Dorothy Hill Medal
Award highlights
- The award supports research in the Earth sciences, by women researchers up to 10 years post PhD in the calendar year of nomination.
- This award honours the contributions of the late Professor Dorothy Hill AC CBE FAA FRS.
- The Academy acknowledges the generous sponsorship provided by the Geological Society of Australia, the University of Queensland, the Brisbane Girls' Grammar School, the Association of Australasian Palaeontologists, Rio Tinto and Woodside Energy.
The Dorothy Hill Medal honours the contributions of the late Professor Dorothy Hill AC CBE FAA FRS to Australian Earth science and her work in opening up tertiary science education to women.
The award supports research in the Earth sciences, by women researchers up to 10 years post PhD in the calendar year of nomination, except in the case of significant interruptions to a research career. An honorarium of $3000 is offered.
The award may be made annually, for research carried out mainly in Australia. It is restricted to candidates who are normally resident in Australia and who have the potential to further contribute to a better understanding of Australian Earth science.
Candidates may be put forward for more than one award. If a proposed candidate is already the recipient of an Academy early-career honorific award, they will not be eligible for nomination for another early-career or mid-career honorific award. A mid-career honorific award recipient will also not be eligible for nomination for another mid-career honorific award. Fellows of the Academy are ineligible to be nominated for early and mid-career awards
Key dates
Below are the key dates for the nomination process. While we aim to keep to this schedule, some dates may change depending on circumstances.
GUIDELINES
The following guidelines and FAQs provide important information about eligibility, submission requirements, and assessment processes. Please review them carefully before submitting a nomination.
How to nominate a scientist for the Academy’s honorific awards
The following guidelines contain detailed information for nominators.
These guidelines contain information for honorific award nominators.
The following guidelines contain information for honorific award referees.
These guidelines contain information for honorific award referees.
Please submit your nominations using the Nominate button found on the top right of this webpage when nominations are open.
Please note the Academy uses a nomination platform that is external to the main Academy site. Nominators will be required to create an account on the platform. Even if you are familiar with the nomination process, please allow extra time to familiarise yourself with the platform.
Early-career, mid-career and career medals
Can I nominate myself?
- No – you must be nominated by someone else. Self-nominations are not accepted.
Can I submit a nomination on behalf of someone else?
- Yes – you can submit a nomination on behalf of someone else if you are not the nominator. An example would be a university grants office or personal/executive assistant completing the online nomination form on behalf of a nominator. Once the form is submitted, the nominator will be sent an email confirming that the nomination has been completed. If a nominee submits a nomination for themselves on behalf of a nominator it will not be considered a self-nomination.
Residency requirements
- Winners of all awards except the Haddon Forrester King Medal should be mainly resident in Australia and/or have a substantive position in Australia at the time of the nomination deadline. Unless explicitly stated in the awarding conditions, the research being put forward for the award should have been undertaken mainly in Australia. Some awards have more specific conditions that the relevant selection committee must apply and nominators are advised to read the conditions associated with each award very carefully.
Honorific career eligibility (more specific details found in the honorific awards nominator guidelines and the honorific award post PhD eligibility guidelines)
- Career eligibility is calculated by calendar year.
- Early career awards are open to researchers up to 10 years post-PhD.*
- Mid-career awards are open to researchers between eight and 15 years post-PhD.*
- Please note that the Awards Committee may consider nominees with post PhD dates outside of these ranges if a career exemption request is being submitted with the nomination, further guidelines on career exemption requests can be found in the nomination guidelines.
- See the post-PhD eligibility guidelines document for relevant conferral dates.
- * or equivalent first higher degree e.g. D.Phil., D.Psych., D.Sc.
Academy fellowship requirements in award nominations
- Fellows and non-Fellows of the Academy can provide nominations for either Fellows or non-Fellows for all awards.
Women only awards
- The Dorothy Hill, Nancy Millis and Ruby Payne-Scott Medals are for women only. These medals are open to nominees who self-identify as a woman in the award nomination form. The Academy does not require any statement beyond a nominee’s self-identification in the nomination form.
- This practice is consistent with the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, which has recognised the non-binary nature of gender identity since 2013, and gives effect to Australia’s international human rights obligations. The Academy remains committed to the fundamental human rights principles of equality, freedom from discrimination and harassment, and privacy, as well as the prevention of discrimination on the basis of sex and gender identity.
