Bronwyn Harch

Professor Bronwyn Harch (born Bronwyn Christensen in 1969) is an Australian environmental statistician who brings digital technology and mathematical sciences to sectors like agriculture, environment, health, manufacturing and energy. Bronwyn has almost two decades of research leadership experience, primarily at CSIRO. She is currently Executive Director of the Institute for Future Environments (IFE) at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane.

Early life and education

Bronwyn Harch comes from a farming family in the rural Lockyer Valley, west of Brisbane. She attended the local state primary school, Laidley North Primary School. For high school, she boarded at Ipswich Girls' Grammar School then went to university in Brisbane.

With interests and talent in environmental science, mathematics and education, Bronwyn studied environmental sciences and secondary school teaching at Griffith University and Queensland University of Technology. She obtained a joint bachelor's degree in Science (with Honours) in Australian Environmental Studies and Secondary Teaching (Mathematics and Science) from Griffith University/Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

However, at the conclusion of her undergraduate studies, Bronwyn's interest in research won out and she went on to do a PhD in applied statistics in the Agriculture Department at the University of Queensland. Her PhD, completed in 1996, was funded by the Grains Research & Development Corporation. A feature of her postgraduate studies was a stint in Hyderabad, India at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics undertaking big data statistical analyses applied to plant conservation and genetic resources for agriculture.

Career

Bronwyn joined CSIRO in 1995 as a postdoctoral fellow in the then Biometrics Unit of the Institute of Natural Resources & Environment, which a few years later became part of the Division of Mathematics and Statistics. She was based at CSIRO's Waite campus in Adelaide then moved back to Brisbane, in the division renamed as CSIRO. Mathematical and Information Sciences, in 2000.

Her role involved contributing to, and increasingly leading, research initiatives with government and industry, predominantly in the environmental and agricultural sectors. These large-scale projects combined statistical expertise with the expertise of scientists from other parts of CSIRO as well as universities, government and industry. The projects were initiated to address environmental issues, for example monitoring the ecological health of waterways in one of Australia's most populous regions, south-east Queensland.^[1][2] Her research career at CSIRO was signified by substantial contributions to statistical design for landscape-scale sampling protocols and monitoring programs, and spatio-temporal statistical modelling of agri-environmental systems. She left CSIRO for QUT in 2014 having held senior positions in CSIRO Flagships (Deputy Director, Sustainable Agriculture) and Divisions (Chief of CSIRO Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics; then Chief CSIRO Computational Informatics^[3]).

In her tenure at CSIRO, she actively fostered international co-operation with China's research and mapping agencies, particularly in allowing access to Earth observation data for environmental research. She also played a key role in the organisation's diversity and inclusion programs.

Bronwyn's role on joining QUT in 2014 was two-fold. She was Assistant Dean of Research in the Science and Engineering Faculty, the University's largest, and Deputy Director of Research in the Institute for Future Environments (IFE). Bronwyn transitioned into the role of Executive Director of IFE in July 2016 where the focus is delivering research impact for industry, government and the community, harnessing QUT's disciplinary strengths from across its six Faculties.

Awards and honours

Bronwyn is active in the local and international statistical research community. She has served in executive roles in the South Australian and Queensland state branches of the Statistical Society of Australia and co-founded its Environmental Statistics section. During 2013-2014 she was President of The International Environmetrics Society (TIES) and in 2008 she won its Abdel El-Shaarawi Prize for Young Researchers for "contributions to the construction of biological indexes for freshwater quality; for development of monitoring programs for water quality; for outstanding leadership and group building in CSIRO; for valuable contributions to TIES as conference organizer, treasurer, and board member."^[4] Bronwyn is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute or ISI.

Bronwyn has held adjunct professorships at the University of Wollongong and Griffith University and several research fellowships, including at China's National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation and India's CR Rao Advanced Institute of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science. In 2013, she was made a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and has written for its magazine.^[5] Bronwyn has served as associate editor for numerous international journals and has contributed to the Decadal Plan for the Mathematical Sciences, the Australian Ecosystem Science Decadal Plan, and the Decadal Plan for Agriculture, all both supported by the Australian Academy of Science.

Bronwyn is currently on the Boards of Innovation and Science Australia, the Internet of Things Alliance (IoTAA) and the Integrated Marine Observing Systems (IMOS); the Independent Scientific Advisory Panel for the GBR, International Scientific Advisory Committee for the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and the Plant Phenotyping & Imaging Research Centre in Canada.

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