About Us

Welcome

Welcome As the Head of School, I would like to warmly welcome you to the web pages of School of Mathematics and Applied Statistics. Our School is one of the best mathematics departments in Australia, achieving an “above-world standard” classification in the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) rankings¹. In our School, we provide a learning and research environment that is supported by highly-qualified academic staff with expertise covering a wide range of sub-disciplines within the mathematical sciences.

With a comprehensive and exciting set of degrees, we provide a range of course options, including those with maximum flexibility and those with a strong industry focus, which are fully accredited by the relevant professional bodies. Our courses are reviewed regularly and inputs from stakeholders in industry and other disciplines are sought to ensure our degrees adequately prepare students for the current workplace environment. A range of undergraduate scholarships and Dean’s Scholars options are available for high achieving students.

At the undergraduate level, we have Bachelor of Mathematics (Advanced) and the Bachelor of Mathematics and Finance (Dean Scholar) options for outstanding students. All these degrees have been accredited by the Australian Mathematical Society. The Bachelor of Mathematics and Finance degree includes four exciting major studies, and these majors articulate into Masters programs and are accredited by ASIC and FINSIA. While the BMathEd degree is aimed at prospective high school Mathematics teachers and produces graduates who are qualified to teach mathematics in high schools, the newly-developed BMedMath degree is established to provide students with the skills needed to pursue careers in mathematics, statistics, medical research and industry, in areas such as genetics, epidemiology, medical imaging, drug delivery, neurophysiology and pharmacokinetics. There is also a range of double degree options combining mathematics with other areas of study within the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences and within the university. Above all, we have a comprehensive Honours program for undergraduate students who prefer to add a research component to their undergraduate education. An Honours Degree will considerably widen the career opportunities of a graduate as a professional mathematician/statistician, and is also the normal mode of entry for higher research studies towards either a Masters Degree or a PhD degree.

We currently offer a number of popular one-year (48cp) coursework Masters degrees including

  • Master of Mathematical Studies
  • Master of Mathematics
  • Master of Statistics
  • Master of Financial Mathematics.

We also have a two-year (96cp) coursework Masters program, which combines a one-year (48cp) Master of Mathematical Sciences Studies degree with one of the three existing one-year (48cp) Masters degrees. The School takes pride in its quality of learning and teaching.

The School has established an enviable reputation for being research-intensive in nature and our academic research staff are internationally recognised as leaders in their respective fields. Currently, among 6 full professors, we have a Distinguished Professor in Statistics, who is among Thomson Reuters ISI’s elite group of highly-cited mathematical scientists, an ARC-funded Future Fellow, two externally funded professors (one by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and the other by CSIRO and Grains Research Development Corporation partnership). Among junior staff members, we have two staff members, who are fully funded by ARC’s DECRA program between 2014-2016 and 2016-2018, respectively.

The School has enjoyed outstanding research achievements. In the past 3 years (2011-2013), our staff members have published a total of 282 papers in reputable international journals; approximately 48% of them are in ERA-A* and A categories. Also in the past three years alone, the School has been awarded a total of 9 ARC Discovery and Linkage grants and has graduated 47 PhD students.

As a result of all of the above, we are unique in our capacity to leverage our research into topical subject content. Our research covers a wide range of pure mathematics, applied mathematics and applied statistics, with strongly focused areas in Operators Algebra, Differential Geometry, Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations, Financial Mathematics and Statistical Survey Methodology. We host one of the thirteen UOW Research Strengths, the NIASRA (the National Institute for Applied Statistics Research Statistical Australia).

We have a very strong postgraduate program with over 45 currently-enrolled research students (PhD and MPhil) and a similar number of postgraduate coursework students. Potential students can contact individual supervisors directly or the relevant degree coordinator.

Thank you for being interested in our School’s profile and browsing over our website. If you need further information, please do not hesitate to contact me directly or any of our staff members.

Professor Aidan Sims
Head of School

¹ Under the most recently released ERA ranking 2015, our 0101 sub-disciplinary area (pure mathematics) is ranked with a score 4 while the 0102 and 0104 sub-disciplinary areas (applied mathematics and applied statistics, respectively) are ranked with the maximum score 5 (“above-world standard”).

