Researchers receive Australian Academy of Science honours

Each year the Australian Academy of Science presents honorific awards to career researchers for life-long achievements and to outstanding early-career researchers in recognition of scientific excellence.

Professor Roger Powell FAA, from the School of Earth Sciences was recently awarded the Jaeger Medal for research into earth sciences (a 2013 Career research award) and Aurore Delaigle from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics was awarded the Moran Medal for research in statistics (2013 Early-career research award).

Professor Powell was honoured for his work in understanding the rocks that make up mountain belts: metamorphic rocks. His primary interest is in solving methodological problems in the study of metamorphism and metamorphic rocks using equilibrium thermodynamics, mathematics and statistics. This work has been done in collaboration primarily with Dr Tim Holland (University of Cambridge) and Professor Richard White (University of Mainz). The tools they have developed have become the standard for quantitative mineral equilibrium modelling in natural rock systems. 

Professor Powell is also involved in a wide range of metamorphic applications with his network colleagues nationally and internationally. He was elected to the Australian Academy of Sciences in 2006.

Dr Delaigle was recognised for her work on contemporary statistical problems. An important aspect of her work concerns the estimation of curves from data observed imperfectly, for example data measured with errors or observed only in a summarised form. These problems have wide applications in public health and nutrition, where the variables that can explain a disease (e.g. systolic blood pressure, fat intake or cholesterol level) are typically observed inaccurately. 

She has also made contributions to the analysis of data that are in the form of functions, such as annual rainfall or temperature curves at Australian weather stations, ozone pollution curves, near infrared spectra, or temporal gene expression profile.

Her work transforms complex and highly abstract methods into easy to understand concepts. Her techniques depend only on the data type, not on the source of the data, and are applicable in a wide variety of settings. An advantage of this approach is that her techniques apply to many practical problems, such as the statistical analysis of infectious disease studies, heart, cancer and genetic studies, pollution, weather, and speech recognition.

 The prizes will be officially presented at the Academy’s annual conference, Science at the Shine Dome, being held in Canberra from 29 to 31 May 2013, where they will be invited to make a short presentation of their work.

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