Our postgraduate students' cutting-edge and innovative research is often rewarded with prizes and scholarships. Here we have featured some of the notable awards won by our students over the last few years.
Annual prizes are also awarded at the School Postgraduate Conference.
All of our students aim to publish their thesis work in top international journals; many succeed in doing this while still enrolled.
Abirami Srikumar
Some recent award winners include:
Brock Sherlock won Best 1-Minute Thesis presentation for the School at the UNSW Science Postgraduate Research Showcase in June 2024.
Sam Mason received the award for Best Student Talk at Biometrics at the Bay of Islands Conference in December 2023. His talk was titled "Spatio-temporal species distribution modelling".
Stuart James Burney received an Honourable Mention for the 2023 TM Cherry Prize, which is awarded for the best student talk at the ANZIAM Annual Conference.
Christian Bagshaw received an Honourable Mention for the 2022 B.H. Neumann Prize at the 2022 Australian Mathematical Society's Annual Meeting for his talk, "Lattices and their applications in function fields".
Yudhi Bunjamin and Thomas Lesgourgues received Honorable Mentions for the CMSA Anne Penfold Street Student Prize at the 44th Australasian Combinatorics Conference in December 2022.
Abirami Srikumar (pictured left) won Best Student Talk at The 2022 Computational Techniques and Applications Conference at Queensland University of Technology.
Michael Denes won the 2022 TM Cherry Prize for the best student talk at the ANZIAM Annual Conference.
Maeve McGillycuddy was a joint winner of the 2021 J.B. Douglas Award at the Statistical Society of Australia's 22nd annual J.B. Douglas Postgraduate Awards Day.
Alan Stoneham (pictured right) received an Honourable Mention for the 2021 B.H. Neumann Prize at the 2021 Australian Mathematical Society's Annual Meeting for his talk, "A generalisation of the spectral theorem for self-adjoint operators".
Thomas Scheckter, who submitted his thesis in 2020, won a UNSW Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Theses.
Yudhi Bunjamin won a 2020 UNSW Science Student Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Award. These awards recognise and celebrate the contributions of students to the field of equity, diversity, and inclusion.
UNSW
UNSW
Several students who submitted their theses in 2019 won UNSW Dean’s Awards for Outstanding PhD Theses: Peter Ayre, Jinghao Huang, Edward McDonald, Anna McGann, and Tom Stindl.
Yudhi Bunjamin won the 2019 Bernhard Neumann Prize for the most outstanding talk delivered by a student at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society.
Three students who submitted their theses in 2018 won UNSW Dean’s Awards for Outstanding PhD Theses: Jaslene Huan Lin, Firouzeh Noghrehchi, and Gennady Notowidigdo.
Tom Whitaker won second prize at the 2018 Annual J.B. Douglas Award.
Carlos Vieira Rocha (pictured left) won the Peter Holloway Oceanography Prize at the Australian Marine Sciences Association conference in Adelaide in July 2018. The prize is awarded to the best full-length oral presentation related to Oceanography.
Gordana Popovic won the award for Outstanding Student Talk at the International Statistical Ecology Conference in Seattle in June 2016.
Hot on the heels of her J.B. Douglas Award, Thais Rodrigues (pictured top right) was awarded the 2016 EJG Pitman Prize at the Australian Statistical Conference. The EJG Pitman Prize is awarded for the most outstanding talk presented by a ‘young statistician’.
Thais Rodrigues won the 2016 J.B. Douglas Award at the Statistical Society of Australia's 17th annual J.B. Douglas Postgraduate Awards Day.
Ashish Goyal (pictured right) was selected for an AUSTMS Lift-off Fellowship shortly after his thesis was approved. In late 2016 he took up a position as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, U.S.
Ashish Goyal
Anna McGann
Anna McGann (pictured left) won Best Student Talk at the Annual NSW/ACT ANZIAM Meeting in November 2015 for her presentation "Generalising Epidemic Dynamics: Deriving a fractional SIR Model". Her achievement is especially impressive, considering it happened during her first semester as a PhD student. Her PhD is being supervised by Bruce Henry and Chris Angstmann.
Isaac Donnelly, who is supervised by Bruce Henry in the area of pattern formation, anomalous diffusion and networks, won a highly coveted Fulbright Scholarship. He was one of just 11 Fulbright postgraduate scholars selected in 2015, and the only UNSW postgraduate recipient. He left for Northeastern University in Boston in late 2015, to spend 10 months working on the development of non-linear control theory for networks under the mentorship of world-leading scientist Professor Albert-László Barabási.
Boris Beranger won the 2014 J.B. Douglas Award for his presentation, Extremal dependence models: state of the art and new advances. He delivered his talk at the 15th Annual J.B. Douglas Awards, held at the University of Technology, Sydney in November. The J.B. Douglas competition is held annually between selected PhD students from NSW universities. The award commemorates the work of the late Jim Douglas, the first ever statistics appointment at UNSW.
Former PhD student Stephen Maher (pictured right) won an award for his thesis, "The application of recoverable robustness to airline planning problems", which was completed under the supervision of Gary Froyland and co-supervisor Cheng-Lung Wu (from UNSW Aviation). It was awarded in 2014 by the Aviation Applications Section of The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, which confers a prize for the best dissertation in any area related to aviation operations research.
Frances Hui won the 2013 Annual J.B. Douglas Award.
Daniel Mansfield won the Analysis Prize at the Australian Mathematical Sciences Student Conference at ANU in July 2013, out of a pool of 90 students from across the country.
Stephen Maher won the 2012 Anna Valicek Award at the Airline Group of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies symposium in Arizona. He was selected for his research paper, "The recoverable robust tail assignment problem", with the awarding council stating that Stephen's win represented "an excellent accomplishment and affirmation" of his scholarship.
Ian Renner won the 2011 Annual J.B. Douglas Award.
Stephen Maher