Adrian Dudek

Adrian completed a Bachelor of Science with Honours majoring in Pure and Applied mathematics at the University of Western Australia and did his PhD in Number Theory at the Australian National University. After this, he became a Derivatives Trader at Optiver. He is now Head of Academic Partnerships at Optiver APAC and spends a lot of time talking to students about all the neat things they can do with numbers. Outside of this, his mathsy undertakings range from researching prime numbers to learning machine learning. He also manages and writes for the website mathsfeed.blog.

Olivia Smith

Olivia completed her PhD in combinatorial optimisation from the University of Melbourne. After her PhD, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Newcastle. She then went on to hold positions at IBM Research Australia and at Telstra. She is currently an Optimisation Consultant at Roster Right building mathematical models and algorithms to help create rosters for workers across all sorts of industries.

Benjamin Wilson

Ben’s PhD in Representation Theory was awarded by both the University of Sydney and the University of São Paulo. He then went on to take up several postdoctoral positions including at the University of Paris VII, the University of Sydney and the Technical University of Munich. He left academia to work as a freelance data scientist around Europe before he co-founded Lateral GmbH in 2013 and currently works as its Chief Scientist.

Michael Hartley

Michael did his PhD in Algebra and Combinatorics from the University of Western Australia. He then went on hold academic positions at several institutions in Malaysia. After two decades of being an academic, Michael left his position as an Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham’s Malaysia campus to return to Perth. He is now a mathematician at DUG Technology. Check out his website about maths games!

Twitter: @MichaelIHartley

Josef Bisits

After completing a Bachelor of Music from the Sydney Conservatorium in 2010, Josef worked as a professional double bassist with Opera Australia, Australian Chamber Orchestra and Sydney Symphony Orchestra. He came back to study a Bachelor of Science (Advanced Mathematics) at UNSW and completed his Honours in Applied Mathematics in 2021. Joey has started his PhD at UNSW in water mass transformation and continues to play as a freelance double bassist.

Catriona Croton

Cat was a veterinarian in Emergency and Critical Care for almost two decades before making the move to statistics and data science with a Masters from the Biostatistics Collaboration of Australia. While completing her masters, she was a data scientist at the University of Queensland School of Veterinary Science, where she is now an honorary lecturer and doing a part-time PhD. After graduation, she worked for the University of Southern Queensland as a lecturer in statistics and was involved with SSA’s Early Career & Student Statistician Network as a co-EIC of Inferential Interests. Cat is now working with a contract research organisation, where she greatly enjoys working with other statisticians, programmers and data managers.

Pantea Pooladvand

Pantea worked in the fashion industry before coming back to do an undergraduate degree in mathematics. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Sydney, looking at mathematical models to study biological problems in tumour growth and immunology. She is now a lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sydney.

Louise Campbell

Louise was a financial planning professional for over 10 years before deciding to pursue an undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science at the University of Adelaide. Louise is now a PhD candidate in the School of Mathematical Sciences. She works predominantly in the field of forensic statistics, with a focus on using machine learning techniques to develop a recommender system for triaging crime scene exhibits. She holds a first class honours in Phylogenetics - using simulated datasets and mixed effects modelling to look at human mutation rates over time. She is an experienced tutor, lecturer and course developer across statistics, data science and bioinformatics.