Trevor McDougall wins Australian Laureate Fellowship

We are thrilled to reveal that Scientia Professor Trevor McDougall has been anounced as a new Australian Laureate Fellow.

Professor McDougall is one of 15 recipients of the prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC) Fellowship, and one of three awarded at UNSW.

The Fellowship, the most prestigious research award from the ARC, will enable Prof. McDougall to work on improved models of mixing in the ocean, to advance predictions of changes to climate.

Prof. McDougall's Fellowship project, titled "Ocean mixing processes and innovation in oceanographic models", is worth $2,770,434.

The project will aim to "develop new oceanographic tools and thermodynamic variables to support a new generation of accurate ocean models more suitable for the prediction of changes in a warming world. The ocean’s role in the climate system is predominantly to store and to transport heat and carbon dioxide, and the ocean’s ability to do this is sensitive to the strength of mixing processes, which are quite uncertain".

The project also hopes to "distinguish the vital role of vertical mixing from that of horizontal mixing by (i) developing algorithms to construct neutral density surfaces in climate models, (ii) formulating new inverse techniques to deduce the amount of vertical mixing in various ocean regions, and (iii) incorporating new approaches to ocean mixing processes and thermodynamics into ocean models".

Minister for Education and Training, Christopher Pyne MP, said the research programmes of the Fellows "will deliver outcomes that will benefit our nation, its economy and our people".

Prof. McDougall's Fellowship comes hot on the heels of his Australian Academy of Science Jaeger Medal for Research in Earth Sciences, awarded earlier this month.

We applaud Prof. McDougall's latest achievement, which is one of numerous accolades he has received during his time at UNSW.