Our awards & recognition

ABI Research Forum

• Best published paper - Omkar Athavale
• Excellence in graduate supervision - Justin Fernandez
• Excellence in research translation - Tim Angeli-Gordon
• Professional staff excellence award - Kiel Joe
• Research staff citizenship award - Toan Pham
• ABI Media Engagement Award - Kelly Burrowes
• Three Minute Thesis Winner - Sergio Dempsey
  
• Three Minute Thesis Runner-up - Jet Wright
• Three Minute Thesis People’s Choice - Cheng Huan Lu
• ECR Showcase People’s Choice - Musculoskeletal Modelling Group
• Postgraduate Poster Winner - Lata Paea
• Postgraduate Poster Runner-up - Arne Bruns
• Postgraduate Poster 3rd Place - Joshua Dillon
• Summer Student Poster Winner - Nadia Lee
• Summer Student Poster Runner-up - Sophie Rose
• Summer Student Poster 3rd Place - Lucy Baynes

Other awards and recognition:

• Chad Drake awarded the ABI Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis, for his work titled 'Non-Invasive Biomagnetic Imaging of the Stomach Validated by Electroanatomical Mapping' (May 2025)
• Josh Dillon won Best Moderated Oral Poster: Imaging at NZ Cardiac Society Annual Conference (May 2025)
• JC Han won Best Moderated Oral Poster: Basic Research at NZ Cardiac Society Annual Conference (May 2025)
• Alan Wang was awarded the 2023 Best Paper Award by MDPI’s Bioengineering journal for his article Anomaly Detection for Sensor Signals Utilizing Deep Learning Autoencoder-Based Neural Networks (Apr 2025)

• Jarrah Dowrick for winning the Young Investigator Award from the New Zealand Society of Gastroenterology (Dec 2024)
• Sergio Dempsey won best presentation at ISMRM Advances in MR Flow (Nov 2024)
• Zahra Aghababaie won Best Thesis at the UoA 2024 Celebrating Excellence Awards (Oct 2024)
• Vinod Suresh, Jagir Hussan, Michael Hoffman and the rest of the QuickMas team won the 2024 Velocity $100k Challenge (Oct 2024)
• Derek Orbaugh won the $1,000 Velocity ABI Award for his DiverTrace idea (Oct 2024)
• Ting Long won $5,000 at Velocity for her team's idea MoveInsight (Oct 2024)
• Mark Billinghurst received the International Symposium on Wearable Computers Impact Award for the most significant paper published (Oct 2024)
• ABI Art of Bio Engineering (Oct 2024) People’s Choice Runner Up: Symphony of Minds by Tamil Selvan Gunasekaran;
• ABI Art of Bio Engineering (Oct 2024) People’s Choice Winner: Intergalactic Brain by Alireza Sharifzadeh-Kermani, Jiantao Shen, Debbie Zhao, Kekeyan Nanthakumar, Stephen Creamer and the Animus Lab;
• ABI Art of Bio Engineering (Oct 2024) Runner Up: Inhale: The Mosaic Within by Kelly Burrowes;
• ABI Art of Bio Engineering (Oct 2024) Winner: Connected Under the Waves by Antony Tang, Wei-Ting Teo, Derek Orbaugh, Chen-Huan Lu
• Logan Ritchie for winning the People’s Choice Award at the 3 Minute Thesis UoA Finals (Aug 2024)
• Zahra Aghababaie who won the ABI Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis and was selected as one of only five to win the Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis 2023. (Jun 2024)
• Roshan Sharma who won the Fowlds Memorial Prize for the ABI Best ME thesis (Jun 2024)