Two Laureate Fellowships for University of Adelaide

Tuesday, 9 July 2013

Two world-leading University of Adelaide researchers have been awarded prestigious Australian Laureate Fellowships - Professor Tanya Monro, Director, Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing, and Professor Ian Reid, School of Computer Science and Australian Centre for Visual Technologies.

The aim of the scheme is to attract and retain outstanding researchers and research leaders of international repute and build and strengthen world-class research capability in Australia. Of the 17 fellowships announced across the nation, two were awarded to the University of Adelaide.

The Australian Laureate Fellowship Scheme, run under the auspices of the Australian Research Council, provides generous project funding in addition to salary support.

University of Adelaide Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Mike Brooks said that the Australian Laureate Fellowships were much sought after.

"The Laureate Fellowships are only awarded to researchers who have achieved international eminence in their fields of expertise," said Professor Brooks. "For the University of Adelaide to have two recipients is very rewarding and testimony to the remarkable calibre of research being undertaken."

The Laureate Fellowship provides recipients with up to $300,000 towards their nominated project in addition to funding support in the form of two post-doctorate and two PhD positions. In total each Fellowship is worth up to $700,000 per year for 5 years.

Professor Monro's project entitled "Controlling light to understand and drive nanoscale processes" aims to develop a suite of light-based sensing technologies capable of quantifying the dynamic environment within a living cell. This will extend the capacity to harness the interaction of light with matter at the nanoscale, providing new insights in fields ranging from plant biology to medicine.

As a special ambassador for sciences and technology, Professor Monro has been awarded the Georgina Sweet Australian Laureate Fellowship and will play a major role in promoting women in research.

"I am absolutely thrilled to have been awarded an ARC Laureate Fellowship," said Professor Monro. "This will allow me to pursue an ambitious research program focussed on advancing our capacity to control and generate light on sub-wavelength scales.

"Women are our greatest under-tapped talent pool in the science and technology area. I aim to establish a framework of activities to attract women into careers in science, and to retain them, and to showcase female science role models to school girls," she said.

Professor Reid's project is "Lifelong Computer Vision Systems" which will create new ways of generating detailed environmental maps in real time, turning standard video cameras into sensors that "understand" a visual scene. This high-level sensing will unlock a wide range of applications for autonomous systems in areas such as robotics and surveillance.

Contact Details