Eighth annual Postgraduate Conference is hosted online
Published on the 12 August 2021
Our eighth annual Postgraduate Conference took place on Wednesday 11 August, and for the second year in a row was hosted as a fully online event.
The conference, which was hosted via Zoom, was attended by a cross-section of School members, current students and their relatives, joint supervisors from other departments, and UNSW staff. Students presented according to a packed full-day schedule across different breakout rooms, and attendees joined live Q&A sessions with the speakers.
Postgraduate Director Ian Doust facilitated the event, with the help of a committee which included PhD students Ashwaq Zarban, Christopher Rock and Alan Stoneham.
Lengthier plenary talks were delivered by Maeve McGillycuddy (Statistics), Michael Denes (Applied Maths) and Gavin Robertson (Pure Maths).
The event showcased the diverse research that our postgraduate research cohort are currently working on, with 46 presentations across the day.
The day culminated in prizes for the best talks, voted on by attendees in the categories of Statistics, Applied Mathematics, and Pure Mathematics.
The Best Talk recipient for Statistics was Maeve McGillycuddy, for her presentation "A new tool to fit multivariate random effects parsimoniously via a reduced rank approach".
The recipient for Applied Maths was Michael Denes - a three-time winner of this prize! - for his talk "Persistence and Coherence - Tracking the evolution and decay of an Agulhas ring".
The winner of best talk for Pure Maths was Madeleine Kyng, for her talk "A new algorithm for computing zeta functions of algebraic curves".
Ashwaq Zarban won the Contribution Prize, for all of her wonderful efforts in helping to organise the conference.
The following students received honourable mentions for their presentations: Daniel Boettger, Fiona Kim, Gavin Robertson and Chris Rock.
Thank you to all of the students for their presentations, and to the committee who delivered an excellent and engaging conference. Looking forward to next year's event!
Pictured, from top, L-R: Abi Srikumar, Daniel Boettger, Zhe Han
James Ross, Maeve McGillycuddy, Michael Denes
Ian Doust, Christian De Nicola Larsen, Fiona Kim
