The RST Council recently approved the two winners of the 2024 Doctoral (PhD) Award. This award is intended to recognise recent PhD graduates who have made significant advances during their doctoral research. The value of the award is $1,000 (AUD).
The winners of the 2024 RST Doctoral (PhD) Award were Dr Ingrid Cox and Dr Manon Simon.
Dr Cox’s PhD project was undertaken at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research, University of Tasmania. Her thesis sought to understand the health burden and economic impact of Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) in Australia by: (1) deriving incidence, prevalence, and mortality estimates; (2) assessing health-related quality of life (HRQoL), the best ways to measure it and factors affecting HRQoL; (3) assessing trends in resource use and costs related to IPF and providing a comprehensive cost analysis for the disease in Australia.
Dr Ingrid Cox is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Physician and Health Economist at Menzies Institute for Medical Research. Ingrid’s current research matches her passion for health equity and equality and aims to understand the population, their environment, influences on their health and access to healthcare resources. The ultimate aim of her work being to improve access to health services for Tasmanians and the broader Australian population by improving efficiencies in the use of resources. Her research spans over various disease areas with a focus on respiratory diseases.
Dr Simon’s PhD project was undertaken at the School of Law, University of Tasmania. Her thesis assessed the relevance of a legal analogy between cloud seeding and regional solar radiation management (SRM) through the analytical and normative lens of adaptive governance. Using adaptive governance principles, it examined the governance of cloud seeding in two Australian states and two American states. These case studies showed that regional SRM regimes require: (1) legal arrangements to facilitate greater interactions between institutions across scales of governance, to account both for the scale of deployment and the scale of impacts; (2) broader participation of relevant stakeholders at an early stage of research; (3) flexible legal mechanisms built-in the decision making to foster iterative learning; and (4) mechanisms to prevent and resolve potential conflicts.
Dr Manon Simon is now a lecturer in the School of Law, UTAS and she is interested in the transferability of lessons from the governance of weather modification techniques to the governance of solar radiation management.
