Matthew Flinders Medal and Lecture
Award highlights
- This award recognises scientific research of the highest standing in the physical sciences, and honours the contributions of Australia's early scientific researchers.
- The award is one of the Academy’s most prestigious awards recognising researchers of the highest standing over a career of whatever length.
The Matthew Flinders Medal and Lecture is a career award that recognises scientific research of the highest standing in the physical sciences, and honours the contributions of Australia's early scientific researchers. Along with the Macfarlane Burnet and Ruby Payne-Scott Medals, it is one of the most prestigious career awards of the Academy.
Nominated candidates should normally be resident in Australia.
Candidates and nominators may be non Fellows.
As a Premier Award, this award is one of the Academy’s most prestigious awards recognising researchers of the highest standing over a career of whatever length.
This award is open to nominations for candidates from all genders. The Australian Academy of Science encourages nominations of female candidates and of candidates from a broad geographical distribution.
Referee reports are not required as part of the nomination process for this award.
To be eligible for nomination an appropriate period of time should elapse following the receipt of any other Academy award.
Key dates
Below are the key dates for the nomination process. While we aim to keep to this schedule, some dates may change depending on circumstances.
GUIDELINES
The following guidelines provide important information about eligibility, submission requirements, and assessment processes. Please review them carefully before submitting a nomination.
How to nominate a scientist for the Academy’s honorific awards
The following guidelines contain detailed information for nominators.
These guidelines contain information for honorific award nominators.
Please submit your nominations using the Nominate button found on the top right of this webpage when nominations are open.
Please note the Academy uses a nomination platform that is external to the main Academy site. Nominators will be required to create an account on the platform. Even if you are familiar with the nomination process, please allow extra time to familiarise yourself with the platform.
Can I nominate myself?
- No – you must be nominated by someone else. Self-nominations are not accepted.
Can I submit a nomination on behalf of someone else?
- Yes – you can submit a nomination on behalf of someone else if you are not the nominator. An example would be a university grants office or personal/executive assistant completing the online nomination form on behalf of a nominator. Once the form is submitted, the nominator will be sent an email confirming that the nomination has been completed. If a nominee submits a nomination for themselves on behalf of a nominator it will not be considered a self-nomination.
Residency requirements
- Winners of all awards except the Haddon Forrester King Medal should be mainly resident in Australia and/or have a substantive position in Australia at the time of the nomination deadline. Unless explicitly stated in the awarding conditions, the research being put forward for the award should have been undertaken mainly in Australia. Some awards have more specific conditions that the relevant selection committee must apply and nominators are advised to read the conditions associated with each award very carefully.
Honorific career eligibility (more specific details found in the honorific awards nominator guidelines and the honorific award post PhD eligibility guidelines)
- Career eligibility is calculated by calendar year.
- Early career awards are open to researchers up to 10 years post-PhD.*
- Mid-career awards are open to researchers between eight and 15 years post-PhD.*
- * or equivalent first higher degree e.g. D.Phil., D.Psych., D.Sc.
- Please note that the Awards Committee may consider nominees with post PhD dates outside of these ranges if a career exemption request is being submitted with the nomination, further guidelines on career exemption requests can be found in the nomination guidelines.
- See the post-PhD eligibility guidelines document for relevant conferral dates.
Academy fellowship requirements in award nominations
- Fellows and non-Fellows of the Academy can provide nominations for either Fellows or non-Fellows for all awards.
Women only awards
- The Dorothy Hill, Nancy Millis and Ruby Payne-Scott Medals are for women only. These medals are open to nominees who self-identify as a woman in the award nomination form. The Academy does not require any statement beyond a nominee’s self-identification in the nomination form.
- This practice is consistent with the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, which has recognised the non-binary nature of gender identity since 2013, and gives effect to Australia’s international human rights obligations. The Academy remains committed to the fundamental human rights principles of equality, freedom from discrimination and harassment, and privacy, as well as the prevention of discrimination on the basis of sex and gender identity.
PREVIOUS AWARDEES
Professor Yuri Kivshar FAA, Australian National University
Optics is the art of manipulating light through devices including lenses, gratings and nonlinear crystals. Photonics allows us to use light for many applications. Professor Yuri Kivshar is a pioneer in optics who has described with his team whole new classes of materials and devices by combining the properties of nonlinear and structures patterned on a sub-wavelength scale. He is globally recognised for introducing the field of metaphotonics using artificial materials with novel properties and applications. Professor Kivshar is one of the founders of all-dielectric resonant metaphotonics that derives unique functionalities from electric and magnetic Mie resonances. His work has led to the development of innovative photonic devices, such as chiral nanolasers, employed in a new generation of optical communication systems, biomedical sensing, and defence and security applications. He has trained a remarkable number of students and early-career researchers, with many of them now in leading positions in industry and academia worldwide.
Professor Lidia Morawska FAA, Queensland University of Technology
Professor Lidia Morawska’s 30 years of innovative work brings us closer to breathing safely. The fundamental science that she pioneered and advanced in the multifaceted field of air pollution is critical for humanity to understand pollution and its impacts, and to build bridges translating science into public health applications. This work laid the foundation for the 2021 World Health Organization (WHO) Global Air Quality Guidelines, which included recommendations on ultrafine particles from combustion processes for the first time, providing authorities around the globe with the basis to develop regulations to control this major pollutant to improve human health and save lives. Professor Morawska’s seminal work on particles from human respiratory activities became critical during the COVID-19 pandemic, in recognition of the importance of aerosol transmission, and convincing the WHO and national regulatory bodies to review public health policies and practices from schools to workplaces, making these environments safer for more people around the world.
Professor Andrew Holmes AC FAA FRS FTSE, University of Melbourne
Professor Andrew Holmes is recognised for his world-leading contributions to the chemical synthesis of organic and polymeric substances for use at the interface with materials science and biology.
