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Sydney’s engineering and computer science researchers continue to excel

2 November 2021

Recognising our research strengths

Three international awards recently granted to Sydney academics acknowledge their substantial contributions to their respective fields of engineering and computer science.

Three University of Sydney researchers have been awarded internationally for their achievements in the fields of biomedical engineering and computer science.

Dr Lining Arnold Ju named one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35

Dr Lining Arnold Ju, an ARC DECRA fellow from the School of Biomedical Engineering, Heart Research Institute, and a member of the University of Sydney Nano Institute, has been named one of MIT Technology Review's 2021 Innovators Under 35 Asia Pacific.

The MIT TR35 Innovators award honours young talents under age 35 whose superb and innovative technology promises to change the world.

By applying engineering principles to biomedical research in the exciting new field of mechanobiology, Dr Ju has established a new paradigm linking the mechanical forces behind blood flow and their effects on haematological proteins and blood clotting cells.

After inventing innovative biomechanical nanotools that advance our knowledge of blood clotting, Dr Ju found that blood flow disturbance in a person’s veins and arteries generate mechanical forces that rapidly trigger blood clotting, leading to heart attacks and stroke.

The discovery will support the establishment of new solutions to help diagnose, treat, and control blood clotting diseases.

"Being named one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 places me alongside many talented early career researchers in Asia Pacific," said Dr Ju.

"I am excited by the prospect to develop better cardiovascular microdevices to benefit people and support early diagnosis and treatment of blood clots, and I am grateful to have this work acknowledged in the MIT TR35 award."

This achievement follows Dr Ju being named an Australian Museum Eureka Prize Finalist and NSW Young Tall Poppy in 2020, and a Heart Foundation Future Leader earlier this year.

IEEE award recognises Professor Albert Zomaya's cloud computing expertise

In the School of Computer Science, Director of the Centre for Distributed and High-Performance Computing and University of Sydney Nano Institute member Professor Albert Zomaya has been awarded the 2021 IEEE TCCLD Research Innovation Award in recognition of his contributions to resource management in cloud computing systems.

The award celebrates not only outstanding technical innovations in the field, but a long-term impact on advancing the theory and practice in cloud computing.

Widely recognised as a cloud computing expert, Professor Zomaya’s research is advancing the development of the computing technologies that support a vast range of everyday technologies and services.

Professor Zomaya’s notable list of achievements include being accepted to join the Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe) in 2019, receiving the 2019 New South Wales Premier’s Prize of Excellence in Engineering or Information and Communications Technology, and taking on the role of Editor–in–Chief, ACM Computing Surveys in 2020.

"It is an honour to receive this prestigious award after more than 25 years in the field – it is also a recognition of the efforts of many talented collaborators and students that I was privileged to work with over the years," said Professor Zomaya.

"Cloud computing is an important field of research due to our increasing reliance on computing technologies that support a vast range of everyday technologies and services, and I’m proud to be making contributions through my research."

Honourable mention for PhD thesis exploring efficient key-value stores

Also in the field of computer science, Sydney graduate Assistant Professor Oana Balmau has received an honourable mention for the Dennis M. Ritchie Award for her PhD thesis, completed under the research supervision of Professor Willy Zwaenepoel, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering.

Already a recipient of the John Makepeace Bennett Award for best PhD, Assistant Professor Balmau’s research focused on the design and implementation of efficient key-value stores for future hardware and performance requirements.

She developed several techniques to improve the performance of storage systems, including making them scale with the degree of multi-threading, taking advantage of large memory sizes, and decreasing the impact of system maintenance on user operations.

The Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award was created by the ACM Special Interest Group in Operating Systems to recognise research in software systems and to encourage the creativity embodied by influential computer scientist Dennis Ritchie.