2015

  • 2015 Wilcoxon Award for best practical applications paper appearing in the 2014 issues of Technometrics: Nguyen, H., Katzfuss, M., Cressie, N., and Braverman, A. (2014). Spatio-temporal data fusion for very large remote sesing datasets. Technometrics, 56, 174-185.
  • The 1993 book, "Statistics for Spatial Data, rev. edn" by Noel Cressie, was inducted into the Wiley Classics Library in 2015.

2014

Noel Cressie awarded the Pitman Medal and the DeGroot Book Prize

2013

Nathan Brownlowe receives Early Career Award for Outstanding Contribution to Teaching and Learning

Every year, SMAS gives out “Best Paper Awards” to authors of the best paper (determined through the Scimago Journal Rank) in each of the sub-disciplines, Statistics, Applied Maths, and Pure Maths. 

Statistics

2023

Kim Kiely
Tawiah R., Jagger C., Anstey, K.J., and Kiely, K.M., "Lifecourse socioeconomic position and cohort differences in health expectancy in Australia: a longitudinal cohort study," The Lancet Public Health, 2022. 

Sumeetpal Singh
Chopin, N., Singh, S.S., Soto, T., and Vihola, M., "On resampling schemes for particle filters with weakly informative observations," The Annals of Statistics, 2022.

2022

Andrew Zammit-Mangion
Zammit-Mangion, A., Ng, T. L. J., Vu, Q., and Filippone, M., "Deep compositional spatial models," Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2021.

2021

David Gunawan
Gunawan, D., Khaled, M., Kohn, R. "Mixed marginal copula modeling," Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 2020.

Alberto Nettel-Aguirre
Freedman, S. B., Xie, J., Nettel-Aguirre, A., Pang, X.-L., Chui, L., Williamson-Urquhart, S., Schnadower, D., Schuh, S., Sherman, P. M., Lee, B. E., Gouin, S., Farion, K. J., Poonai, N., Hurley, K. F., Qiu, Y., Ghandi, B., Lloyd, C., Finkelstein, Y., and the Pediatric Emergency Research Canada Probiotic (PERC) Regimen for Outpatient Gastroenteritis Utility of Treatment (PROGUT) Trial Group,  “A randomized trial evaluating virus-specific effects of a combination probiotic in children with acute gastroenteritis,” Nature Communications, 2020.

2020

James Ng
Fosdick, B. K., McCormick, T. H., Murphy, T. B., Ng, T. L. J., and Westling, T., “Multiresolution network models,” Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 2019.

Alison Smith, Brian Cullis, Chris Lisle, and Michael Bertolacci received an honourable mention.

2019

Thomas Suesse
Barthélemy, J. and Suesse, T., “An R Package for Multidimensional Array Fitting and Simulating Multivariate Bernoulli Distributions,” Journal of Statistical Software, 2018.

Matt Moores
Moores, M. T., Nicholls, G. K., Pettitt, A. N., and Mengersen, K., “Scalable Bayesian Inference for the Inverse Temperature of a Hidden Potts Model,” Bayesian Analysis, 2018.

2018

Ray Chambers
Das, S. and Chambers, R., “Robust mean‐squared error estimation for poverty estimates based on the method of Elbers, Lanjouw and Lanjouw,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, 2017.

Pavel Krivitsky
Karwa, V., Krivitsky, P. N., and Slavković, A. B., “Sharing social network data: differentially private estimation of exponential family random‐graph models,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C, 2017.

David Steel and Marijka Batterham received an honourable mention.

2017

Andrew Zammit-Mangion
Martín-Español, A., King, M. A., Zammit-Mangion, A., Andrews, S. B., Moore, P. & Bamber, J. L., “An assessment of forward and inverse GIA solutions for Antarctica,” Journal Of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 2016.

Martín-Español, A., Zammit-Mangion, A., Clarke, P. J., Flament, T., Helm, V., King, M. A., Luthcke, S. B., Petrie, E., Rémy, F., Schön, N., Wouters, B. & Bamber, J. L., “Spatial and temporal Antarctic Ice Sheet mass trends, glacio-isostatic adjustment, and surface processes from a joint inversion of satellite altimeter, gravity, and GPS data,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, 2016.

Noel Cressie
Cressie, N., Wang, R., Smyth, M., and Miller, C. E., “Statistical bias and variance for the regularized inverse problem: application to space-based atmospheric CO2 retrievals,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 2016.

