Fiona Gray and Chris Hindson win 2010 Neil Archbold awards
Talented young Deakin researchers Fiona Gray and Chris Hindson are the winners of the Neil Archbold Memorial Travel Awards and Medals for 2010.
The award caps off a successful month for Fiona Gray – she took the people’s prize at Deakin University’s inaugural Three-Minute Thesis competition.
Fiona’s research focuses on the architecture of Rudolf Steiner, seeking to determine whether he was an occult crank or an architectural mastermind.
Chris Hindson will use his travel award for an extended stay at the University of Queensland.
Chris was recently accredited with an astonishing breakthrough in the area of chemiluminescence, elucidating for the first time in 100 years the light-producing reaction between the permanganate ion and both organic and inorganic substrates.
Deakin University’s Higher Degrees by ResearchExecutive Officer, Mr Grant Michie, said that in the three years it had been running, the Neil Archbold Memorial Travel Award had proven a great success.
“I first want to congratulate Fiona and Chris,” he said. “They are both worthy recipients of the award.
“When I look at what they have achieved since gaining the award, there is clear evidence that it has boosted the research careers of previous winners Dr Alison Carver, Ben Allardyce, Liza John and Sally Percival Wood.”
The Neil Archbold Memorial Travel Awards and Medals honour the memory of Professor Neil Archbold, one of Deakin’s finest researchers.
Professor Archbold was actively involved in all facets of research and research training at Deakin.
He was Professor and Personal Chair in Palaeontology at the School of Ecology and Environment and the coordinator of Earth Sciences at Deakin University.
He was also the author of 160 scholarly publications, was awarded Australian Research Council grants of over $1m and was a long-standing member of the Royal Society of Victoria and that body’s president from 2001 to 2004.
From 2003 until his death in 2005, he was the Chair of the University’s Higher Degrees by Research Committee.
“Professor Archbold was not just a wonderful researcher, he was universally loved,”?Grant Michie said.
“His death in 2005 was a tremendous loss for Deakin and for his many, many friends around the world.
“This travel award and medal is keeping his name alive. It is also demonstrably doing something Neil himself would have loved to see, helping young researchers get out into the world.”
