Hannan Medal
Award highlights
- This award recognises outstanding research in any of the fields of statistical science, pure mathematics, applied mathematics and computational mathematics
- The award honours the contribution to time series analysis of the late Professor E J Hannan FAA FASSA, Professor of Statistics at the Research School of Social Sciences of the Australian National University.
- The 2027 Hannan Medal is for pure mathematics.
The Hannan Medal is a career award that recognises outstanding research in any of the fields of statistical science, pure mathematics, applied mathematics and computational mathematics and is made in one of those three areas in turn at two-yearly intervals. It honours the contribution to time series analysis of the late Professor E J Hannan FAA FASSA, Professor of Statistics at the Research School of Social Sciences of the Australian National University.
The 2027 Hannan Medal is in pure mathematics.
The 2029 Hannan Medal is in applied mathematics and computational mathematics.
The 2031 Hannan Medal is in statistical science.
Work carried out through a candidate’s entire career is taken into consideration but special weight is given to recent research. The majority of the relevant research will have been carried out in Australia.
This award is open to nominations for candidates from all genders. The Australian Academy of Science encourages nominations of female candidates and of candidates from a broad geographical distribution.
Career awards recognise achievement over a career of whatever length.
Candidates may be put forward for more than one award. If a proposed candidate is already the recipient of an Academy award, the second award must be for a distinct, additional, body of work undertaken since the first award, and/or work in a different field.
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
Professor Noel Cressie FAA, University of Wollongong
Professor Noel Cressie is a world leader in statistical science for the analysis of spatial and space-time data, especially in environmental science. He has made pioneering, fundamental, ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting and highly influential contributions to theory, methodology and applications. Professor Cressie is a leading exponent of statistical methods in environmental science, especially for large-scale phenomena such as oceanic and atmospheric circulation and climate. By combining physical principles with stochastic models to capture uncertainties, he has developed powerful methodology to investigate causal links in these complex global processes. He has overcome daunting challenges to make the methodology computationally feasible for large and complex datasets. Professor Cressie has played a key role in applications to global CO2 flux, regional climate, sea surface temperature, air pollution, disease mapping, biogeochemical cycles, soil carbon dynamics, movement of glaciers and river pollution. His recent work on climate model uncertainty may ultimately have a substantial impact on science and policy.
Professor Richard Hartley FAA, Australian National University
Professor Richard Hartley has made important and pioneering contributions in the area of computer vision, both theoretical and applied, especially in the mathematical underpinnings of the field. He is one of the founders of the research field of multiview geometry, which is the technical foundation behind the computation of digital 3D models from sets of images or videos. This technology allows construction of models of cultural or archeological sites, as well as city and anatomical models. It also facilitates robot navigation in complex environments, and production of real (tangible) models of objects through scanning and 3D printing. The goal of his recent research is to provide a theoretical basis for ensuring that the models are correct and accurate. In one of his notable contributions he has identified the exact conditions under which available data is sufficient to allow unambiguous model creation. This work relies on advanced methods of algebraic and projective geometry.
Professor Mathai Varghese FAA, Adelaide University
Professor Mathai Varghese has made highly influential contributions to the field of geometric analysis, which relates geometric, analytic and algebraic properties of (possibly infinite dimensional) manifolds. Among these are his co-inventions of Fractional Index Theory and Projective Index Theory that have received international recognition for explaining the mystery of the analytic counterpart of the A-hat genus. His recent joint work extending the Fractional Index Theorem to infinite dimensional loop spaces is also of immense significance. His joint body of work proves the conjecture that fundamental quantization commutes with reduction in the noncompact case. Also seminal is his joint work on twisted analytic torsion, where an analogue of the Cheeger-Muller theorem is proved, establishing the equality by using a new combinatorially-defined twisted torsion. A catalyst for much activity in the area is his joint work formulating the magnetic gap-labelling conjecture, which labels the spectral gaps of certain magnetic Schroedinger operators on Euclidean space. Evidence for the validity of the conjecture is given in 2D, 3D and for principal solenoidal tori in all dimensions, which is itself a breakthrough.
