We are very proud to announce that PhD student Anna McGann won best student talk at the Annual NSW/ACT ANZIAM Meeting this week.

Anna delivered her talk, titled "Generalising Epidemic Dynamics: Deriving a fractional SIR Model", on the first day of the two-day meeting held in the Sydney headquarters of the University of Newcastle.

In briefly describing her winning talk, Anna said "In recent years disease models have been generalised by the inclusion fractional derivatives in an ad hoc manner. By considering the disease process as a random walk stochastic process, we are able to include fractional derivatives in a natural manner, preserving a physical interpretation."

Director of Postgraduate Studies Professor David Warton praised Anna's win, highlighting that her achievement is "especially impressive" considering she is still in her first semester as a PhD student. Anna's research is being supervised by Bruce Henry and Chris Angstmann.

The ANZIAM Meeting programme featured several other School members, including Ian Sloan, Zdravko Botev, Quoc Thong Le Gia, Shane Keating, Chenxi Fan, and Ashish Goyal. Professor Sloan was one of just three plenary speakers on the schedule.

A big congratulations to Anna for her win!