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’Donoghue at the Australian Awards for University Teaching announced at Parliament House, Canberra earlier today.
Dr O’Donoghue shared the honour with Associate Professor Lynne Hunt from Edith Cowan University in Western Australia.
In 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. On behalf of all of those people committed to quality tertiary education, I accept this award,” he said.
He said the key to his teaching was an acronym – FOCUSED – standing for Fun, Organised, Contemporary, Unique, Sincere, Energetic and Directed.
The award is the second for a UQ teacher in just three years. In 2002, 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.
The award to Dr O’Donoghue was one of three awards won by the University today – 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.
In 1988, UQ became the first Australian university to introduce awards rewarding teaching excellence and other institutions have since followed suit.
As part of a special UQ Teaching and Learning Week held between November 18 and 22 this year, eight individual winners received $10,000 each and two groups were awarded $20,000 each by the University. Three Excellence in Research Higher Degree Supervision awards were also made.
• 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 third-year 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 masters-level courses in financial management and derivative securities and PhD and honours-level courses in asset valuation and corporate finance.
He has been instrumental in 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 University and has previously served on the faculty at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
Professor Gray has consulted to industry in the areas of corporate finance; derivative valuation; econometric modelling; and the development of proprietary trading models. He has also served as an expert witness in court proceedings.
Media contact: Shirley Glaister (telephone 07 3365 2339) or Brad Turner (mobile 0411 610 546) at UQ Communications.