Professor Alan Welsh FAA, Australian National University
Professor Welsh has developed useful new methodology, derived the properties of these and other methods and clarified relationships between different statistical methods, all in a particularly wide variety of problems. He has developed innovative new models for count data with many zeros and compositional data, including for longitudinal and clustered forms of these data. He has made important contributions to inference, robustness, the bootstrap and model selection for mixed models. His research on applications of smoothing methods to clustered data demonstrated that remarkable improvements can be achieved by taking proper and careful account of the dependence structure when constructing a smoother. Professor Welsh contributed to resolving how to do maximum likelihood estimation for sample survey data and, in ecological survey analysis, he made especially important contributions to distance sampling and occupancy modelling. All this work, and more, has the characteristic of theoretical depth combined with substantial practical relevance.
2017
Dr Frank Robert de Hoog FTSE, CSIRO Data61
Dr de Hoog is recognised internationally as having made highly original and insightful contributions to the advancement of applied, computational and industrial mathematics, and has contributed substantially to the mathematics profession. The importance and significance of his theoretical and applied contributions, and their flow‐on contributions to the advancement of science and to improving the efficiency of industrial processes, have been recognised by various awards.
The impact of his industrial research has been exceptional in terms of the speed of implementation by industry and the subsequent contributions to Australia’s export economy.
2015
Professor Gustav I Lehrer FAA, University of Sydney
Professor Lehrer has made highly influential contributions to algebra and geometry. Among the highlights are his co-invention of the theory of cellular algebras in the decade’s most highly cited Australian mathematical work, his development of “Howlett-Lehrer theory” to solve decomposition problems in algebra and geometry, and his development of “Springer-Lehrer theory”, with geometric and algebraic applications. His recent joint solution of the second fundamental problem of invariant theory has resolved a question of 75 years standing.
Professor Alan G R McIntosh FAA, Australian National University
Professor McIntosh works at the boundary between harmonic analysis and partial differential equations, two pillars of modern mathematics and physics. He is famous for having given with his collaborators the final answer to the Kato conjecture, a question raised in 1961 which puzzled specialists for 40 years. The techniques that he and his co-workers have developed have revolutionised the way we analyse the fundamental operators of physics.
2013
Professor Matthew Paul Wand FAA, University of Technology Sydney
Matt Wand’s main research focus is non-linear statistical models and methodology for high-dimensional and complex data, in the face of rapid technological change. Much of this research incorporates ongoing developments in Machine Learning. His contributions are multifaceted and involve applications, theory, methodology and publicly available software. Whilst most of Wand’s research is generic, areas of application that have driven some his research include public health, computational biology and the natural environment.
2011
Professor Colin Rogers FAA, University of New South Wales
Colin Rogers has made major contributions in the detection of hidden invariance and symmetry properties in nonlinear mathematical systems descriptive of complex physical processes. He is recognised as a leading world authority on Bäcklund and reciprocal type transformations and has demonstrated their extensive application in nonlinear continuum mechanics in such diverse areas as elasticity, magnetogasdynamics liquid crystal and soliton theory.
2009
Professor (Edward) Norman Dancer FAA, University of Sydney
Norman Dancer is an expert in nonlinear analysis and nonlinear differential equations. He has made important contributions to bifurcation theory, to degree theory in cones and to nonlinear elliptic partial differential equations and their applications. He has introduced many new techniques and used them to solve old classical problems, including problems in water waves and combustion theory. His ideas have had a major effect on nonlinear analysis internationally.
2007
Emeritus Professor Eugene Seneta, University of Sydney
Eugene Seneta has done much seminal work in probability and statistics in connection with branching processes, the history of probability and statistics, and in such diverse areas as slowly varying functions, Bonferroni type bounds on probabilities of unions of sets, on modelling of the price of a risky asset, and in the scaling of Higher School Certificate marks. The implications of some of his research are considerable. The algorithm which Eugene produced for scaling Higher School Certificate marks in the early 1980 was later used to determine the New South Wales Tertiary Entrance Rank.
2005—R.P. Brent
2003—J.H. Rubinstein
2001—A.J. Baddeley
1998—A.J. Guttmann
1996—N.S. Trudinger
1994—P.G. Hall; C.C. Heyde
