Science Awards
Illawarra Mercury
Tuesday September 16, 2008
The University of Wollongong enjoyed a good night at the inaugural NSW Scientist of the Year Awards in Sydney last week, winning two of the nine award categories.
Professor Gordon Wallace was the winner of the chemistry category, and Prof Matt Wand won the mathematical sciences category. Solar cell expert Prof Martin Green from the University of NSW was named overall winner of the NSW Scientist of the Year Award. The awards recognise outstanding individuals carrying out cutting-edge work that generates economic, health, environmental or technological benefits to NSW. Prof Wallace is executive research director at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science and director of the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute at UOW. He is UOW's sole ARC Federation Fellow, which is awarded to outstanding researchers to help retain their skills within Australia.In 1990, Prof Wallace established the world's first intelligent polymer research laboratory and is recognised as a world leader in the development of these materials. More recently, he has been focused on combining nanotechnology with his research into intelligent materials and is now a recognised world expert and pioneer in the emerging area of nanobionics, a field which bridges nanotechnology and human biology. Prof Wand's academic career has included appointments in the United States at Texas A&M University, Rice University in Houston and a five-year stint as associate professor in biostatistics at Harvard. He was inducted as a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in the US for "fundamental contributions to the theory, computation and applications of nonparametric and semiparametric statistical methods". Prof Wand joined UOW as a research professor of statistics within the School of Mathematics and Applied Statistics.
© 2008 Illawarra Mercury