Bankmecu Student Scholarship Winner

CAASTRO congratulates our PhD student Morag Scrimgeour on receiving the bankmecu Student Scholarship.  This was awarded at the annual Malcolm McIntosh Lecture, on Wednesday 4 April 2012. This award is presented each year by bankmecu, CSIRO’s credit union, to a student chosen by the invited Malcolm McIntosh Lecture speaker to be an outstanding student in the speaker’s field of research.

Brian Schmidt, this year’s invited speaker, selected Morag.  He gave the Malcolm McIntosh Lecture on 4 April, on the discovery of the accelerating universe which led to the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics.

Morag gave a short talk on her work following Brian’s lecture. Her talk, titled “Testing Dark Energy with Galaxy Velocities,” described how we can use peculiar velocity measurements from the upcoming SkyMapper and WALLABY surveys to test dark energy and the standard model of cosmology.

Morag Scrimgeour is a PhD student at UWA. The title of her PhD is “Cosmology with structure and motion in the Universe”.  She is supervised by Professor Lister Stavely-Smith (UWA) and Dr Tamara Davis (UQ).  Morag is collaborating with Brian Schmidt (ANU) and Tamara as part of her PhD is on simulating  cosmology measurements with the SkyMapper supernova peculiar velocities.