AMSI recently welcomed Australia’s brightest undergraduate mathematics students to the University of Melbourne for a two-and-a-half-day Summer Research Scholarship conference.
AMSIConnect (11–13 February) is an annual national conference for undergraduate students participating in the AMSI Summer Research Scholarships program.
The AMSI Summer Research Scholarships program is a paid initiative valued at $3000 which allows undergraduate students in Australia to experience life as a researcher. The bursary enables undergraduates to spend the summer break conducting research on a chosen topic in the mathematical sciences.
AMSIConnect is the culmination of this research and provides students with a platform to present their findings, improve communication skills, explore career pathways, connect with supervisors, and build relationships with students in their field.
Guest speakers
This year’s conference opened with two guest speaker presentations. Sue Finch, Deputy Director at the Statistical Consulting Centre (SCC) and Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, was the first to the lectern. Her talk homed in on the practical applications of a mathematics qualification, using her own experience of analysing public transport passenger frequencies for Public Transport Victoria (PTV) and Transport for NSW as an example of utilising a maths skillset in a practical, real-world environment.
Kiwi Louie Bernhardt, a fourth year PhD student at the University of Melbourne, was the second guest speaker. Louie spoke candidly about his PhD journey to date, providing plenty of insight as to what undergraduate students should expect when making the leap to postgraduate study. His research on mathematical general relativity sparked plenty of questions from a highly engaged audience.
Estimathon
Event sponsor Jane Street took an active role in the event, hosting a well-received estimathon which wrapped up day one of proceedings.
View this post on Instagram
Student presentations
Much of the conference revolved around student presentations, with 25 research project presentations taking place across two days. Each presentation fell within a predetermined category (Applied, Statistics/Data Science, Pure/Theoretical). Each student was allocated 20 minutes, 15-minutes of which to present their research. The remaining five minutes were for the chair to introduce the speaker and a short Q&A session.
All presentations were professionally delivered, providing fascinating insights into the students’ chosen research topics. Three students were chosen as finalists in a peer-led vote:
First place: Finn Thomas, University of Newcastle. Mapping ‘Profundity’ in Large Language Models: A Geometric Analysis.
Second place: Samuel Walsh, University of Newcastle. Solution of Interface Problems for The Linearised Benjamin-Bona-Mahony Equation: The Line and Star-Shaped Network.
Third place: David Nachuan Chen, University of New South Wales. Multiplicative Dependence in Linear Recurrences.
Scholars have now returned home to write up their final research reports and blog posts. Stay tuned – these will be published in March 2026.
Speaking at the event, AMSI Research and Higher Education Program Manager, Angela Coughlin, commended the high standard of the student’s research projects, “It’s incredibly rewarding to see the enthusiasm and confidence of these emerging mathematical scientists as they share the outcomes of their summer research. AMSIConnect is not only a celebration of their hard work, but a glimpse of the future of the discipline. I look forward to watching the impact they will undoubtedly make across academia, industry and beyond.”
