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Teaching accolades by Shirley Glaister . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The excellence of UQ academics was recognised when two staff members received major honours at this year’s Australian Award for University Teaching in Canberra this month. University of Queensland Associate Professor in the School of Molecular and Microbial Sciences Peter O’Donoghue is the joint winner of the 2002 Prime Minister’s Australian Award for Individual University Teacher of the Year. Federal Minister for Education, Training and Youth Affairs Dr Brendan Nelson presented the prestigious award to Dr O’O’Donoghue at the Australian Awards for University Teaching announced at Parliament House, Canberra, on December 3. Dr O’Donoghue shared the honour with Associate Professor Lynne Hunt from Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. Accepting the award, Dr O’Donoghue said he felt honoured “but somewhat embarrassed” because he knew how many good quality teachers had been in the running for Australia’s highest teaching prize. “How the judges can select a single individual is beyond me. I accept this award on behalf of all of those people committed to quality tertiary education,,” he said. He said the key to his teaching was an acronym – FOCUSED – standing for Fun, Organised, Contemporary, Unique, Sincere, Energetic and Directed. Dr Nelson and Dr O’Donoghue 4 UQ NEWS, DecEMBER 2002
It was the second major award for a UQ teacher in just three years. In 2000, The University of Queensland’s Professor of Information Systems, Ron Weber, also won the Prime Minister’s Australian Award for Individual University Teacher of the Year. UQ has won national awards in each of the five years since the national teaching awards were introduced in 1997. Ninety-seven nominations in 10 individual and institutional categories were received for this year‘s awards, which carry $75,000 in prize money for the Prime Minister‘s Award for University of Teacher of the Year, and $40,000 for the winners of each of six categories. Institutional awards carry prizes of $50,000 each. UQ Vice-Chancellor Professor John Hay, the chair of the Australian Universities Teaching Committee, congratulated the finalists and said the level of student evaluations had been the highest in the award’s history. “The competition for these awards has become increasingly rigorous and competitive,” he said. “When they were introduced, the awards were the largest in any known jurisdiction around the world. They may still be among the largest. “Their recognition has now extended well beyond Australia, to Western Europe, to North America.” The award to Dr O’Donoghue was one of three awards won by the University – more than any other Australian university. Dr O’Donoghue also won his Biological Sciences and Related Studies category while UQ Business School Professor Stephen Gray won his category of Economics, Business and Related Studies. Dr O’Donoghue is resident protozoologist in the Department of Microbiology and Parasitology. In 1994, he accepted the position of Senior Lecturer in Protozoology in the Department where he teaches animal biology to first-year science students; introductory parasitology to second-year science and veterinary science students; medical parasitology, marine parasitology, wildlife and veterinary parasitology to thirdyear science students; and foundations of medicine to Graduate Medical Course students. He has broad research interests in protozoology and has conducted ecological, morphological, immunological and genetic characterisation studies on a range of parasitic, commensal, symbiotic and free-living protozoa including “sporozoa”, flagellates, amoebae and ciliates. He is particularly interested in identifying protozoan species occurring in Australia’s unique wildlife (mammals, birds, reptiles and fish). He has supervised 18 postgraduate students for higher degrees and is keen to train more protozoologists in Australia. Professor Gray’s research interests lie in the areas of empirical finance and asset-pricing with an emphasis on modelling interest rates and pricing interest-rate-sensitive securities. In particular, he has developed a model allowing the behaviour of economic time-series such as interest rates and exchange rates to change as the economy switches between different regimes. He has also done extensive work in the areas of risk management, hedging, and derivative valuation. His work has been published in leading academic and practitioner journals. Professor Gray teaches masterslevel courses in financial management and derivative securities and PhD and honours-level courses in asset valuation and corporate finance. He has been instrumental in ’ . . . . . . . . . . . . How the judges can select a single individual is ’ beyond me… designing and implementing computer-based learning materials for a number of finance courses. He is a past winner of the KPMG Teaching Prize at The University of Queensland and the Jaedicke Award and Fellowship from Stanford Univers-ity. The University had two other finalists in divisions of the national awards. Dr Nan Bahr from the School of Education was nominated in the Social Sciences category. The Community Service and Research Centre (CSRC) based at UQ Ipswich was a finalist in the Innovative and practical approach to the provision of educational services to the local and/or regional community category. Professor Gray Professor Hay, left, Dr Nelson and Dr O’Donoghue UQ NEWS, decEMBER 2002 5
Page 1 and 2: AUSTRALIA UQ News Online www.uq.edu
Page 3: December 10, 2002 Issue 521 UQ news
Page 7 and 8: Christmas came early to the UQ St L
Page 9 and 10: TEACHING AND LEARNING WEEK 2002 The
Page 11 and 12: $1 million dividend from CMR techno
Page 13 and 14: Back row (from left) Dr Elizabeth W
Page 15 and 16: One of Australia’s leading educat
Page 17 and 18: Dragon lights fire in young leaders
Page 19 and 20: Author and Arts student Rudi Stiebr
Page 21 and 22: SITE LEARNING Engineering flexibili
Page 23: ‘‘ Can I do further study? ’

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