Catherine Greenhill officially inducted as a 2022 Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science

Catherine Greenhill of the School of Mathematics and Statistics has been officially inducted as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science at an event in Canberra.

Professor Greenhill was elected a 2022 Fellow of the Academy of Science in May. Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science are among the country’s most distinguished scientists, elected by their peers for groundbreaking research and contributions that have had clear impact.

The Australian Academy of Science is hosting its annual Science in the Shine Dome event in Canberra this week, where Australia’s most influential scientists gather to celebrate science and to honour outstanding achievements in science.

Fellows from 2020-2022 were honoured at a Fellows Admission Ceremony on Tuesday 22 November. A session of presentations from the 2022 cohort of Fellows was held on Wednesday, where Professor Greenhill discussed some of her recent work during her talk, Short stories about random hypergraphs.

All new Fellows sign the Royal Charter during the event, which all Fellows have done since the Australian Academy of Science was founded in 1954.

Professor Greenhill joined UNSW Sydney in 2002, and she leads the School's Combinatorics research group. She was promoted to Professor at UNSW in 2019, and is the current Chair of the Women in Mathematics Special Interest Group of the Australian Mathematical Society. 

In 2015, she won the Australian Academy of Science Christopher Heyde Medal in Pure Mathematics, and was awarded the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications Hall Medal in 2010.

Internationally recognised as a leading expert in asymptotic, probabilistic and algorithmic combinatorics, Professor Greenhill undertakes research at the interface between combinatorics, probability and theoretical computer science. She tackles difficult, fundamental questions about ubiquitous combinatorial objects, such as graphs and hypergraphs.

She has achieved major breakthroughs including establishing the efficiency of a natural algorithm for generating graphs, and finding threshold values for the emergence of certain structures in random hypergraphs.

Her highly cited research provides new formulae and algorithms that have found broad applications in many areas, including cryptography and physics.

“It is a great honour to be elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science”, said Professor Greenhill.

“Almost all of my research is performed in collaboration, so I would like to acknowledge my wonderful co-authors, ranging from senior colleagues through to talented undergraduate students. I have learnt so much from working with all of you”. 

See below for a video profile of Professor Greenhill's career and work, filmed by the Australian Academy of Science.