The Office of Graduate Research held a special ‘Celebrating HDR Success’ ceremony on Monday 2 June 2025 to present the 2024 awards, which we acknowledge and celebrate some of our brightest, most talented and most diligent Higher Degree by Research students, and their dedicated supervisors.
The ceremony, which was attended by about 60 people in person and online marked the achievements of 21 award recipients, who were announced by Professor Tim Cavagnaro, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research Training and Capabilities) and Dean of Graduate Research. We were also joined by Professor Raymond Chan, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) who spoke of the importance of research achievements.
We celebrated the success of our HDR’s in three categories:
- Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Doctoral Thesis Excellence
- HDR Student Research Impact Prize
- Best HDR Student Publication
Professor Chan highlighted “It gives me great pride as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) coming to work knowing that we are a research intensive university. That we care about academic excellence, we care about education, and we care about research that matters.”
Professor Chan also pointed to Flinders University’s success “We know that 20 to 25% of our income comes from research as a University. It is not about the size, but it’s about what we do. Last year in 2024, we reached $133 million of annual income when it comes to research. Flinders University though, over the past five years, our commencing load has increased by over 30%. Our PhD on-time completion has reached over 90%. Last year, we were particularly successful in winning the industry schemes, the industry PhD schemes in particular in ARC as well as the NIP and Cisco. All of these indicators are telling us that we are doing industry or partners relevant research. The research that you each one of you do today makes an impact in our community, to our industry partners, and to our government.”
He also noted that “Today is about celebrating your success. But it’s also celebrating your supervisors success. I hope that you would get an opportunity to consider how you as a graduate of Flinders will continue to fearlessly go out there as a PhD graduate and having that original impact. ”
Congratulations to all of the winners!
To watch a recording of the ceremony click here.
To read more about the winners click on the above award links
Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Doctoral Thesis Excellence
Daniel Bonnar
College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
“Exploring Sleep Habits in the Wide World of Esports”
Jin Chen
College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
“Imagining ageing futures: LGBTQ+ multicultural people in Australia”
Peter Mader
College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
“Principal associations: the struggle for political agency in neoliberalising policy regimes”
Lucy Matson
College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
“Stuck on disgust: Investigating disgust’s memorability”
Erin Simister
College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
“Beyond the blur: The empirical basis of Instagram’s sensitive-content screens”
Lisette Yip
College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
“Feeling Good, Looking Good or Doing Good? Exploring how the Quality of Motivation predicts the Quantity, Longevity and Persistence of Collective Action”
Adrian Mollenmans
College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
“‘A most sacred part of our land’ An exploration of ethnohistory, archaeology, palaeogeography and Narungga knowledges in relation to Point Pearce Peninsula/ Burgiyana and adjacent islands on Yorke Peninsula/Guuranda, South Australia”
Minglei Wang
College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
“Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the 21st Century: The China Cultural Centre Project”
Manam De Silva
College of Medicine and Public Health
“Glioblastoma plasticity and therapeutic sensitivity in the human brain microenvironment”
Lauren Newman
College of Medicine and Public Health
“EVolving the Liquid Biopsy: Extracellular Vesicles for Assessing Liver Function and Disease”
Mitali Mukherjee
College of Nursing and Health Sciences
“Relationship between anti-inflammatory diet and inflammation related side effects in oncology patients receiving systemic therapy”
Jasmine Pople
College of Science and Engineering
“Synthesis and applications of poly(trisulfides)”
HDR Impact Prize
Lauren Newman
College of Medicine and Public Health
“EVolving the Liquid Biopsy: Extracellular Vesicles for Assessing Liver Function and Disease”
Rupert Mathwin
College of Science and Engineering
“Modelling a threatened species (Litoria raniformis) to guide conservation.”
Best HDR Student Publication
Hamid Azizi
College of Business, Government and Law
“A systematic review of the extent of the Taliban and FARC’s involvement and profit from drug trade and methods of estimating income from the drug trade”
Sarah Crossman
College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
“Facilitators and constraints to adult sports participation: A systematic review”
Paul Clark
College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
“A Solomon Island plank-built lashed-lug canoe in the Canterbury Museum collection, Christchurch”
Bradley Menz
College of Medicine and Public Health
“Current safeguards, risk mitigation, and transparency measures of large language models against the generation of health disinformation: repeated cross sectional analysis”
Sophie Miller
College of Medicine and Public Health
“Exposure to doxycycline increases risk of carrying a broad range of enteric antimicrobial resistance determinants in an elderly cohort”
Alexandra Manson
College of Nursing and Health Sciences
“Unpacking the cost of the lunchbox for Australian families: a secondary analysis”
Elise Tuuri
College of Science and Engineering
“How plastic debris and associated chemicals impact the marine food web: A review”
Wenjie Liu
College of Science and Engineering
“Remote sensing delineation of wildfire spatial extents and post-fire recovery along a semi-arid climate gradient”