Ruby Payne-Scott Medal Award and Lecture 2024
Distinguished Professor Kerrie Mengersen, ISI Vice-President, has been awarded the prestigious Ruby Payne-Scott Medal and Lecture from the Australian Academy of Science.
The Ruby Payne-Scott Medal and Lecture honors her 35 year career in advancing statistical methods and applying them to real-world challenges.Professor Mengersen’s work has made a significant global impact, from protecting jaguar populations in the Amazon to developing Australia’s first interactive cancer atlas. She also led the Virtual Reef Diver project, allowing divers to upload photos of the Great Barrier Reef for public annotation, which aids in reef monitoring.
Reflecting on her career, Professor Mengersen expressed that tackling new data analysis challenges inspires her daily:
"It’s what gets me up in the morning wondering, ‘What will today bring?"
The Ruby Payne-Scott Medal is one of the Academy's highest honors, awarded annually to outstanding women researchers in the physical and biological sciences.
About Kerrie Mengersen:
Distinguished Professor Kerrie Mengersen’s 35 year post-PhD research career has focused on the development of new statistical methodology motivated by challenging real-world applications. As a pioneer and leader of Bayesian statistics in Australia, her first 25 years focused substantively on research and translation of Bayesian methods and computational algorithms. In the last decade, her research has expanded further to embrace new types of data and data science, with the former including digital and citizen science data, and the latter focused on the intersection between statistics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Professor Mengersen’s work is explicitly multidisciplinary and all of her contributions have been jointly developed with collaborators. She has maintained a career-long focus on engaging with and mentoring women in mathematical and applied sciences, and has more recently had the pleasure and honour of working with Indigenous Australian researchers.
About the Ruby Payne-Scott Medal and Lecture for women in science:
The Ruby Payne-Scott Medal and Lecture is a career medal that recognises researchers of the highest standing in the physical and/or biological sciences. Along with the Macfarlane Burnet and Matthew Flinders Medals, it is one of the most prestigious career awards of the Academy and honours Ruby Payne-Scott’s pioneering contribution to radiophysics and radio astronomy. The Lecture is given at an Annual General Meeting of the Academy and complements that of the other prestigious awards.
The award is made annually and is restricted to women researchers who are normally resident in Australia and for research conducted mainly in Australia.
