Awards and Prizes

SigmaOpt/MoCaO Best Student Paper Prize

The SigmaOpt/MoCaO Student Best Paper Prize is award to a student for an exceptional paper in the field of mathematical optimisation, optimal control, operations research or related field published in the last 18 months. The winner of this prize will be awarded $300 and invited to present the paper at the SigmaOpt workshop. 

https://www.anziam.org.au/SIGMAOPT

Past winners:

• 2026: Bethany Caldwell (UNSW). Paper title: Optimal Control Duality and the Douglas-Rachford Algorithm. 

• 2025: Lien Nguyen (RMIT). Paper title: Fast Gradient Algorithm with Dry-like Friction and Nonmonotone Line Search for Nonconvex Optimization

• 2024: Sandy Spiers (Curtin). Paper title: An exact cutting plane method for the Euclidean max-sum diversity problem

CTAC Best Student Presentation Prize

MoCaO fund a prize for the best student presentation at the CTAC conference every year since 2018. We have committed to doing this as an annual event to support the CTAC conference.

Past winners:

Fillipe Georgiou (University of Newcastle) – 2020.

WOMBAT travel support grant

Is typically awarded to individual students.