PREVIOUS AWARDEES
Dr Linda Armbrecht, University of Tasmania
Dr Linda Armbrecht is a detective who uses fragments of ancient DNA preserved in the seafloor in the polar regions to determine what organisms lived in the oceans in the past. She has pioneered new techniques to minimise contamination and maximise the quantities of ancient DNA fragments that can be recovered from marine sediments. She uses the ancient DNA data to uncover how climate change has impacted Antarctic ecosystems over the last 1 million years. Dr Armbrecht’s work is helping to solve ancient mysteries about the evolution and adaptation of keystone species, such as plankton and krill, in response to past climate change. These species make up the base of the polar food webs and are an indicator of ocean health. This research provides important clues as to how the unique polar ecosystem and food web around the icy southern continent might respond to future climate change.
Associate Professor Ailie Gallant, Monash University
Swings between seasons and years of high and low precipitation are ubiquitous in Australia, leading to our reputation as a land of ‘droughts and flooding rains’. But characterising these precipitation see-saws, and understanding the underlying causes of this variability, remains somewhat elusive. To this end, Associate Professor Ailie Gallant’s work has focused on trying to understand how bad Australian droughts can get using multiple lines of evidence, and by working to understand the underlying causes of precipitation variability and drought. Her work has examined observations to understand how the characteristics of drought vary and have changed, and how these characteristics covary with other climate extremes such as extreme heat and rainfall. She has worked on methodologies to define droughts; from rapidly-onsetting ‘flash droughts’ through to multi-year droughts. She has worked on extending hydroclimatic records using proxies like tree rings and corals to find where modern droughts fit relative to longer-term estimates of climate variability. More recently, Associate Professor Gallant’s team has focused attention on understanding how precipitation is regulated by both large-scale drivers, like El Niño, right down to the weather-scale. Specifically, her team has identified a strong role for heavy rainfall, which may consist of only around a week or so’s worth of rainfall, in ‘making’ or ‘breaking’ droughts; with an absence of significant rainfall during drought conditions, and a return or enhancement following drought conditions. In an era of global warming, understanding the causes and nature of drought is essential to determine any effect of climate change.
Associate Professor Raffaella Demichelis, Curtin University
Discovering what makes a mineral, investigating how minerals form in systems as diverse as coral reefs and the human body, and how they interact with various chemicals, is the focus of Associate Professor Raffaella Demichelis’s research. Her team’s work involves using supercomputers to model the atomic structure, crystal growth and chemical reactivity of different types of minerals. She has led landmark research that opened new perspectives in the fields of chemistry, geochemistry and mineralogy, providing quantitative evidence in favour of non-classical nucleation theory and a solution for numerous debated mineral structures. Harnessing and mimicking the rich chemistry observed in nature offers insights into, among other things, the mechanics of carbon-dioxide sequestration and coral reef preservation, how kidney stones form, and how to control scale formation in industry. Associate Professor Demichelis also contributes to the development of computational tools that are now used in academic and non-academic laboratories conducting research in the fields of chemistry and Earth science worldwide. She also volunteers a considerable amount of her time to inclusion and diversity causes, advocating for accessible and sustainable research careers, and to science outreach.
Dr Samintha Perera, University of Melbourne
Australia’s per capita carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are among the world’s highest and the recent drought and bushfire crises clearly illustrate our vulnerability to increases in greenhouse gas emissions. Although carbon dioxide geo-storage in deep coal seams can play a vital role in emission reduction, conversion of CO2 into a highly chemically reactive “supercritical CO2 (scCO2)” at such deep depths causes unpredictable CO2 flow behaviours in coal seams while modifying its flow and mechanical properties. Dr Samintha Perera discovered the unique interaction between the coal mass and scCO2 and the resulting impacts on underground applications. According to her findings, all these unique scCO2 behaviours in coal seams are caused by the significant coal matrix swelling resulted from the coal-scCO2 interaction. Regardless of that, she found the effectiveness of scCO2 as a fracking fluid for coal reservoirs, which gave a great value to this problematic scCO2 as a reservoir stimulation agent.
Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, UNSW Canberra
Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick is a world-renowned expert on heatwaves. She has dedicated her career to studying key features of these high-impact events, including their definition, their observed trends, future changes, underpinning physical drivers, and the role of anthropogenic influence behind observed events. She has also been at the forefront of the emerging field of marine heatwaves.
He has translated many of his successes from his laboratory to scale, with his inventions adopted in various industry sectors globally, to enable a circular economy, including (petro) chemical re-processing of (plastic) waste, utilisation of renewable chemicals and energy storage through his emerging battery technology.
Dr Rebecca Carey, University of Tasmania
Dr Rebecca Carey is internationally recognised for her research in volcanology. She has contributed significantly to the understanding of eruption and hydrothermal processes on land and on the sea-floor. Her achievements in the field of submarine silicic volcanism include demonstration of the influence of confining pressure provided by overlying ocean in modifying the style of volcanic eruption on the seafloor, and pioneering quantification of volatile fluxes through the magma into the surrounding seafloor. Parallel work on basaltic volcanism has identified a previously unrecognised mechanism for explosive basaltic eruptions involving volatile supersaturation, bubble nucleation and explosive fragmentation, triggered by a compression-decompression wave within a shallow magma conduit, and the first quantification of the duration of magma convection using the microtextures of erupted clasts.
Dr Laurie Menviel, UNSW Sydney
Dr Menviel is an exceptional early career researcher who has made major contributions to our understanding of the oceanic circulation, its variability and its impact on global climate, the carbon cycle and the cryosphere. Widely considered as a leader in our understanding of abrupt climate change, Dr Menviel has made a series of ground-breaking discoveries in several topical areas of earth science: detecting past changes in oceanic circulation; understanding the role of ocean circulation in past and future abrupt climate change; evaluation of the impact of changes in oceanic circulation on the carbon cycle; and constraining the stability and variability of the Antarctic ice sheet.
Associate Professor Tracy Ainsworth, University of New South Wales Sydney
Associate Professor Tracy Ainsworth’s research aims to determine the impact of environmental stress on reef-building corals, their host-microbe interactions, symbioses and disease outbreaks. Her studies on the bacterial associates of corals have led to an improved understanding of how coral diseases occur and progress. She has also identified a variety of novel intracellular bacteria that appear to play a key role in the success of corals. She has found that the same bacteria can be found within the tissues of corals in Hawaii and Australia, from the shallows to depths of over 100 metres. She has also extensively researched how increased temperatures affect coral now and will into the future. She has discovered that while small increases in sea temperatures can negatively impact the health of corals, under the right circumstances some corals appear to be able to acclimate to higher temperatures.
2017
Dr Joanne Whittaker, University of Tasmania
Dr Whittaker has made several fundamental contributions to understanding the structure and evolution of the Earth by examining the relationships between deep and surface processes. Her work has provided a new framework for understanding the history of the planet after the breakup of supercontinent Pangaea, particularly the evolution of the ocean basins surrounding Australia.
2016
Dr Andréa Sardinha Taschetto, UNSW
Dr Taschetto is internationally recognised as a leader in the field of climate systems science. She has made major contributions to our understanding of large‐scale oceanographic/atmospheric phenomena in the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans, and their subsequent impact on regional climate. In particular, based upon her research findings, Dr Taschetto is widely considered as a leader in the development of our understanding about regional climate dynamics and global modes of climate variability, including the El Niño Modoki phenomenon. Her research has significantly and substantially advanced our understanding of the role of the oceans on regional climate variability from seasonal to multi‐decadal timescales and future projections. For these and other high-impact achievements, Dr Taschetto has made a major contribution both within and beyond her field.
2015
Dr Nerilie Abram, Australian National University
Dr Abram’s pioneering research addresses the past behaviour of the Earth’s climate system, and implications for anthropogenic climate change. Her outstanding research portfolio has generated unique new records of past climate and environmental impacts from regions spanning the tropics to Antarctica, and assessing these alongside state-of-the-art climate models. Her high- impact work has led to groundbreaking advances in understanding how climate change is impacting Southern Ocean winds, Antarctic temperatures and Australian rainfall patterns.
