Academy Fellow and UNSW Professor John Church is the first Australian awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change for his work in detecting, understanding and projecting sea-level rise due to climate change.
He shares the prize and €400,000 prize money with French space geodesist Anny Cazenave, a specialist in satellite altimetry (the measurement of the form and dimensions of Earth) and British climate scientist Professor Johnathan Gregory, an expert in ocean heat uptake and climate sensitivity.
The prize is rated as one of the world’s 99 major science awards by IREG List of International Academic Awards, with a reputation score of 0.59 (a Nobel Prize has a score of 1.0). Read more about the prize on the UNSW Newsroom website.
Academy Fellow and RMIT Distinguished Professor Min Gu has been awarded a top international prize, the 2019 Dennis Gabor Award in Diffractive Optics, named in honour of the Nobel-winning inventor of holography, Dennis Gabor.
The award, announced by the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), is presented annually in recognition of outstanding accomplishments in diffractive wave front technologies, especially those that further the development of holography and metrology applications.
Internationally renowned for his expertise in 3D optical imaging theory, Gu’s discoveries are helping drive the development of solutions to some of our biggest challenges in renewable energy, information technology and big data storage. Read more about the prize on the RMIT News website.
Meanwhile Academy Fellow and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute Professor Melissa Little will receive $936,221 from the National Health and Medical Research Council.
The funding will be used to further her research into the use of human stem cells to develop kidneys with functioning tissue as an alternative for renal replacement. The research will focus on the molecular basis of kidney development, renal disease and repair.
The funding was announced by the Minister for Health, Greg Hunt, in January. Read the NHMRC media release.
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