Farewell to Pierre Del Moral & Justin Wishart
Published on the 23 Nov 2015
School members congregated in the staff room this morning to farewell two members of staff, Pierre Del Moral and Justin Wishart.
Statisticians Professor Del Moral and Dr Wishart were wished all the best and thanked for their service by Ian Doust (Acting Head of School) and Scott Sisson (Acting Head of Statistics).
Professor Del Moral will return to France, where he will take up a position as Research Director at INRIA. He told the gathering that he had enjoyed his time at UNSW, and hopes to return to visit soon. Prof Del Moral has a daughter who is currently living in Sydney.
Dr Wishart is taking up a Lectureship at Macquarie University. He has moved house in order to be located closer to the university, and said that he is excited about his new role.
Professor Del Moral joined the School in January 2014. He is known internationally for his work on the development of the theory on stochastic particle methods in nonlinear filtering, numerical physics, engineering and information 
theory.
He has been a very active member of the School, who was involved in organising and delivering presentations at UNSW workshops (including the Risk: Modelling, Optimization and Inference UNSW-CSIRO Workshop in December 2014, and the ABC in Sydney workshop in July 2014). He also presented an inspiring talk about his academic career to our higher degree students at the 2014 Advanced Mathematics Day.
In June of this year, Prof Del Moral was invited by UNSW Vice Chancellor Ian Jacobs to deliver a Professorial Inaugural Lecture at the Chancellery, where he spoke before a large capacity audience. He was the first of our staff members to deliver a talk in this series.
Dr Wishart came to UNSW in mid-2012, after finishing a one year Postdoctoral position at the University of Melbourne. Prior to that, he completed a PhD at the University of Sydney.
He describes his research as situated in the "classical and somewhat general field of nonparametric regression in Mathematical Statistics", with his work centring on nonparametric inverse problems with a particular focus on deconvolution.
He hit the ground running in his role as Lecturer at UNSW, and has been heavily involved with the School at the community level. He has been a member of the Stochastic Analysis and Nonparametric Statistics research groups, served as Statistics Representative on the Computing Committee, provided student consultations as part of our Statistics Walk-in Consultation service, and secured Early Career Research Grants for projects in both 2014 and 2015.
Pierre and Justin will be greatly missed within the School. We wish them both the very best moving into the next phase of their careers, and we look forward to keeping in touch with them into the future.