Professor Micheal Brear
Industry Advisory Committee
Michael Brear is a mechanical engineer and the Director of the Melbourne Energy Institute (MEI) at the University of Melbourne. MEI facilitates the University’s research on the technical, economic, environmental and social impacts of energy.
Michael is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, the Combustion Institute, Engineers Australia and the Australian Institute of Energy. He previously established the University’s multi-disciplinary degree, the Master of Energy Systems. Prior to commencing at the University of Melbourne, Michael worked for ICI Australia (now Orica), and then undertook graduate studies at Cambridge University and post-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
David Scerri
Industry Advisory Committee
Dave is the CEO of Biarri Optimisation, a company focused on leveraging the power of mathematics to unlock efficiencies across scheduling, planning and rostering. With some of Australia’s largest companies across retail, energy, supply chain and healthcare as customers, as well as Fortune 500 companies globally, Biarri software delivers embedded optimised results on a daily basis. Dave has been with Biarri for 12 years, previously having worked in AI research and as a founding CTO at a sports technology startup. He has a Computer Science degree from RMIT University.
Dr Francis Norman
Industry Advisory Committee
Dr Francis Norman is the CEO and Managing Director of the Centre of Decommissioning Australia (CODA). The first 30 years of his career were spent in a global engineering services organisation then in 2015 he was elected to the position of Western Australian president of Engineers Australia. This role led to a career change into industry advocacy where he worked initially for NERA and then most recently in his role with CODA.
Francis’ deep interest in understanding complex systems in both industry and society commenced in his engineering career in industrial controls and then expanded through both his management roles and during his PhD studies, where he researched interpersonal communications in virtual teams.
Francis holds a MSc in project management and a PhD in management, he is a Fellow and EngExec with Engineers Australia, a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, Member of the International Centre for Complex Project Management and a Life member of the International Society of Automation.
Dr Simon Bowly
Industry Advisory Committee
Simon’s works with OPTIMA CI Prof. Andreas Ernst. His main research interests lie in optimisation algorithms: their real-world applications and how they perform on a wide range of problems with different structures. In algorithm performance analysis, he focuses on linear and mixed-integer programming methods. These techniques apply to many optimisation problems in transport, power generation and distribution, and network design (to name a few). His work focuses on generating test cases that effectively stress-test optimisation algorithms and determine their relative strengths and weaknesses, enabling algorithm selection and automated configuration methodologies to improve algorithm performance.
The focus of his applied work is on analysing passenger and freight movement in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The aim is to understand the potential role of rail transport in the region by applying mixed-integer programming and decomposition methods to solve logistics problems