2014
Dr Maria Seton, The University of Sydney
Dr Seton has made significant contributions to the areas of global plate tectonics, longterm sea-level change, global geodynamics and back-arc basin formation. Her work on global tectonics has redefined the way that traditional plate reconstructions are achieved, through the development of an innovative workflow that treats plates as dynamically evolving features rather than the previous paradigm, which modelled the motion of discrete tectonic blocks. She has been part of ground breaking studies on the effect ocean basin changes have had on global long-term sea-level and ocean chemistry.
2013
Dr Lisa Alexander, The University of New South Wales
Dr Lisa Alexander's research has focused on our understanding of how climate extremes are changing globally and over Australia. Her key contributions, with marked policy relevance, include providing convincing evidence that future changes in the frequency and intensity of heatwaves in Australia will be strongly dependent on the amount of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
2012
Dr Karen Black, University of New South Wales
Dr Karen Black is a vertebrate palaeontologist and author of many new fossil species including koalas, possums, marsupial moles, wombat-like diprotodontids and trunked palorchestids. Her internationally acclaimed study of cranial development in a bizarre sun bear like diprotodontid is the first for a fossil marsupial. She spearheads continent-wide research focused on the evolution of Australia’s extraordinary mammals, correlating changes over time with global palaeoclimatic events to provide new evidence-based understanding about current and probable future climate-driven changes in Australian biodiversity.
2011
Dr Kirsten Benkendorff, Southern Cross University
Kirsten Benkendorff is an acclaimed Australian malacologist whose research contributions span from the molecular to the ecosystem scales of marine biology and ecology. Her research approach involves applying sound experimental design, along with the tools of immunology and natural products chemistry to investigate molluscan evolutionary adaptations, thus providing new leads for the development of novel bioresources. Through this approach, she has made significant advances across a range of research disciplines that can be grouped under the themes of environmental, aquaculture and human health.
2010
Dr Nicole Webster, Australian Institute of Marine Science
Nicole Webster has researched many aspects of reef bacterial symbioses, including the specificity of symbiotic relationships and the impact of environmental stressors on these sensitive partnerships. Recent work describes the highest bacterial diversity ever reported for an invertebrate host – over 3000 different bacteria living in one type of sponge. Her discovery of a response of spawning corals to bacterial biofilms could help us to understand and predict how coral communities will recover from disturbance.
2009
Dr Daniela Rubatto, Australian National University
Daniela Rubatto works in the field of high-grade metamorphic petrology and implications for crustal growth and mountain building. Daniela discovered a key relationship that exists in high grade metamorphic rocks between the timing of mineral growth, and the geochemical signature in Ubearing accessory minerals. This geochemical link allows a full characterisation of the pressure–temperature–time path that the rocks have experienced and thus the depth to which the rock suite has travelled.
2008
Dr Sandra McLaren, The University of Melbourne
Sandra McLaren has made contributions to our understanding of diverse areas of Earth sciences, including continental tectonics, thermochronology, microstructural and basin analysis. She has tackled inter-disciplinary many-scale research problems reflecting her broad interests and motivation. Her early research affected a significant paradigm shift in understanding thermal and tectonic processes in the Proterozoic period, including high-temperature, low-pressure metamorphism, crustal anatexis and mineralisation.
2007
Dr Léanne Armand, Laboratory of Oceanography and Marine Biogeochemistry, Marseille
Léanne Armand is the recipient of the 2005–07 European Union Marie Curie Fellowship for her comprehensive taxonomic treatment of Southern Ocean diatoms. She has added rigour to the study of diatoms by applying statistical analysis, increasing the degree of confidence in the reconstruction of sea water temperatures of the past. This has particularly enhanced the value in reconstructing environments during the late Quaternary. The relevance of this type of work is increasing as questions of evolution of our modern environment become more important.
2006
Dr Adriana Dutkiewicz, University of Sydney
Adriana Dutkiewicz has made exceptional contributions in the field of early Precambrian petroleum geology. She was the first to discover oil inclusions preserved in Archaean and early Precambrian rocks and to demonstrate that primordial biomass was sufficiently abundant to generate hydrocarbons. She has shown that eukaryotes survived extreme climatic events including higher temperatures than previously accepted. Adriana has contributed valuable insights relating to the early evolution of life and petroleum exploration.
2005—M.J.H. van Oppen
2004—S.E.A. Wijffels
2003—K.M. Trinajstic
2002—A.D. George
Principal partner
