NEW ZEALAND INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICS AND ITS APPLICATIONS (NZIMA) ====== One of New Zealand's Centres of Research Excellence ====== Newsletter 27 May 2010 We're pleased to give you another update on news from the mathematical sciences CoRE, the NZIMA. The eighth issue of our colourful twice-yearly NZ-IMAges bulletin has just appeared (in April). We hope you like it. If you didn't get a copy and would like to, please let us know! Marston Conder and Vaughan Jones Co-Directors of the NZIMA SUMMARY OF CONTENTS 1. New framework being set for the NZIMA 2. Jones Medal for Lifetime Achievements 3. Awards and Honours and other news 4. Profile: Alona Ben-Tal 5. NZIMA Annual Report for 2009 6. CoRE publications analysis 7. Events calendar 1. NEW FRAMEWORK BEING SET FOR THE NZIMA Our new Board has met two times so far this year, and we are pleased to report on a high level of commitment to the continued advancement of the NZIMA and its valuable activities, and to achieving success in the next CoRE selection round (expected to take place in 2012/13). The CoRE selection decision regarding the NZIMA in 2007 was based on a number of perceived flaws, mostly concerned with governance, strategy and added value (over and above what could be achieved by an increase in funding to existing activities). There was no question about research excellence. The selection process put a lot more emphasis than expected on wider benefits to New Zealand, aside from research excellence. We now wish to develop a new framework for the NZIMA, to enable better planning, organisation and communication of the NZIMA's activities, and broaden its ability to help New Zealand build a strong future. One of the main tasks ahead is to make a much better case demonstrating how much, and increasingly, the mathematical and computational sciences contribute to higher levels of GDP, through innovation in methodologies, systems and practices in all fields of science, commerce and public life. Another will be to analyse and set priorities for the great variety of activities undertaken by the NZIMA, in a way that gives more explicit recognition to its short-term, long-term and indirect contributions. A third one will be to seek opportunities for additional finance to help sustain the NZIMA through to the next CoRE round, through a small number of partnerships in tightly-focussed areas of application and from sources within the university sector. 2. JONES MEDAL FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENTS A new medal has been established by the Royal Society of New Zealand to recognise lifetime achievement in the mathematical sciences in NZ. Named the Jones Medal, after our own Sir Vaughan Jones, this medal is to be awarded every two years, from 2010. Nominations have been called for the first award, with a closing date of 28th June 2010. For further details, see the RSNZ website http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/Site/funding/MedalsAwards/awards/academy_awards/jonesmedal.aspx 3. AWARDS AND HONOURS AND OTHER NEWS * John Butcher (one of our founding principal investigators and director of one of our earliest programmes) has been made a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), in fact possibly the first ever New Zealand based scientist to win this honour * Peter Hunter (one of our founding principal investigators) has been named an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Professional Engineers New Zealand (IPENZ) * An article featuring Gaven Martin (one of our founding principal investigators and co-director of two of our thematic programmes) has appeared in the "North and South" magazine 4. PROFILE: ALONA BEN-TAL Alona Ben-Tal began her career with an MSc in Mechanical Engineering from the Technion in Haifa, followed by two and half years as a researcher in the Israel Electric Cooperation. One of the projects that Alona worked on during that time involved the construction of bifurcation diagrams for a mathematical model that mimicked a harmful phenomenon for power systems known as ferro-resonance. One of the bifurcation points that she found was puzzling, and motivated her to do a PhD in Mathematics, which she completed in 2001 at the University of Auckland. Alona then spent three years as a New Zealand Science and Technology Postdoctoral Fellow at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute, developing mathematical models for the cardio-respiratory system, and in 2005 joined Massey University where she is a Senior Lecturer at the Albany campus. Alona won a Fast Start Marsden grant, and now holds a full Marsden Fund grant to study different aspects of neural control of respiration. She is also involved (as a co-supervisor) in other projects, studying optimal control of embryo growth, and modelling a high-speed weighing device. She is an active member of the New Zealand mathematical community, and enjoys teaching. In 2008 she won a Distinguished Teaching Award from her Institute, and together with Merryn Tawhai she organised an international workshop on multi-scale modelling of the respiratory system (sponsored by the NZIMA). Alona is currently the secretary of the NZ branch of ANZIAM, and a member of the Marsden Fund panel for Mathematical and Information Sciences. 5. NZIMA ANNUAL REPORT FOR 2009 Our annual report for 2009 (prepared for the TEC) is now available, online in pdf at http://www.nzima.org/Publications.html 6. CoRE PUBLICATIONS ANALYSIS An analysis of publications by NZ Centres of Research Excellence (CoREs) over the years 2004, 2006 and 2008 has been carried out by Warren Smart at the Ministry of Education, based on information from CoRE annual reports. This analysis is very positive for the NZIMA. It shows, for example, that over those three years, the NZIMA reported 269 publications, with 70% of them in journals rated A or A* under the new Australian ERA evaluation system. The other CoREs together reported 1385 publications, with 51% in A or A* journals. In fact the NZIMA reported 16% of the combined total of reported publications and close to 22% of those in A or A* journals -- on a budget of about 5% of the total CoRE Fund. 7. FORTHCOMING EVENTS IN THE MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES IN NEW ZEALAND 29 June - 1 July 2010, at Massey University, Palmerston North: NZSA 2010 Conference and International Conference on Statistical Methodologies and Related Topics See http://nzsa_cdl_2010.massey.ac.nz/ 22-25 November 2010, at Hanmer Springs: 2010 NZ Postgraduate Mathematics & Statistics Conference For further details, contact Shannon Ezzat, University of Canterbury, email: sez10@uclive.ac.nz 29-30 November 2010, at University of Auckland: Annual Conference of the Operations Research Society of NZ See http://www.orsnz.org.nz/#conference 6-9 December 2010, at University of Otago, Dunedin: Annual NZ Mathematics Colloquium Further details will be available on a website soon 9-14 January 2011, at Raglan: Annual NZMRI/NZIMA Summer Meeting, with theme "Dynamical systems" See http://www.math.canterbury.ac.nz/NZMRI2011/ 15-20 December 2011, at Victoria University of Wellington: The 12th Asian Logic Conference See http://msor.victoria.ac.nz/Events/ALC2011/WebHome SUBSCRIBING AND UNSUBSCRIBING Please forward this NZIMA newsletter to any non-subscriber to whom the material may be relevant and who may wish to receive the publication regularly. 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