**The Outstanding Achievements Recognition Award acknowledges and celebrates ACEMS members who deserve recognition from the ACEMS community because of outstanding work in 2020.
University of Adelaide – Dr Melissa (Mel) Humphries – Associate Investigator
Mel Humphries is being recognized by ACEMS for her outstanding contributions to the Adelaide Node since she joined ACEMS. In particular, Mel has made a very significant contribution to the node's culture and has demonstrated great energy in pursuing a number of external collaborations. Congratulations Mel, and thank you.
UNSW Sydney – Dr Xuhui Fan – Research Fellow
Xuhui Fan is being recognized by ACEMS for a sequence of innovative and outstanding research published in premier journals and machine learning conferences, including the development of new space-partitioning model concepts (incl. trees, forests, and batch and online algorithms), techniques and methods for Hawkes process modelling, new structures for modelling relational data (smoothing graphons and recurrent Dirichlet belief networks), and many others.
Monash University – Dr Bonsoo Koo – Associate Investigator
ACEMS is recognising Bonsoo Koo for his research productivity and impact in the areas of econometric and statistical theory as well as financial econometrics and quantitative finance. His contributions to these disciplines include, proposing a novel method for pricing financial assets, providing an array of novel methods for forecasting economic and financial variables and establishing new theories for the estimation of and inference for high-dimensional models and their statistical properties. He has had papers published in some top journals and collaborated with industry partners Challenger Ltd, Betashares and CSIRO.
Queensland University of Technology – Dr David Warne – Research Fellow
David Warne has made outstanding contributions to two areas in 2020. The first area is in modelling global spatio-temporal patterns of covid-19 cases, as part of an international research team. David led this work and its submission as a journal article. The work has resulted in two new avenues of research with national and international partners. The second area is in modelling resilience of coral reefs, in collaboration with ACEMS Partner Organisation, AIMS. In addition to maintaining a positive and effective relationship with AIMS, David has initiated engagement with a range of other ACEMS members to enhance this research.
Competitive award to recognise exceptional teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2020 Special Commendations were offered to recognise the exceptional work in teaching and learning that academic and professional staff supporting teaching undertook in response to the COVID19 pandemic.
In recognition of the increased workload imposed by the changes in teaching mode required by the emergency response we also simplified the application process.
Awards were made to staff who were able to demonstrate agility, creativity and innovation in responding to the unique learning and teaching context created by the COVID19 pandemic.
