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Recent News
Inaugural Professorial Lecture
Mike Hendy will be giving his inaugural professorial lecture on Tuesday 15 May at 5.30 pm in the Archway 1 Lecture Theatre. His title is "Molecular Evolution - a Mathematical Perspective".
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Winner of BlueFern Student Challenge
Tim White has just joined the Department as a postdoc working with Mike Hendy.
Tim has been awarded one of two student prizes of 1,000,000 CPU hours on BlueFern in the Fast Start Challenge for 2011. BlueFern is "New Zealand’s supercomputing and services facility for research and development". Tim was funded for his work on a project titled "Pushing the Phylogenetics Envelope".
Welcome Tim and congratulations!
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New Lecturer in Statistics
Ting Wang joined us as a Lecturer in Statistics in early January 2012. After obtaining her PhD in Statistics from Massey University, Ting spent 18 months in a Research Fellowship working on robust estimation of volcanic hazards with the Volcanic Risk Solutions research group at Massey. Before obtaining her PhD, she spent a month in Tokyo as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Statistical Mathematics. Her main research interests include stochastic models (especially in geophysics); epidemic models, hidden Markov models and their applications; point processes; statistical seismology; robust statistics; and survival analysis.
Welcome Ting!
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New Lecturer in Statistics
Tilman Davies joins the Department as a new Lecturer in Statistics shortly after submitting his PhD (Massey University) for review. He has spent time working in Australia at Melbourne's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), as well as in the USA near Washington DC as a researcher at a biostatistical consulting firm. His research interests revolve around applied spatial statistics with an epidemiological slant, including kernel smoothing, computational statistics, and point processes. Welcome Tilman!
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Fellow of the NZ Maths Society
Mike Hendy has been accredited as a Fellow of the New Zealand Mathematical Society in "recognition of his contribution to mathematics and his professional standing in the New Zealand mathematical community". Congratulations Mike!
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New Book
Advanced Topics in Linear Algebra: Weaving Matrix Problems through the Weyr Form by John Clark, Kevin O'Meara and Charles Vinsonhaler has just been published by Oxford University Press. The book gives "the only comprehensive account of the Weyr matrix canonical form and its applications".
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Visiting Biologist
Torbjørn Håkan Ergon, a biologist from the University of Oslo, is visiting the Department until the end of May. Tor is interested in statistical modelling. Welcome Tor!
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Appreciation Award
John Harraway is the recipient of an award from the Office of Disability Information & Support.
The award recognises staff who offer exceptional support to the Office and the students they work with. Congratulations John!
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New Lecturer of Statistics
Dr Matt Parry has taken up his position as Lecturer in the Department.
Matt obtained his PhD in theoretical cosmology at Brown University. After postdoctoral positions at Imperial College London and the University of Munich, he took up a fellowship at the University College London and then the University of Cambridge working on decision theory and information geometry. His most recent work has been in mathematical modelling and statistical analysis of plant diseases. His main interests include decision theory, information geometry, epidemiology, spatiotemporal processes, computational and Bayesian statistics, and quantum statistical mechanics. Welcome Matt!
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Grant Success
Iain Raeburn and Astrid an Huef have been awarded $585,000 by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society to study equilibrium states in operator-algebraic dynamical systems. Congratulations Iain and Astrid!
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Otago Maths in Top 100
Otago has one of the world's top 100 mathematics departments according to the 2011 QS World University Rankings by Subject. Otago scores particularly well for citations per faculty member.
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New president of the IASE
John Harraway has been elected President of the International Association for Statistical Education. This organisation seeks to promote, support and improve statistical education throughout the world at all levels from elementary school through to the training of professionals; it is the education section of the International Statistical Institute.
Congratulations John!
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Invited speakers at Korean research workshop
Boris Baeumer and Misi Kovacs are invited speakers at a Hot Topics Workshop at the National Institute for Mathematical Sciences in South Korea. The theme of the November workshop is Laplace transforms methods and their applications.
