Prof Warrick Lawson, Head of School, and A/Prof Harvi Sidhu, Deputy Head of School, School of Physical, Environmental & Mathematical Sciences at UNSW Canberra, visited our School this morning.

Around 30 School staff gathered in the Staff Room to attend a morning tea in their honour. Following the morning tea, Prof Lawson and A/Prof Sidhu presented a seminar, "Getting to know your “cousin” – Maths & Stats at UNSW Canberra” in the Access Grid Room to a large group of academic staff.

They cleared up some misconceptions about the Canberra branch of UNSW, and spoke about the disciplines and offerings within the School of Physical, Environmental & Mathematical Sciences.

See the abstract of their presentation below for more details.

Getting to know your “cousin” – Maths & Stats at UNSW Canberra
PEMS is the other Maths & Stats (and Chemistry, Geography, Oceanography and Physics) school, at the other UNSW campus in Canberra. The broad multi-disciplinary nature of research in the School spanning the harder edge of the physical sciences to our human geography contributions in the humanities is probably unique for a science school at UNSW, if not the country. Maths & Stats plays a dominant role in UG teaching at UNSW Canberra, and well as in research. In this talk we will provide an overview of the research activities undertaken by the staff of the Applied and Industrial Mathematics (AIM) research group – the research arm of the Maths and Stats discipline at UNSW Canberra. The group’s research strengths lie in the following three main areas: (i) bushfire dynamics and combustion modelling; (ii) ecological modelling; and (iii) nonlinear dynamics. Our interdisciplinary research projects cover a diverse range of topics from the survival of Little Penguins on Philip Island, to modelling self-heating in compost piles. We hope that by the end of the seminar, the audience will gain an appreciation of the research activities undertaken by staff from the AIM group, and that this will be the first step in forging a positive relationship between the two Maths & Stats “cousins” of UNSW.