Australian Mathematical Society Lift-Off Fellows

The Australian Mathematical Society Lift-off Fellowships are designed to help recent PhD graduates in Mathematics and Statistics jump-start their career by giving them financial support during the period between the submission of their PhD thesis and their first postdoctoral position. The Lift-off Fellowships are awarded on the basis of academic merit.

The rules and application forms for the Lift-Off Fellowships can be found on the Lift-Off Fellowship information page.

The Australian Mathematics Society Lift-Off Fellows to date are:

• 2013 - Dr Natalie Aisbett Dr Aisbett is a combinatorial topologist with particular interest in simplicial spheres. She has made significant contributions towards solving some of the major conjectures in this field. In particular, Dr Aisbett has proved the Nevo-Petersen conjecture for the class of simplicial spheres that are obtained from the boundary of a cross-polytope by an arbitrary sequence of edge subdivisions. She will use her Lift-Off Fellowship to continue her work on simplicial spheres and to study combinatorial complexes for complex reflection groups.
• 2013 - Dr Nahid Banihashemi Dr Banihashemi uses numerical methods to solve optimal control problems with an emphasis on real world applications. She has developed novel algorithms for solving a general class of box-constrained optimal control problems building on inexact restoration methods and Euler discretization. Dr Banihashemi will use her Lift-Off Fellowship to develop a computational model of the co-metabolism of carbon and nitrogen in collaboration with Professor John Crawford at the Charles Perkins Obesity Centre at the University of Sydney.
• 2012 - Dr Nicholas Beaton Dr Beaton works on solvable lattice models, polymer absorption and self-avoiding walks. With coauthors he has given precise estimates for the surface fugacity of random walks on several planar lattices. He will use his fellowship to study self-avoiding walks on a rotated honeycomb lattice and prudent walks on lattices.
• 2012 - Dr James Caffrey Dr Caffrey is a mathematical biologist who has developed models of interacting populations to understand experimental observation using a mixture of analytical tools and simulations. He will use his Lift-Off Fellowship to continue his work and to attend the 12th International Symposium on Mathematical and Computational Biology in Arizona.
• 2012 - Dr Bao Ho Dr Ho is a combinatorial game theorist with expertise in analyzing the game of NIM and its many variations, some of which he introduced. He will use his Lift-off Fellowship to investigate periodicity in subtraction games and, more generally, in octal games.
• 2012 - Dr Anthony Mays Dr Mays works in mathematical physics and random matrix theory, having particular expertise in studying the distributions of the eigenvalues of random matrices. Dr Mays will use his Lift-Off Fellowship to attend the “Random matrices” workshop at the University of Bonn in May 2012 and to visit Professor Akemann at the University of Bielefeld, one of the leaders in his field.
• 2011 - Dr Tyson Ritter Dr Ritter is a complex geometer with particular expertise in elliptic manifolds and Oka theory. He has shown that every Riemann surface with abelian fundamental group can be acyclically embedded into a two dimensional elliptic Stein manifold. Using very different techniques, he constructed some interesting new examples of elliptic manifolds which he then used to prove similar results for open Riemann surfaces. He will use his Lift-Off Fellowships to study related questions in Oka theory.
• 2011 - Dr Joanne Hall Dr Hall works on the interface between coding theory, combinatorics and geometry. She gave the first explicit construction of mutually orthogonal Latin squares from mutually unbiased bases. Her lift-off fellowship will allow her to continue her work relating these structures and Hjelmslev geometries. In addition, it will partially support her collaboration with Metod Saniga at the Slovak Academy of Sciences.
• 2011 - Dr Wendy Baratta Dr Baratta’s research is concerned with the non-symmetric Macdonald polynomials. She will use her Lift-off fellowship to continue working with Forrester at the University of Melbourne and to finishing writing up her work and making it readily available to other mathematicians via Mathematica.
• 2011 - Dr Michael Pauley Dr Pauley works on generalisations of cubic polynomials to Riemannian manifolds and Lie group. He will use his lift-off fellowship to investigate higher order variational problems with Prof Óscar Garay and his colleagues at the University of the Basque Country, Spain, and to visit Imperial College.
• 2010 - Dr Neil Saunders Dr Saunders' has obtained substantial new results about the minimal embeddings of finite groups inside symmetric groups. He will use his Lift-Off fellowship to continue his study of the minimal embedding problem for Coxeter groups and complex reflection groups and to help foster collaborations with groups in Cornell and Melbourne.
• 2010 - Dr Philip Brooker Dr Brooker has obtained significant results in the theory of operator ideals and Banach spaces where he has used Szlenk indices to define a class of operators ideals which, by his work, have very favourable algebraic and geometric properties. Philip will use his Lift-Off Fellowship to compute the Szlenk indices of the Banach spaces of continuous scalar valued functions on a compact space.
• 2010 - Dr Judith Egan Dr Egan has obtained significant results in the area of orthogonal partitions of latin squares. With her Lift-Off Felllowship Judith will continue her collaboration with Ian Wanless (Monash) and Brendan McKay (ANU).
• 2010 - Dr Michael Haythorpe Dr Haythorpe works in numerical optimisation and computational mathematics with particular expertise in numerical algorithms. He was awarded the TM Cherry Prize Winner for Best Student Presentation at the ANZIAM conference in 2008 and he was runner up in 2009 and 2010. Using his Lift-Off Fellowship Michael initiated a collaboration with Walter Murray at Stanford University.
• 2010 - Dr Roslyn Hickson Dr Hickson is an applied mathematician with particular expertise in modelling and industrial applications. She has wide ranging interests from diffusion and heat transfer to disease modelling. Roslyn used her Lift-Off Fellowship to participate in a course on Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases at the University of Utrecht.