WIMSIG NEWSLETTER — November 2021

Latest AustMS WIMSIG Awardees

Congratulations to the following awardees of the October 2021 round (Round 15) of the Cheryl E. Praeger Travel Awards and Anne Penfold Street Awards.

  • Hoa Thi Bui (Curtin University) was awarded a Praeger Award for a research trip at the Department of Mathematics, University of Alicante, Spain.
  • Joan Licata (ANU) was awarded a Street Award as the co-organiser of the semester program on Braids at The Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM).

A big thank-you to the Selection Committee, comprised of Sara Herke (Queensland), Sevvandi Kandanaarachchi (RMIT), and Melissa Humphries (Adelaide), for their work in assessing the applications.

Round 16 of the travel awards is now open and closes on April 1, 2022.

If you are receiving this newsletter and would like to join AustMS you can do so here. Membership of AustMS is free for students at Australian universities. The Praeger and Street Awards require membership of AustMS for at least the 12 months prior to submitting an application. If you do join AustMS, remember to select ‘yes’ to being a member of WIMSIG too.

Congratulations to Poh Wah Hillock

Dr Poh Wah Hillock has won The University of Queensland Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning “for transforming first year mathematics courses at UQ by building an extensive support network and collaborative learning environments for students”.

WIMSIG Conference 2021

Thank you to everyone involved in the WIMSIG Conference 2021, which was held on 1 October 2021 in various online and in-person hubs around Australia. It was wonderful to see so many participants from across the country. Thanks for making the conference work in an unusual format. A report on the conference will appear in the November issue of the AustMS Gazette. Meanwhile, if you’d like to catch up with any of the plenary talks, they can be viewed on the ACEMS YouTube channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VxpbWlwjyI&list=PLBxgDdQG5yHJWhyMbM77s_GFs1PlMkQEJ

WIMSIG Executive Committee Call for Nominations

At the end of 2021, WIMSIG will be electing two new members for the Executive Committee, to commence terms in February 2022. The positions that will be open and the length of term are as follows.

  • Incoming Chair — 4yr term (one year as Incoming Chair, two as Chair, one as outgoing Chair)
  • Student Member — 1yr term

If you are interested in the opportunity to lead the drive for gender equity in Australian Mathematics, please consider nominating for a position by November 30.

The current Chair, Catherine Greenhill (c.greenhill@unsw.edu.au) is happy to answer any questions you may have about the role of Chair. The current student representative, Ellena Moskovsky (ellena.moskovsky1@monash.edu) is happy to answer any questions you may have about the Student role.

The Returning Officer is Emma Carberry (emma.carberry@sydney.edu.au).

Usually a nominee acts as nominator (self-nomination) and needs another nominator to support their nomination.  Both nominee and nominator should be WIMSIG members. The nominee should email the Returning Officer with the following information: the nominee’s name, the name and email address of the nominator, the role, and a statement from the nominee on why they would like to take on that role. This statement will be sent out to the WIMSIG membership list should there be an election. The nominator will be contacted by the Returning Officer directly.

Association for Women in Mathematics Student Essay Contest

High-school and undergraduate students are invited to interview a women in the mathematical sciences and write an essay: https://awm-math.org/awards/student-essay-contest/. Submissions accepted until February 1, 2022.

STEM Women Asia Launched

The recently launched STEM Women Asia initiative builds upon the success of the Australian STEM Women platform, which has over 3,000 profiles. STEM Women Asia is a partnership of the Australian Academy of Science, the Association of Academies and Societies of Sciences in Asia and the Inter Academy partnership.

There are lots of wonderful Asian women working in STEM, so the platform will grow with lots of profiles. WIMSIG member and Women in Science and Engineering chair of the Association of Academies and Societies of Sciences in Asia, Cheryl Praeger, encourages WIMSIG members to create their own profiles on the STEM Women Asia hub.

EVENTS

MATRIX November Seminar

MATRIX Invites you to join us for our November online seminar with A/Prof Jessica Kasza (Monash University).

Stepping up and crossing over: designing efficient cluster randomised trials

Abstract: Although individually randomised trials are the gold standard for assessing the impact of new treatments on the outcomes of individuals, they aren’t always possible. In many situations, including when treatments are applied at the group (or “cluster”) level, cluster randomised trials must instead be conducted. Such designs are less efficient than individually randomised trials: larger numbers of participants are required than for equivalent individually randomised trials. Longitudinal cluster randomised trials can claw back some lost efficiency, by instructing clusters to switch between treatments during the trial. Stepped wedge trials are a particular type of longitudinal cluster randomised trial design that has seen a rapid rise in popularity in recent years. In this talk I’ll discuss work investigating the statistical aspects of stepped wedge trials that points the way towards less burdensome and more efficient “incomplete” variants. This work highlights the fact that in stepped wedge designs, not all observations are created equal.

Date and Time: Tuesday 9 November at 10:00-11:00 (AEDT)

Register once for the seminar series at https://www.matrix-inst.org.au/events-01/online-seminars/. You’ll be emailed the Zoom link within 24 hours prior to the commencement of the seminar.

Annual WIMSIG Business Meeting and Dinner

The annual WIMSIG Dinner will be held on Monday 6 December as part of the 65th Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society at The University of Newcastle. While the AustMS meeting will primarily be held online, the WIMSIG Dinner is planned as a hybrid event, with some people attending in person and some online.  

The WIMSIG Dinner is free to all participants of the AustMS meeting, regardless of gender or membership of WIMSIG. The purpose of the dinner is to support women, trans and gender diverse people, and particularly early career researchers, to enter and establish careers in mathematics. Come along (in person or virtually!) to hear about the careers of the AustMS 2021 women plenary speakers, to discuss issues concerning women, trans and gender diverse people in mathematics in Australia, and to network with fellow WIMSIG members and supporters.

The annual WIMSIG Business Meeting will also be held on Monday 6 December, prior to the WIMSIG Dinner. As with the Dinner, anyone interested in WIMSIG activities is welcome to attend the Business Meeting. This is also planned as a hybrid event at this stage.

OPPORTUNITIES

The University of Melbourne

Australian National University

The University of Newcastle

MEDIA

Have you read an interesting article? Have some news? Have an opportunity available?

Please send items to WIMSIG-news@women.austms.org.au.

Note: Newsletters are published on the 1st day of each month (or soon after). The deadline for submitted items is the 27th day of each month.

To keep in touch in between newsletters, follow @wimsigAU on Twitter.