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Four scientists from the University of Sydney have won medals from the Australian Academy of Science, in recognition of their outstanding contribution to human understanding of the scientific world: Professor Dietmar M眉ller, Professor Geordie Williamson, Associate Professor Liz New and Professor Steven Flammia.

The recognise outstanding contributions to science, with the awards presented at the Academy鈥檚 annual celebration of science, , on 30 May 2019. The University of Sydney received the equal highest number of awards announced today.

Professor Dietmar M眉ller,聽from the聽聽in the Faculty of Science, won the Jaeger Medal for lifelong achievement, which recognises research on the Earth or its oceans carried out in Australia or with a connection to Australian Earth science.

聽is internationally renowned for leading the construction of a virtual Earth laboratory,聽, to 'see' deep into the Earth in four dimensions (space and time). This laboratory draws together custom software, workflows and data to produce open-access models of the Earth鈥檚 dynamic history.

"I have a fascination with geology, because it puts life into a perspective far beyond our everyday experiences. Geology reminds us that the current version of the world as we know it is ephemeral, but firmly connected to past and future worlds," Professor M眉ller said.

"Our EarthByte Group reconstructs the Earth as a system in which the slow convective churning of the deep Earth鈥檚 mantle is connected to moving continents and ocean basins, which are like biscuits floating on a warm toffee ocean. These reconstructions give us a framework to explore Earth鈥檚 mineral and energy resources and to understand past climates, landscapes and ocean circulation," Professor M眉ller said.

"Rocks tell us stories about past worlds. The age of big data and artificial intelligence now allows us to use computers to decipher what these rocks can tell us, and even to predict the future. Our interactive models and visualisations of the Earth鈥檚 dynamic history are shared with the community. They help us get a sense of geological time and why we need to think far beyond a human lifetime to聽understand possible future paths for Earth, and to聽keep it habitable."

Professor M眉ller is particularly honoured to receive the聽Jaeger Medal, as Professor John Jaeger had a close connection to the University of Sydney, completing his Bachelor of Science at the University of Sydney,聽and continuing his close connection to the University by collaborating with Professor Horatio Carslaw, chair in pure and applied mathematics at the University of Sydney, whom Jaeger met as a student. They both worked on the application of mathematics to the conduction of heat, and their textbook聽Conduction of Heat in Solids聽(1947) remains a classic in the field, and is the foundation of the theory of heat conduction in the Earth.

Professor Geordie Williamson,聽from the聽聽in the Faculty of Science, has been awarded the Christopher Heyde Medal, which recognises distinguished research in mathematics and statistics.聽聽is a world leader in the field of geometric representation theory.

Among his many breakthrough contributions are his proof, together with Ben Elias, of Soergel's conjecture 鈥� resulting in a proof of the Kazhdan-Lusztig positivity conjecture from 1979 鈥� his entirely unexpected discovery of counter-examples to the Lusztig and James conjectures, and his new algebraic proof of the Jantzen conjectures.

鈥淢athematics allows you to understand the world in another way, and it鈥檚 beautiful to be able to switch on the mathematical viewpoint,鈥� Professor Williamson said.

He launched the聽聽at the end of 2018 and is the institute鈥檚 director. Last year he became the youngest living Fellow of both聽聽and the聽. Capping off a stellar year for Professor Williamson, he was also awarded聽聽in Australian mathematics by his peers.

Associate Professor Liz New, from the聽聽in the Faculty of Science, has been awarded the Le Fevre Medal, which recognises outstanding research in chemistry. Associate Professor New's research focuses on developing chemical tools that advance the understanding of the chemistry within cells.

An understanding of the fundamental chemistry of the body offers new insights into many of the key questions in medical research, including the location of disease-causing chemicals or drug molecules, the perturbation of chemical environments in disease, and the role of chemical signalling molecules in health.

, who is also a member of the聽,聽prepares fluorescent sensors that emit light to visualise biochemical changes in the body caused by disease, lighting up where and how the body is experiencing oxidative stress. Her principal focus is on the diseases of ageing, where she explores the action of antioxidants in countering oxidative stress, but her sensors have found application across many fields of medical research.

Associate Professor New has reported 10 new sensors, one that is capable of indicating the effect of copper levels in Alzheimer's disease and another shows how oxidative stress is essential in fat breakdown and even in embryonic development. She has also developed sensors that observe how cancer treatments such as cisplatin have effect within the cell.

Professor Steven Flammia, from the聽聽in the Faculty of Science, has been awarded the Pawsey Medal, which recognises outstanding research in physics.

, also a member of 聽is a global leader in quantum information science, a field born at the interface between physics and computation. By marrying the classical theory of compressed sensing with quantum tomography, Professor Flammia鈥檚 work has succeeded in drastically reducing the number of measurements required to learn the types of quantum states and processes commonly found in laboratory experiments aimed at building scalable quantum computers.

This work is significant as, firstly, it has had a real practical impact, with numerous experiments already performed that show the advantages of his new approach and, secondly, the methods introduced have had an impact beyond physics in the machine learning community where the idea of compressed sensing originated.

Professor Flammia鈥檚 work has impacted both theory and experimental practise in the field, with direct influence on Australian efforts in quantum technology.