those documents make clear both the scientific collaborations and the legal‑policy framework in which they sit — but they stop short of the administrative detail that would resolve the outstanding questions about approvals, checks and the precise mix of U.S. defence funding. Reporters have drawn a line from those facts to policy concerns; national security agencies and the university sector will decide whether further reviews or disclosures are required.
Sources
- Physical Review Letters (Chiral Dichroism in Resonant Metasurfaces with Monoclinic Lattices; PRL paper and arXiv preprint)
- Australian National University (public statements and research pages on metasurface work)
- National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (institutional affiliations listed in the academic publications)
- Australian Government (Autonomous Sanctions (Designated Persons and Entities and Declared Persons – Russia and Ukraine) List and ARC governance materials)
