About the Fellowship
Who does this Fellowship assist?
The Alf van der Poorten Travelling Fellowship aims to assist young pure mathematicians in travelling in Australia and overseas so that they can enrich their mathematical research through contact with other mathematicians.
Information
The Alf van der Poorten Travelling Fellowship is offered in odd-numbered years to researchers who have obtained their PhD in pure mathematics from an Australian university.
The Fellowship is awarded on academic merit, although need may be taken into account. The Fellowship is funded by the family of the late Professor Alf van der Poorten.
The selection committee will recommend the amount to be granted, to a maximum of $10,000, to a successful applicant, taking account of the proposed research and travel activities, the need for support and the research track record of the applicant relative to opportunity.
Eligibility criteria
To be eligible to apply, a candidate must have qualified for their PhD in pure mathematics from an Australian university within five years of the closing date, and they cannot have previously been awarded the Alf van der Poorten Fellowship.
Applicants must have been members of the Society for the consecutive twelve-month period immediately prior to the date of application. (Back dating of membership to the previous year is not sufficient.) Preference may be given to applicants who are resident in Australia.
How to apply
Applications should include the completed application form (PDF, 710 KB) detailing a travel and research plan and budget (at most one page), a budget justification, letters of support from all institutions being visited, a full CV and a letter from the awarding institution confirming when the applicant qualified for the award of their PhD.
The applicant should also arrange for two letters of support from experts in their field to be sent directly to the committee chair anne.thomas@sydney.edu.au. These letters should comment on the track record of the applicant and on the merits of the Fellowship application. One of these letters can be one of the letters of support from a host institution.
Applications should be sent to the committee chair anne.thomas@sydney.edu.au by 16 May in the year of the award.
Contact form
- Application form here application form (PDF, 710 KB)
The Alf van der Poorten Fellows to date are:

Dr Wu obtained her PhD at The University of Wollongong in 2021. Her research is mainly in geometric analysis, including results at higher order geometric differential equations for curves which rely heavily on techniques from geometric analysis, partial differential equations and topology.
With her Alf van der Poorten Travelling Fellowship she will visit Tsinghua University to collaborate with Professor Haizhong Li for collaboration around higher-order curvature flow of open curves under different boundary conditions and higher-order curvature flow of closed curves without boundaries. She will also visit Associate Professor Tatsuya Miura in Tokyo Institute of Technology, where they will work on the self-similar solutions of curve diffusion flow with infinite length.

Dr Lindstrom earned his PhD at the Computer Assisted Research Mathematics and its Applications Priority Research Centre at The University of Newcastle. In 2018, he commenced a postdoctoral fellowship at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His approach to mathematical questions is to build new models of them that are amenable to study by the tools of experimental mathematics. Many of the models exploit geometric characterizations of variational analysis frameworks. Dr Lindstrom will study the relationship between Fenchel–Moreau–Rockafellar Duality and the classical notion of duality from projective geometry.
Dr Howie obtained his PhD in 2014 in the area of knots and links. Recently he proved a topological characterisation of alternating knot complements, using properly embedded spanning surfaces, which answered an open question of Ralph Fox from the early sixties. He would like to extend this characterisation to an algebraic one. He will try to find a characterisation of the knot groups associated to alternating knots. He proposes to collaborate with Genevieve Walsh, who is an associate professor at Tufts University, and with Anastasiia Tsvietkova, an expert on alternating links and hyperbolic geometry based at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan.

Dr Tran’s research focuses on developing connections between topology, number theory and geometry. He has proven a conjecture of Melanie Matchett Wood and Ravi Vakil on stability of the Betti numbers of certain subspaces of a symmetric product. In joint work with Nathan Perlmutter and Dev Sinha of the University of Oregon, he is constructing geometric interpretations for characteristic classes of surface bundles, or equivalently cohomology classes of the moduli space. Dr Tran will use his Fellowship to collaborate with Dr Norman Do at Monash University, applying geometric constructions to algebro-geometric problems, and to investigate the homological stability of Hurwitz spaces, with Assistant Professor Craig Westerland of the University of Minnesota. He will also participate in the PIMS Symposium on the Geometry and Topology of Manifolds in July 2015.

Dr Ritter is a complex geometer with expertise in Oka theory who obtained his PhD from the University of Adelaide in 2011. He will use his Fellowship to visit the University of Oslo for four weeks in 2013 to collaborate with Erlend Wold (University of Oslo), Franc Forstneric (University of Ljubljana) and Rafael Andrist (Universität Wuppertal). His main aim is to construct embeddings of Stein manifolds into complex manifolds. While in Oslo Dr Ritter will also attend an international research symposium which is being organised to coincide with his visit.

Dr Chiodo is a computability theorist and a group theorist, with particular interests in algorithms and decision problems in groups. He will use his Alf van der Poorten Fellowship to attend a special research program at the Isaac Newtown Institute at the University of Cambridge and the British Logic Colloquium in Manchester. During this time he will collaborate with Professor Rod Downey (Uni. Wellington) on generic computability in groups, Professor Nigel Smart (Uni. Bristol), Dr. Andrew Lewis (Uni. Leeds) and Dr Jack Button and his student Mariano Zeron-Medina (both at Uni. Cambridge).

Dr Vozzo’s expertise is in the topology and geometry of infinite dimensional manifolds and bundle gerbes. He will use his Alf van der Poorten Fellowship to attend the conference “Analysis, Geometry, and Quantum Field theory” in Potsdam, Germany. During this conference he will initiate a collaboration with Professor Rosenberg of Boston University. After this conference he will visit Dr Daniel Stevenson at the University of Glasgow and Professor Michael Singer at the University of Edinburgh.