Director's Message

Dear Colleagues,

It's wonderful to begin this week celebrating the success of our colleagues through the recent promotions round. Congratulations to Shankar Dutt, Zain Mehdi, Zuzana Slavkovska, and Wei Wen Wong on their promotions to Level B, to Ling Sun and Kirill Koshelev who have been promoted to Level C, and to Daria Smirnova and Rose Ahlefeldt on reaching Level D. 

As we look ahead to 2026, I want to let people know that we do have scholarships available for high-achieving domestic (includes New Zealand students) who have achieved H1 honours results. If you know of talented students who might be interested in joining our research programs, please reach out to our Associate Director HDR, Vince Craig. 

This week's paper comes from PhD student Namisha Chabbra and colleagues at CGA, with their work on "Measurement of thermo-optic and coating Brownian noise in a novel coating design" just published in Physical Review D. Namisha designed a custom dielectric optical coating for her PhD experiment and visited the MIT-LIGO group to make precision measurements of it's thermal noise. The results are exciting as they're thought to be the first direct measurement of thermo-optic Brownian noise in materials used in LIGO mirror coatings. This type of thermal noise limits many optical precision measurements including optical clocks and gravitational wave detectors, making these findings significant for the broader precision measurement community. Congratulations to Namisha and the team.

We'll shortly be opening expressions of interest for three leadership positions within the school: Associate Director Research, Associate Director Infrastructure, and a new role of Associate Director Translation. These roles are part of our school executive team. The School Manager will be sending details about these positions in the coming days and we will have a celebration to thank John Close and Hoe Tan for their work as ADs towards the end of the year.

Also a reminder we have the ANU Quantum Open Day on Saturday 29 November. This public event, marking the 2025 International Year of Quantum, will showcase our research across all aspects of quantum science and aims to inspire the next generation of STEM students through talks, lab tours, and interactive displays. 

Jodie

End Of Year Finance Cut Off Dates

• Friday 21 November - Last day to submit invoices for payment where the Supplier is new, or requires amendment, if payment is due in 2025
• Thursday 11 December - Last day to submit invoices for existing Suppliers, if the payment is due in 2025
• Thursday 11 December - Last day to submit Self Service Reimbursement requests for payment in 2025
• Monday 15 December - Last day for Financial Delegates to approve invoices and reimbursements in ES Financials for payment in 2025
• (10pm) Tuesday 30 December - Last day to approve an expense claim in Concur to ensure expenditure is recorded in 2025