Do The Maths

2024 events

Our 2024 Do The Maths - Women, Empowerment, Opportunity Workshops were held from 5-7 June. 

On-campus event

The on-campus event was held on Wednesday 5 June at the UNSW Roundhouse with an audience of over 430 students, plus 41 high school teachers.
The program included maths and careers presentations, a mathematics workshop, a range of carnival booth activities, a campus tour, degree and scholarship information, and a Q&A featuring current students and alumni. 

Online events

The online events were held on Friday 7 June. Students connected via Zoom for the session. 
We held a virtual event in the morning for 250 Australian high school students, and one in the afternoon for South East Asian high school groups.

The program included maths presentations, a workshop activity, a talk from our 2024 Women in Mathematics and Statistics Ambassador Karen Willcox, degree and scholarship information, and a Q&A with current student panellists. 

See the news item linked to the left for a wrap up of the DTM 2024 events!

2024 UNSW Women in Mathematics and Statistics Ambassador

Karen Willcox, Director, Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences; Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics; University of Texas at Austin

Karen delivered a presentation at our 2024 workshops, "Adventures at the Interfaces of Mathematics, Computing and Aerospace". She also gave a public lecture at UNSW on Thursday 6 June. 

Karen Willcox is Director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, Associate Vice President for Research, and Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin. She is also External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Before joining the Oden Institute in 2018, she spent 17 years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she served as the founding Co-Director of the MIT Center for Computational Engineering and the Associate Head of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Prior to joining the MIT faculty, she worked at Boeing Phantom Works with the Blended-Wing-Body aircraft design group. She is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Karen's work has produced scalable computational methods for design, optimization and control of next-generation engineered systems. Areas of particular focus include scientific machine learning, digital twins, model reduction as a way to learn principled approximations from data, multifidelity formulations to leverage multiple sources of uncertain information, and uncertainty quantification. She has applied these approaches to a wide range of problems, including aircraft design optimization, aircraft environmental impact, unmanned aerial vehicles, additive manufacturing, and rocket propulsion. Her model reduction and multifidelity methods are widely applied across the scientific and engineering community, and have been incorporated into industry/government codes for aircraft system design and environmental policy decision-making.

Karen is also active in education innovation. She served as co-Chair of the MIT Online Education Policy Initiative, co-Chair of President Rafael Reif's 2013-2014 Institute wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education, and Chair of the MIT OpenCourseWare Faculty Advisory Board. She is a recognised innovator in the U.S. education landscape, where she was a 2015 recipient of a First in the World Department of Education grant that developed and deployed educational technologies in community colleges. She continues to direct the Mapping Lab, which develops technologies for the future of digital education. 

2023 UNSW Women in Mathematics and Statistics Ambassador

Inge Koch - Associate Dean, Mathematical Sciences, RMIT

Professor Inge Koch delivered presentations at the Do The Maths events, and a public lecture on the evening of 8 June, "Mathematics and Gender: Nature versus Nurture".

Inge Koch is a Statistician with research interests in the analysis of high-dimensional and functional data, ranging from new methodology to cross-disciplinary collaborations including biologists and medical experts. She has a strong background in pure and applied mathematics and experience in industry and the CSIRO. Since the completion of her PhD in statistics at the Australian National University, she taught statistics at the University of Newcastle, and UNSW Sydney. In 2009, she became Associate Professor in Statistics at the University of Adelaide, and, in 2019, she moved to UWA as Professor of Statistics and Data Science. Inge joined RMIT as Associate Dean, Mathematical Sciences in February 2023.

Throughout her career, Inge has been a champion for mathematics and gender diversity in mathematics, passionate about encouraging young women to study mathematics at all levels and to follow careers that use maths skills. She is a co-founder of the Girls Do The Maths initiative at UNSW, a program that began in 2004 and still flourishes today. She brought the same commitment to diversity to the University of Adelaide through her involvement with the Women in Mathematics Workshops. In 2015, she became Executive Director of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) and its ChooseMaths Program, aiming to change public perception of mathematics in order to improve participation, particularly of girls and women, in mathematics across Australia. At UWA she combined this interest with developing statistical data science at all levels ranging from a first year new data science course to research forums involving staff from all faculties. She has been part of the National Review panel for Data Science, jointly organised by AMSI and the SSA, and is a member of the AMSI board.

Inge has great expectations for her new position at RMIT; combining her background in gender diversity in mathematics, her involvement in data science with mathematics education at all levels, research and collaborations across the STEM college and beyond.

2022 events

The 2022 campus event was held on Thursday 23 June at the UNSW Roundhouse, and the online event the following day, Friday 24 June.

We hosted 300 students from 20 schools across Sydney at the campus event. They participated in maths activities, heard presentations, viewed the Australian Women in Maths exhibit, went on campus tours, and partipated in a Q&A with current UNSW students as panellists. 

The online event, attended by 100 high school students, was MCed by our Visiting Teaching Fellow Karen Man over Zoom. She led a schedule which included presentations, maths activities and a panel discussion. 

For more about the 2022 events, see the info and schedule below, and read the news item. 

2021 UNSW Women in Mathematics and Statistics Ambassador

The on-campus and online events featured a presentation by our 2021 UNSW Women in Mathematics and Statistics Ambassador, Virginia Wheway.

Virginia's talk was titled "What is all this Data Science hype about?".

Virginia Wheway is Vice President, Data and Analytics at Koala. She is an accomplished and influential data-focused executive with diverse skills and experience across numerous industries; including aviation, mining, manufacturing, government, medical research and finance. We were thrilled for her to join us at the 2021 Girls Do the Maths events.