Plastics have traditionally been used as insulators or lightweight structural components. However, as a result of Professor Holmes’s contributions in developing plastics that emitted light when sandwiched between electrodes connected to a power source, the world now recognises that these materials can serve as semiconductors for flat screen TVs, for organic solar cells and in transistors.
Professor Holmes led the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium that delivered highly efficient solar cells and showed that they could be printed on plastic.
In the area of cell biology, Professor Holmes’s research group collaborated with the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute to attach their synthetic signalling molecules to beads that could be used as fishing lines to identify many key proteins involved in colon cancer cellular signalling.
Dr Richard Manchester FAA, CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science
Dr Richard Manchester is a world leader in pulsar research. Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars with beams that sweep past Earth forming regular pulses of radio emission. These regular pulses can be used to investigate a wide range of astrophysical phenomena, including tests of Einstein's general theory of relativity, to search for gravitational waves from super-massive binary black holes in the early universe, to probe magnetic fields in our galaxy, and to explore the properties of supernova explosions. He has led the teams that have discovered more than half of all known pulsars, mainly using the CSIRO Parkes radio telescope, and used them to explore the universe around us. Among the pulsars they have discovered is the only known double pulsar which has given the best confirmation so far that Einstein’s General Relativity gives an accurate description of gravitational interactions in strong-field conditions.
2017
Professor Barry Ninham AO FAA, Australian National University
Professor Ninham’s discoveries have had a revolutionary impact on the field of colloid science, a discipline that underpins chemical engineering, cell and molecular biology and nanotechnology.
He is the developer of the accepted theory of amphiphilic molecular self-assembly, a process that underlies modern materials science. It is a fundamental principle of self-assembly in nanotechnology, impacting on modern molecular-based technologies, and slow-release technology for in-vivo pharmaceutical drug- delivery. Five decades of work by Professor Ninham has revealed that the discipline of physical chemistry that informed our intuition on a myriad of processes was flawed to the extent that it failed to take account of key “ion specific effects” and dissolved atmospheric gas.
He was Founder and Head of the Applied Mathematics Department at the Australian National University (ANU) and presently works with Professor Richard Pashley and a team of graduate students at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA). They discovered and are implementing simple new technologies for purification of recycled water, desalination, low temperature chemical reactivity, catalysis, and removal of pollutants such as arsenic.
2015
Professor Kurt Lambeck AO FAA FRS, Australian National University
Professor Lambeck is a globally pre-eminent geophysicist who has made fundamental contributions to understanding Earth’s rotation, the strength of Earth’s mantle and its role in plate tectonics, and the complex global geometry of sea level variations associated with ice sheet melting. His work has fundamentally influenced a range of disciplines from geophysics to oceanography, glaciology and archaeology.
2013
Professor Kenneth Freeman FAA FRS, Australian National University
Professor Ken Freeman is widely acknowledged as the world’s most eminent galactic astronomer. The first to identify the necessity for dark matter in galaxies, he has shaped our current understanding of the dynamics and structure of galaxies. Over the past decade, Professor Freeman has co-established the field of galactic archaeology, where fossil records of stars are used to trace the formation of the Milky Way. His ideas have helped launch the one billion dollar European satellite, GAIA (Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics). GAIA will work with a purpose-built instrument on the Anglo–Australian Telescope to fossick for stars that will chronicle the history of the galaxy since its birth more than 13 billion years ago. Professor Freeman has supervised more than fifty PhD theses, and he truly is a father of Australian astronomy.
2011
Professor Brian Kennett FAA FRS, Australian National University
Brian Kennett has made major contributions to the understanding of the Earth using seismological methods, adding geodynamic insight to an unusual combination of theoretical, numerical and observational skills. He has made seminal advances in understanding the Earth’s internal processes, ranging from studies of reflection seismology to the free oscillations of the Earth. In addition, he has pioneered the development of influential new methods for understanding in physical terms the propagation of seismic waves in complex media and made significant innovations in inversion methods for geophysical problems.
2009
Professor Bruce McKellar, University of Melbourne
Bruce McKellar has consistently provided leading edge research in physics, influencing a number of fields of particle physics. This has included important work on weak interactions in the nucleus, which led to the development of the 'Tucson-Melbourne Potential' with his collaborators. He devotes much of his energy to the scientific community in general, through teaching, training of students and post-doctoral fellows, and through his service to the University of Melbourne and key scientific institutions.
2007
Professor Peter Hall, University of Melbourne
Peter Hall is a leading international researcher in theoretical and applied statistics and probability theory. He has made substantial contributions to nonparametric statistics over a 25-year period. Peter has had a massive influence on the development and assessment of the bootstrap method. He has made very important contributions to smoothing methods in statistics, and has introduced practical smoothing parameter-selection methods in a variety of settings. He also developed novel theoretical arguments to explain why some approaches are more variable, or more biased, than others. Peter’s research on fractal-based statistical methods for quantifying surface roughness has also been groundbreaking.
2005—R.D. Ekers
2002—A. McL. Sargeson
2000—D.V. Boger
1998—W. Compston
1996—W.R. Blevin
1994—N.S. Hush
1992—B.D.O. Anderson
1990—J.S. Turner
1988—R.D. Brown
1986—J.N. Israelachvili
1984—B.H. Neumann
1982—R. Hanbury Brown
1980—A. Walsh
1978—A.E. Ringwood
1976—C.H.B. Priestley
1974—J.P. Wild
1972—A.J. Birch
1969—K.E. Bullen
1967—F.J. Fenner
1965—J.S. Anderson
1963—J.C. Eccles
1961—M.L. Oliphant
1959—F.M. Burnet
1957—J.L. Pawsey
