Associate Professor Andrew Zammit Mangion
Associate Professor
01.2012 PhD awarded from the University of Sheffield, UK, titled Modelling from spatio-temporal data: A systems perspective.
09.2007 B.Eng. (Hons.) awarded from the University of Malta in Electrical Engineering.
Science
School of Mathematics & Statistics
I am an Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales, and an Honorary Associate Professor with the School of Mathematics and Applied Statistics at the University of Wollongong. My research sits at the intersection of statistics, computation, and the environmental sciences, with a focus on developing and applying spatio-temporal models to understand complex environmental systems.
I completed my PhD at the University of Sheffield between 2008 and 2011, where I developed variational Bayesian methods for approximate inference in spatio-temporal log-Gaussian Cox process models. This work contributed to early scalable inference methods for complex point process models and was successfully applied to problems in conflict modelling.
Following a brief postdoctoral appointment at the University of Edinburgh, I held an academic position at the University of Bristol from 2012 to 2014, before joining the University of Wollongong in 2014. I joined the University of New South Wales in 2026. Across these roles, my work has combined methodological development, large-scale computation, and interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly in environmental and climate science.
E-mail
- Publications
- Media
- Grants
- Awards
- Research Activities
- Engagement
- Teaching and Supervision
12.2023 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science (ROSES). “Constraining carbon fluxes and transport patterns using new spatiotemporal information in remotely sensed CO2,” 2024-2027. Co-Investigator.
12.2023 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science (ROSES). “Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Statistical Methods for Analyzing OCO-2/3 Data,” 2021-2024. Co-Investigator.
09.2023 King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Opportunity Fund Program (OFP). “Neural Estimators for Fast Optimal Inference with Intractable Statistical Models in Complex Settings,” 2024-2025. Co-Investigator (Lead at Host Institution).
09.2023 US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Research Interests of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Department of Defense. “Bayesian Spatio-Temporal Analysis and Statistical Computation in Very High Dimensional Problems”. Co-Investigator.
03.2021 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science (ROSES). “Spatio-Temporal Statistical Methods for Producing OCO-2/OCO-3 Level 3 and Level 4 Estimates,” 2021-2024. Co-Investigator.
07.2020 Australian Research Council: Industrial Transformation Research Hub (ITRH). “ARC Research Hub for Transforming Energy Infrastructure Through Digital Engineering,” 2021-2026. Chief Investigator (Lead at Host Institution). Total
05.2020 Australian Research Council: Special Research Initiative (SRI). “Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future,” 2021-2027. Chief Investigator.
11.2018 Australian Research Council: Discovery Project (DP). “Bayesian inversion and computation applied to atmospheric flux fields,” 2019-2022. Chief Investigator.
04.2018 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science (ROSES). “Spatial Statistical Analysis of OCO-2 Data,” 2018-2021. Co-Principal Investigator.
11.2017 Australian Research Council: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA). “Deep space-time models for modelling complex environmental phenomena,” 2018-2022. Lead Chief Investigator.
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08.2024 University of Wollongong Vice-Chancellor Team Research Excellence Award, acknowledging outstanding contributions to research by a team of UOW researchers who are collaborating across discipline boundaries and who have combined their expertise to produce achievements of outstanding international significance. 12.2023 The Statistical Society of Australia Horizon Lecture Award, recognising emerging leaders in Australia's statistics community, and their contributions to advancing statistical practice. 08.2023 The American Statistical Association Statistics in Physical and Engineering Sciences (SPES) Award in the innovative use of statistics to solve a high-impact problem in the physical and engineering sciences. 08.2023 The American Statistical Association Outstanding Statistical Application Award in recognition of a paper demonstrating an outstanding application of statistics in any substantive field. 08.2023 The International Society for Bayesian Analysis Mitchell Prize in recognition of an outstanding paper that describes how a Bayesian analysis has solved an important applied problem. 07.2023 The Statistical Society of Australia Venables Award for an open-source software contribution that makes a clear impact for the practice of data science or statistics. 04.2022 The American Statistical Association Section on Statistics and the Environment ENVR Early Investigator Award, in recognition of highly impactful methodological and interdisciplinary research in spatio-temporal statistics applied to investigating causes and effects of a changing climate, for the development of important computational-statistical tools and related software, and for service to the profession. 12.2020 Awarded status of Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI). 05.2020 Taylor & Francis Outstanding Reference/Monograph in the Science and Medical category published in 2019 (for the book Spatio-Temporal Statistics with R). 04.2020 The International Environmetrics Society Abdel El-Shaarawi Early Investigator Award, in recognition of interdisciplinary work in Environmental Statistics and in the development of important computational instruments for space-time data analysis. 04.2013 National Academy of Sciences of the USA Cozzarelli Prize for PNAS paper of outstanding excellence and originality in Engineering and Applied Sciences, Washington DC, USA. 11.2012 Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) Control and Automation Best Doctoral Dissertation Prize, London, UK. 10.2008 Best Student Paper at the UK Automatic Control Council (UKACC) Conference, Manchester, UK. 07.2007 Prize for Best Academic Achievement (sponsored by electronics company RS) at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Malta. |
My research interests lie broadly in spatio-temporal modelling and the statistical and computational tools that enable inference for complex, large-scale systems. I am particularly interested in models that accommodate nonstationarity, non-Gaussianity, multivariate dependence, and massive data volumes, while providing principled uncertainty quantification.
A major focus of my research involves environmental applications. This includes work on assessing Antarctica’s contribution to sea-level rise through the fusion of heterogeneous satellite and observational data, and on estimating the spatio-temporal distribution of greenhouse gas sources and sinks. These projects typically involve large-scale spatio-temporal models, high-performance and GPU computing, sparse linear algebra, and parallel inference algorithms.
More recently, my research has focused on integrating deep learning methods with spatio-temporal statistical modelling. The aim of this work is to leverage the representational power of modern machine learning while retaining the interpretability, structure, and uncertainty quantification offered by statistical models, particularly for environmental and geophysical applications.
My Research Supervision
Vinicius Ricardo Riffel (PhD, University of Wollongong, Primary Supervisor)
Daniel Fynn (PhD, University of Wollongong, Co-Supervisor)
Rick de Kreij (PhD, University of Western Australia, Associate Supervisor)