Lucinda Mathieson is the STEM Careers and Programs Coordinator for the Faculty of Science at the University of Melbourne, which offers over 43 research disciplines and 50 courses to more than 15,000 students. Passionate about delivering exceptional student experiences and driving quality educational outcomes, Lucinda holds postgraduate qualifications in Careers Education and Development and is a Registered Professional Career Development Practitioner with the Career Industry Council of Australia.
In addition, Lucinda serves as Co-Chair, Co-Educator, and Consumer Representative of the Education Working Group of the Statewide Cancer Consumer-led Research Partnership with the VCCC Alliance. In this role, she contributes to enhancing the impact of integrating lived experience into cancer care, research, and education across Victoria.
Before specialising in Careers Education and Development, Lucinda built a career in higher education regulatory compliance, quality assurance, governance, and accreditation, as well as in post-tertiary clinical training for physicians, surgeons, and clinician scientists. She has also developed and advised on educational frameworks and governance across a wide range of disciplines, including Medicine, Social Work, Occupational Therapy, Architecture, Law, Engineering, and Accounting.

Melita Long founded Careers on Purpose (originally called Career Coach Consulting) in Wellington, New Zealand in 2005 to provide career coaching, resume writing, job hunting and career progression services to individual and organisational clients and grew to have 6 coaches in Wellington and Auckland.  In 2010 Melita relocated the business to Melbourne, Australia as a sole operator.  Melita has successfully coached more than 3,300+ clients, delivering 15,000+ hours of coaching in the past 20 years in a variety of contexts. This includes 3 years coaching MBAs in the Career Centre of Melbourne Business School and 5 years training Master of Business students after that. Melita currently coaches MBA students at Macquarie Business School and provides Outplacement career services for Trevor-Roberts supporting people experiencing redundancy from various sectors. Melita has worked in Training and Development and has provided workshops for students at various universities including James Cook, Macquarie and RMIT.

Dr. Steven Edwards completed his PhD at Monash University in the field of discrete optimization. His thesis was motivated by the scheduling of automated pathology testing systems used for the diagnosis of cancers and infectious diseases. As part of his research, he developed a modeling framework for efficiently solving large-scale optimization problems using constraint programming inspired by existing techniques in Boolean satisfiability and mixed-integer programming. After completing his thesis, Steven worked briefly at the Australian Bureau of Statistics on optimization problems in data security before commencing as a Research Fellow in Operations Research at the University of Melbourne. In recent years, he has taken on the role as a Product Manager at Gurobi.

Allen Z. Zhong is a Lecturer in the Optimization Group within the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. His research interests span the domains of model analysis and machine learning integration in optimisation methodologies. His research focuses on exploring model analysis techniques to detect and exploit dominance in constraint optimisation and satisfaction problems. Additionally, he is interested in the combination of machine learning and optimisation algorithms.

Professor Mark Wallace, Faculty of Information Technology, is a leading researcher in discrete optimisation. An Oxford Mathematics and Philosophy graduate, he worked at ICL for 21 years while completing an MSc in AI (University of London) and a PhD in natural language processing (Southampton), which led to a commercial product.
He has pioneered research in Constraint Programming (CP), hybrid optimisation techniques, and their applications in complex scheduling and resource planning, with practical impact in transport, logistics, and healthcare. He led development of the ECLiPSe platform (later acquired by Cisco) and the G12 platform, commercialised through Opturion.
Professor Wallace has collaborated with organisations such as Qantas, BA, RAC, CFA, Melbourne Water, and Alfred Hospital, and founded the Monash-CTI Centre for optimisation in travel, transport, and logistics.

I finished high school in 2008 and spent a few years trying to balance university with a competitive swimming career before accepting that I couldn’t do both at a high level.

After completing my undergraduate degree, I went straight into a Master’s in Mathematics at The University of Melbourne, specialising in Discrete Mathematics and Operations Research. My thesis explored how cooperative game theory can be applied to queuing networks.I was lucky in my final year to secure a two-day-a-week internship at Opturion which I converted into a full time job after graduating.

Over the past 9 years I have been fortunate to work in a variety of industries such as healthcare, construction, health and safety, nuclear research and recently the green energy sector.

Outside of work, I’m usually on the move. Nepal has become a second home, where I’ve trekked classic routes like the Annapurna Circuit and in the Everest region. I’ve also recently travelled overland through the Stans of Central Asia and drove the Pamir Highway, a high altitude road through the mountains of Tajikistan.