2016

Ray Chambers
Tzavidis, N., Ranalli, M., Salvati, N., Dreassi, E., and Chambers, R., “Robust small area prediction for counts,Statistical Methods in Medical Research, 2015.

Applied Maths

2023

Song-Ping Zhu
He, X. J., Zhu, S. P., "Analytical pricing formulae for variance and volatility swaps with a new stochastic volatility and interest rate model," Expert Systems with Applications, 2022.

Pasricha, P., Zhu, S. P., and He, X. J., "A closed-form pricing formula for European options with market liquidity risk," Expert Systems with Applications, 2022.

Chayne Planiden
Hare, W., Jarry–Bolduc, G., and Planiden, C., "Error bounds for overdetermined and underdetermined generalized centred simplex gradients," IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis, 2022.

2022

Song-Ping Zhu and Xiaoping Lu
Lu, X., Zhu, S. P., and Yan, D., "Nonlinear PDE model for European options with transaction costs under Heston stochastic volatility," Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation, 2021.

2021

Song-Ping Zhu
Ma, G., Siu, C. C., Zhu, S.-P., and Elliot, R. J., “Optimal portfolio execution problem with stochastic price impact,” Automatica, 2020.

2020           

Song-Ping Zhu
Zeng, X. and Zhu, S., “A new simple tree approach for the Heston's stochastic volatility model,” Computers and Mathematics with Applications, 2019.

Joanna Goard received an honourable mention.

2019

Chayne Planiden
Planiden, C. and Wang, X., “Epi-convergence: the Moreau envelope and generalized linear-quadratic functions,” Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, 2018.

Mark Nelson received an honourable mention.

2018

Joanna Goard
Broadbridge, P., Daly, E., and Goard, J., “Exact solutions of the Richards equation with nonlinear plant-root extraction,” Water Resources Research, 2017.

Mark Nelson received an honourable mention. 

2017

Marianito Rodrigo
Rodrigo, M. R.,On fractional matrix exponentials and their explicit calculation,” Journal of Differential Equations, 2016.

2016

Maureen Edwards
Edwards, M. P. and Anderssen, R. S., “Symmetries and solutions of the non-autonomous von Bertalanffy equation,” Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation, 2015.

Xiaoping Lu
Lu, X. and Putri, E. R. M., “Semi-analytic valuation of stock loans with finite maturity,” Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation, 2015.

Pure Maths

2023

Valentina-Mira Wheeler
Bourni, T., Clutterbuck, J., Nguyen, X.H., Stancu, A., Wei, G. and Wheeler, V.M., "Ancient solutions for flow by powers of the curvature in R2," Calculus of Variations and Partial Differential Equations61(2), p.44, 2022.

2022

Jiakun Liu
Chen, S., Liu, J., and Wang, X. J., "Global regularity for the Monge-Ampere equation with natural boundary condition," Annals of Mathematics, 2021.

2021

Glen Wheeler and Valentina-Mira Wheeler
Andrews, B., McCoy, J., Wheeler, G. and Wheeler, V.-M.,Closed ideal planar curves,Geometry and Topology, 2020.

2020

Glen Wheeler
Parkins, S. and Wheeler, G., “The anisotropic poly harmonic curve flow for closed plane curves,” Calculus of Variations and Partial Differential Equations, 2019.

Kevin Brix and Aidan Sims received an honourable mention.

2019

Neil Trudinger
Jiang, F. and Trudinger, N., “On the Second Boundary Value Problem for Monge-Ampère Type Equations and Geometric Optics,” Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis, 2018.

Alan Carey received an honourable mention.

2018

David Pask
Brownlowe, N., Mundey, A., Pask, D., Spielberg, J., and Thomas, A., “C*-algebras associated to graphs of groups,” Advances in Mathematics, 2017.

Glen Wheeler and Valentina-Mira Wheeler received an honourable mention.

2017

James McCoy
Andrews, B. and McCoy, J., “Contraction of convex surfaces by nonsmooth functions of curvature,” Communications in Partial Differential Equations, 2016.

2016

Jiakun Liu
Liu, J., Trudinger, N. & Wang, X., “On asymptotic behaviour and W 2, p regularity of potentials in optimal transportation,” Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis, 2015.