Global Utilities

La Trobe University
Department of Mathematics and Statistics

AMSI Summer School 2010 Speakers

The following speakers will present lecturers at the AMSI Summer School 2010.

Maria Athanassenas

Maria.Athanassenas@sci.monash.edu.au

Maria Athanassenas was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. She studied at the University of Bonn, Germany, amidst the (mathematical and other) happenings of the day, with a stint to the University of Hamburg (for the sea change and DESY, the German synchrotron), and an exchange year to the University of Pennsylvania (to learn PDEs from Jerry Kazdan, but not only). Maria completed her PhD at the University of Bonn, under the supervision of Stefan Hildebrandt. She moved to Melbourne in 1992, for a postdoctoral position at the University of Melbourne, and to finally meet those wombats!

Maria is currently working as Senior Lecturer, School of Mathematical Sciences, Monash University. Research-wise she is interested in Capillarity from a mathematical point of view: using tools from differential geometry, partial differential equations, measure theory, calculus of variations.

Conrad Burden

Conrad.Burden@anu.edu.au

Conrad Burden received his B.Sc. in applied mathematics from the University of Queensland in 1978, his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the Australian National University in 1983, and is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Physics. For the first 16 years of his academic career his research interests centred on subatomic particle physics and quantum field theory. After a brief sojourn in the IT industry he made the transition to bioinformation science in 2003.

Conrad is currently a Fellow in the Centre for Bioinformation Science at the Australian National University where his research interests include modelling of oligonucleotide microarrays, alignment free sequence comparison methods, gene regulation and protein structure.

Grant Cairns

G.Cairns@latrobe.edu.au

Grant studied electrical engineering at the University of Queensland, before doing a doctorate in differential geometry in Montpellier, France, under the direction of Pierre Molino. He spent two years at the University of Geneva, and a one year postdoc at the University of Waterloo, Canada, before coming to La Trobe. Grant is a maths enthusiast and enjoys researching and studying all kinds of maths.

Grant has a serious addiction to maths books, and maths-related books, and seldom reads anything else. Fortunately, Grant has a very happy family life, thanks to his loving wife Romana and their sons, Des and Max.

Aurore Delaigle

A.Delaigle@ms.unimelb.edu.au

Aurore Delaigle received her PhD in Statistics from the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. After her PhD, she spent three years in California, where she did a one-year postdoc at the University of California at Davis, and then became an Assistant Professor at the University of California in San Diego. At the end of the three years, she moved back to Europe and took a lecturer job in Bristol, UK and later on became a reader in Statistics at the University of Bristol.

Aurore is currently a QEII fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses mainly on nonparametric statistics and problems of measurement errors.

Markus Hegland

Markus.Hegland@anu.edu.au

Markus is fascinated by the computational challenges posed by high dimensions and ill-posedness (where the results do not depend continuously on the data), applications in machine learning and biology and the mathematical theory which reveals initially hidden computational tractability. He is also interested in implementations - now mostly in Python - of efficient parallel numerical algorithms. Markus is a Senior Fellow at the ANU, and is member of the ARC Centre in Bioinformatics.

Markus has started tutoring in high school, has taught introductory courses in numerical analysis at the ETH in Switzerland and advanced courses at the ANU. He does also enjoy coming to the AMSI summerschools. He has taught 3 times at AMSI before, twice in Melbourne and once in Sydney. He was director of the AMSI summerschool when it was hosted by the ANU in 2005.

Marcel Jackson

M.G.Jackson@latrobe.edu.au

Marcel Jackson is a senior lecturer in mathematics at La Trobe University. He has an active interest in semigroup theory and universal algebra, including their interplay with aspects of theoretical computer science and computational complexity.

Aside from a general interest in things mathematical, Marcel is also quite easily enthused on other topics: fruits, rocks, rain, coastal shrub, noise, ...

Marty Ross

MartiniRossi@gmail.com

Marty Ross is a mathematical bum. At the age of 2, he ran away from America to join the circus. After some controversy involving an elephant, he returned to America to do his PhD on geometric analysis at Stanford University. After a stint at Rice University, he came home to Australia. Since then, he has wandered from Maths Department to Maths Department, aimless but happy.