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Welcome Lisa Clark
Lisa Clark has taken up her position as Lecturer of Pure Mathematics, joining our Operator Algebra group. Lisa joins us from Susquehanna University in the United States. Welcome Lisa!
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Welcome Mike Hendy
Mike Hendy joined the department on July 1, coming from the chair in Mathematical Biology at Massey University in Palmerston North. Mike has had a long career in research relating to the mathematics of the evolution of molecular sequences (DNA, RNA, protein sequences), having published over 100 research papers in this field. In 2002 he coordinated the team of researchers establishing the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, one of the first five New Zealand Centres of Research Excellence (CoREs), and was its Executive Director until 2009. He was also a founding Principal Investigator of the mathematics CoRE, the New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications, and a member of its Governing Board for five years. Mike has been chief supervisor for 10 PhD students, and two of his current students, Atheer Matroud and Josh Collins, will be joining him here in Dunedin.
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Research used to identify lethal E. coli
Software developed by David Bryant was used to identify the strains responsible for the E-coli outbreak in Europe. David is a co-developer of the SplitsTree4 software which is used to analyse the E. coli data. See this blog for more detail.
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Thesis of exceptional quality
All three examiners of Janine Wright’s PhD thesis thought it was of exceptional standard - see the Division of Sciences page on Student Research Achievements and Awards. Janine graduated in May. Congratulations Janine!
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Contributor to a new International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science
David Fletcher was recently invited to contribute an article on "Statistical Ecology" for the International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science. The publisher of the Encyclopedia, Springer, has subsequently invited him to expand on the article by writing a book. Interestingly, the Encyclopedia is edited by statisticians from Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, in a collaborative effort that has led to them being nominated for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. See the article Peace Through Statistics in AMSSTATNEWS, the membership magazine of the American Statistical Association.
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Research presented to parliament
Robert Thompson and others selected by the University's O-zone group presented their research to parliament on 21 June 2011. They also met with various members of parliament earlier that afternoon and the next day.
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Inaugural Lecture
Iain Raeburn will be giving his inaugural professorial lecture on Wednesday 1 June at 5:30 pm in the St David Lecture Theatre. His title is "How the natural numbers freeze". He refuses to give hints about what this might mean.
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Plenary speaker at research workshop
Peter Fenton will give a plenary talk at a research workshop of the Israel Science Foundation. The workshop is on "Normal Families, Meromorphic Functions, and Value Distribution Theory", and will bring together the leading experts in these fields.
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Prestigious invited talk
Astrid an Huef will give a plenary lecture at GPOTS, which is the leading North-American conference in operator theory. This year’s conference will be held at Arizona State University May 18-22.
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John Harraway introduces GenStat to NZ Schools
Undergraduates and school students have access to a new data analysis tool thanks to John Harraway, President-elect of the International Association for Statistics Education. John helped VSN International develop a version of their GenStat software to be freely accessible by schools, by universities and at home. Teachers report this has “enlivened and enriched the teaching of statistics in their classes”. John has also developed motivational teaching resources for statistics including videos of researchers talking about their studies and analyzing their data.
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Promotion to Professor
Vice-chancellor Prof Sir David Skegg recently named Robert (Tank) Aldred as one of 11 to be promoted to Professor effective from February. Congratulations Tank!
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Misi receives the NZ Mathematical Society’s Early Career Award
Mihály (Misi) Kovács is this year’s recipient of the NZ Mathematical Society “Early Career Award for Mathematical Research”. Misi’s citation for the prize reads “for his innovative research in the field of stochastic partial differential equations, particularly their numerical approximation”. Congratulations Misi!
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Successful Mathematics Colloquium
The Department hosted a very successful meeting of the New Zealand Mathematical Society in December. There were 117 participants and 91 contributed talks. The plenary speakers were:
* Andre Nies (University of Auckland)
* Jacqui Ramagge (University of Wollongong)
* Michael Eastwood (Australian National University)
* Hamish Spencer (University of Otago)
* John Butcher (University of Auckland)
The conference organizing committee was led by Peter Fenton (picture).
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