Winners and finalists

UTS Vice-Chancellor's Awards for Research Excellence: 2023 award recipients — Winners of the UTS Vice Chancellor's Awards for Research Excellence. Photo Oscar Coleman

The awards acknowledge research excellence across the following categories.

Research medals

Chancellor's Medal for Research Excellence

This award honours outstanding research at UTS that demonstrates sustained research excellence at the highest level over a period of several years.

Award winner

Distinguished Professor Simon Darcy, UTS Business School

A great deal of our research revolves around the international convention on the rights of Persons with disabilities, which falls into the Disability Discrimination Act, the NDIS, and of course the outcomes, of the most recent Disability Royal Commission. Its important work that you’ve got a baseline, so that you know whether you’re improving being appropriate effective and efficient So that you’re bringing about social change.

Finalists

Distinguished Professor (CT) Chin-Teng Lin, Faculty of Engineering and IT

Everyone today is talking about AI In our new centre. We bring human intelligence and artificial intelligence together. Many of the concerns people have today about AI are because it is not yet human-centric, people wonder, how do we work with ai? Can we trusted, these are challenging, we want to solve.

Professor Philip Hansbro, Faculty of Science

So we really work on chronic respiratory diseases. We're using multis technology to more holistically develop a picture of the entire disease process. We can identify molecules that control those entire disease pathways. So our major goal is to identify new therapeutic targets, develop new therapies to treat chronic respiratory disease.

UTS Medal for Research and Teaching Integration

This award recognises an academic or a team of academics for their outstanding research and outstanding teaching at UTS, especially those who demonstrate their ability to successfully integrate research, teaching and learning across a range of research and teaching activities.

Award winner

Dr Maiken Ueland, Faculty of Science

My research is focusing on developing new technology to locate missing persons, and the way we're going about that is we've developed electronic nose technology, copying what the dogs do. So, we're chemically sniffing the air and trying to pick up where the victims are. And in the future, what I'm imagining is having a whole range of these electronic noses on drones, so we know where to focus our search efforts.

Finalists

Associate Professor Alexandra Crosby, Thomas Lee, Jesse Adams Stein, Katherine Scardifield, Bridget Malcolm, Cameron Tonkinwise, Peter McNeil, Treena Clark, Abby Mellick Lopes, Mark Titmarsh and Lin Wei from Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building

A lot of our research and design studies focuses on climate change and how designers and design researchers should operate differently to visualise design better futures and orient students towards thinking about climate change. We Were looking at developing an AL based bioplastics industry in regional New South Wales, and that involves integrating disciplinary areas like material science and product design and design ethnography.

Associate Professor Nathan Langford, Faculty of Science

In my research group, we aim to build quantum processes and quantum computers out of small scale electronic systems that operate at such low temperatures that they actually become superconducting, so that we can actually use these systems to do quantum simulations, to develop the techniques in our labs that can later be applied to the large scale future quantum computers that we'll see in industry in 20 to 30 years.

UTS Medal for Research Impact

This medal is awarded for research that has achieved considerable impact outside the academic community, including within the creative and/or professional practice(s). It recognises the contribution that research makes to the economy, society, environment or culture beyond the contribution to academic research.

Award winner

Professor Bronwyn Hemsley, Faculty of Health

My research grew out of problems in the sector relating to the support of people with communication difficulty. In particular, people with swallowing difficulty face a big problem with the risk of choking. We need to do more work around our 3D food printing to make that more accessible, and to see if we can improve the variety of texture-modified foods for people with swallowing difficulty.

Finalists

Professor Justin Seymour, Faculty of Science

Australia's beaches have profound ecological economic and cultural importance, yet they're often threatened by poor water quality. We've developed a new set of techniques that allow us to precisely determine where poor water quality is coming from. This has allowed our government partners to identify failures in their wastewater infrastructure and fix up leaks, and ultimately lead to improved water quality at a number of beaches.

Distinguished Tuan Van Nguyen, Faculty of Engineering and IT

My research programme is on about fracture prevention and in fracture prevention. The challenge is how to identify people at high risk of fractures. With the health of the N-H-M-R-C fellowship, we have developed a digital tool. We call it bone checks. For personalised fracture risk assessment. We could reduce the risk of fracture in the general population by up to 50%.