Australian Institute of Physics Award for performance in Honours physics at The University of Technology Sydney:

Burak Cankurtaran (left) completed Year 12 in 1994 at Grantham High School. He began his software development career shortly after. During this time he enrolled in the Computer Systems Engineering degree at the University of Technology, Sydney as a part-time mature age student in 1998. After spending 4 years (part-time)studying first and second year engineering subjects he decided to transfer to the Applied Physics degree and study full time. In 2005 he completed his honours year on computationally modelling the optical properties of arbitrary shaped nanoparticles. He is currently enrolled as a PhD student at Curtin University of Technology extending the density functional theory to work on large nanoparticles.

Burak has been awarded the Australian Institute of Physics prize for his performance in the Honours year at The University of Technology Sydney.

Australian Institute of Physics Award for performance in Honours physics at Macquarie University:

Brent Miszalski completed Year 12 in 2001 at Mosman High School. In 2002 he commenced a Bachelor of Science in Astronomy & Astrophysics at Macquarie University. After three years he proceeded into the honours year and was awarded the inaugural Anglo-Australian Observatory/Macquarie University $5000 Honours Scholarship. The scholarship has been recently established to encourage closer ties between the two institutions, whereby students conduct instrument science research. For his honours thesis Brent developed a new field configuration algorithm for the Two-degree Field facility in anticipation of the AAOmega spectrograph upgrade. His work is already being used at the Anglo-Australian Telescope to provide greater target yields and more uniform target sampling on the world's most sophisticated astronomical instrument that specialises in cutting-edge cosmological surveys. Subsequently he received the Macquarie University Medal for Physics and has already submitted his first paper on the technique to a prestigious refereed astronomical journal. In 2006 he commenced his PhD at Macquarie and Universite Louis Pasteur (Strasbourg) under a `co-tutelle' arrangement and is working on a determination of Galactic abundance gradients using the new Macquarie/AAO/Strasbourg/H-alpha (MASH) catalogue of planetary nebulae.

Brent has been awarded the Australian Institute of Physics prize for his performance in the Honours year at Macquarie.

Australian Institute of Physics Award for performance in third-year physics at The University of New South Wales:

Dean Robinson completed Year 12 in 2001 at Sydney Grammar School and was awarded a Malcolm Chaikin Scholarship to study Physics and Mechanical Engineering at the University of New South Wales. After completing three years in the combined degree he transferred to a Bachelor of Science and completed majors in physics and mathematics. In 2006 he is completing his honours year in physics at UNSW, and is currently working on a research project concerning Lyapunov Modes in Particle Systems.

Dean has been awarded the Australian Institute of Physics prize for his performance in the third year physics subjects at UNSW.