Grants & Awards

Staff and students associated with CLLC have received the grants and awards listed below.
Direct grants awarded since 2002 total approximately $6.05 million.

Grants

[A "Marsden grant" is a research grant from the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand.]

Marsden grant of $405,000 to Sebastian Link for the project Constraints on SQL data: Foundations for a data-intensive society, 2012 - 2014.
Marsden grant of $750,000 to Max Cresswell, Ed Mares and Adriane Rini for the project A Natural History of Necessity, 2011 - 2013.
Marsden grant of $250,000 to Rod Downey for an extension of the project Computability, Complexity and Randomness to a fourth year (2011).
Marsden grant of $575,000 to Noam Greenberg for the project Randomness, degree theory, higher computability: new interactions, 2010 - 2012.
Marsden grant of $400,000 to Sebastian Link for the project Cardinality Constraints for XML: Challenging the Trade-off between Expressiveness and Tractability, 2009 - 2011.
Marsden grant of $170,000 to Noam Greenberg for the project Computability Theory and its Interactions with Set Theory, 2008 - 2009.
Marsden grant of $500,000 to Rod Downey for the project Computability, Complexity and Randomness, 2008 - 2010, with an option of extension to a fourth year.
Marsden grant of $465,000 to Rob Goldblatt and Ed Mares for the project Semantic Analysis of Substructural Logics, 2006 - 2009.
Marsden grant of $475,000 to Rod Downey for the project Aspects of Computability and Randomness, 2005 - 2007.
New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and its Applications grant of $355,000 for a Logic and Computation research programme directed by Rob Goldblatt, 2003 - 2006.
This programme included:
- A postdoctoral fellowship for Liang Yu.
- Masters scholarships for Ranald Clouston and David Friggens.
- An international Logic and Computation Workshop at Tahuna Beach, Nelson, January 2004.
- A Special Issue of Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, Volume 138, Issues 1-3, Pages 1-222 (March 2006), comprising papers by participants in the programme.
Marsden grant of $360,000 to Rod Downey for the project Randomness, Computability and Complexity, 2002 - 2004.

Funded Fellowships held at Victoria

Turing Centenary Research Fellowship awarded to Noam Greenberg by the John Templeton Foundation as one of the winners of a Mind, Mechanism and Mathematics competition (GBP 75,000).
Rutherford Discovery Fellowship to Noam Greenberg for the project Effective randomness, lowness notions and higher computability, 2011-2015. ($800,000)
James Cook Research Fellowship to Rod Downey 2008-2010 ($240,000).
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) Rubicon fellowship to Willemijn Vermaat for postdoctoral research at CLLC, 2006-2008.
MacLaurin Research Fellowship for 2003 awarded to Rod Downey by the New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and its Applications ($150,000).
Foundation for Research, Science & Technology Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to Guohua Wu, 2002 -2005.
Rod Downey's research grants have supported many postdoctoral fellows, including
Michael Moses, Peter Cholak, Geoff LaForte, Richard Coles, Reed Solomon, Walker White, Denis Hirschfeldt, Evan Griffith, Wu Guohua, Joe Miller, Yu Liang, Rebecca Weber, Noam Greenberg, Antonio Montalban, George Barmpalias, Laurent Bienvenu, Asher Kach, Dan Turetsky, Alexander Melnikov.
Noam Greenberg's research grants have postdoctoral fellowships for
Dan Turetsky, David Diamondstone, Alexander Melnikov.
Victoria University Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to Katalin Bimbo.

Awards and Honours

Rob Goldblatt was awarded the Jones Medal for lifetime achievement in the mathematical sciences, by the the Royal Society of NZ, 2012.
Rod Downey was selected to join the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
Adam Day was awarded the 2011 Sacks Prize by the Association for Symbolic Logic, for the most outstanding doctoral dissertation in mathematical logic world-wide. Adam's thesis, Randomness and Computability, was supervised at VUW by Rod Downey.
Max Cresswell was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of NZ (Nov. 2011)
Adam Day was awarded a prestigious three-year Miller Research Fellowship, to be held at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. These fellowships are intended for "exceptional young scientists of great promise".
Rod Downey and co-authors Denis Hirschfeldt, Andre Nies, and Sebastiaan Terwijn received the 2010 Shoenfield Prize (article section) from the Association for Symbolic Logic, for outstanding expository writing in the field of logic.
This was awarded for the paper Calibrating randomness, published in The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, vol. 12, no. 3 (September 2006), pp. 411--491.
Noam Greenberg received the 2009 Hamilton Memorial Prize of the Royal Society of NZ, awarded annually for the encouragement of beginners in scientific or technological research in New Zealand or in the islands of the South Pacific Ocean.
Victoria University Research Excellence Award to Rod Downey 2009.
Laurent Bienvenu received the 2008 Gilles Kahn thesis prize, awarded yearly by the French Academy of Sciences and the the "Specif" association for the best PhD thesis of the year in France in computer science. Laurent's thesis is entitled Game-theoretic characterizations of randomness: unpredictability and stochasticity.
Fellowship of the Association for Computing Machinery awarded to Rod Downey 2007,
for contributions to computability and complexity theory.
NZ Mathematical Society Early Career Award to Noam Greeenberg 2007,
for his discovery of new natural definable classes which capture the dynamics of constructions arising from computability theory, his studies of real-valued measures on the continuum and his use of delicate inductive arguments to exhibit links between high compressibility and low computational power.
Victoria University Research Excellence Award to Rob Goldblatt 2007.
The 2006 Hatherton Award of the Royal Society of NZ to Catherine McCartin, for the best scientific paper by a PhD student at any New Zealand university in Physical, Earth, or Mathematical and Information Sciences. Catherine's award was for her paper Parameterized Counting Problems, which was published in the Special Issue of Annals of Pure and Applied Logic devoted to the NZIMA Logic and Computation programme (see above).
The 2003 Hatherton Award of the Royal Society of NZ to Guohua Wu, for the best scientific paper by a PhD student at any New Zealand university in Physical, Earth, or Mathematical and Information Sciences. Guohua's award was for his paper Isolation and Lattice Embeddings, which was published in the The Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol 67 (2002), pp 1055-1064.
Victoria University Medal for Academic Excellence to
- Simon Doherty as the top VUW student graduating from the BA(Honours) degree in 2001.
- Stephanie Reid as the top VUW student graduating from the BSc(Honours) degree in 2001.

Student Scholarships to VUW

Top Achiever Doctoral Scholarship awarded to Adam Day for 2008-2011 by the Tertiary Education Commission
Marsden Fund PhD scholarship awarded to Galym Akishev 2006-2009.
Victoria University Postgraduate Scholarships awarded to:
- Michael McInerney, PhD
- Michael Kane, PhD
- Andrew Fitzgerald, PhD
- Adam Day, PhD
- Michael Kane, MSc
- Frieder Lempp, PhD
- Keng Meng Ng, PhD
- David Friggens, PhD
- Simon Doherty, PhD
- Beate Elsner, MA

Student Scholarships Abroad

Lisa Fulford (BSc Honours in Logic and Computation 2007) was awarded a HSP Huygens Scholarship funded by The Netherlands Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, to study for an MSc in Logic (specializing in Logic & Mathematics) at the University of Amsterdam.
Luke McCrohon (BSc Honours in Logic and Computation 2006) was awarded a Monbukagakusho Scholarship by the the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology to study for a Masters in Computational Linguistics at the University of Tokyo.
Woolf Fisher Scholarship awarded to Ranald Clouston (MSc in Logic and Computation 2004) for PhD research at the Computer Laboratory, Cambridge University, UK.