Congratulations to Prof. Kate Smith-Miles

Congratulations to Prof. Kate Smith-Miles who was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Australian Laureate Fellowships in August. Prof. Kate Smith-Miles received a Georgina Sweet Australian Laureate Fellowships which means that in addition to her research project —  which will investigate the potential of a new paradigm in algorithm testing — she will also take on an ambassadorial role to promote women in research.

The 2014 Australian Laureate Fellows were awarded by Minister for Education, the Hon. Christopher Pyne MP, at a ceremony in Adelaide. “This funding scheme supports researchers of international repute and these Fellowships will play an important role in meeting the Australian Government’s commitment to ensure Australia successfully competes on the international research stage,” Mr Pyne said in a press release issued by the Department of Education.

A professor in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Monash University and Director of MAXIMA (Monash Academy for Cross & Interdisciplinary Mathematical Applications) she will be speaking at this year’s BioInfoSummer event. Her research interests include most branches of applied mathematics, but especially optimisation, pattern recognition and modelling of complex systems.

Current projects include developing new methodologies for objective assessment of algorithm performance; generating new test instances for various classes of optimisation problems; improved scheduling algorithms; and expensive black-box optimisation.

In the video profile below Kate discusses the beauty and potential of mathematics.