Awards
Early Career eResearch Excellence Prize
AeRO are proud to establish their Early career excellence prize, recognising the outstanding early-career professionals who are building the future of digital research infrastructure across Australia and New Zealand.
Why this matters
Behind every major research breakthrough is a team of professionals who build, maintain, and evolve the digital infrastructure that makes it possible. This prize exists to name and celebrate those people — early in their careers, exceptional in their contribution.
The Early Career eResearch Excellence Prize is awarded annually to an individual who demonstrates outstanding technical contribution, a genuine commitment to enabling research, and the kind of community leadership that lifts the entire sector.
Eligibility
Nominations are open to individuals and AeRO member organisations. Each member organisation may submit up to four nominations per year.
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Affiliation: Employed by, deployed to, or strongly affiliated with an AeRO member organisation.
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Location: Based in Australia or New Zealand at the time of nomination.
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Career Stage: Within 10 years of first entering the eResearch workforce.
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Or within 10 years of completing their highest relevant qualification.
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Eligibility
2026 Prize Winners
Congratulations to the inaugural winner and highly commended recipients of the 2026 award
Dr Sarah Beecroft is the winner of the 2026 AeRO Early Career eResearch Excellence Prize. As a Life Sciences Applications Specialist at Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, Sarah is a national leader in porting structural biology tools to AMD GPU architecture — a technically demanding challenge given the dominance of NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem.
Her work porting ColabFold to Setonix's AMD GPUs has enabled 17 million protein structure predictions, contributed to a major international open-access database and been acknowledged in five scientific publications, including a 2026 Nature Communications paper.
Sarah leads the AMD GPU Life Sciences Computing Program with Australian BioCommons, teaches into university bioinformatics courses, mentors early-career researchers nationally and internationally, and chairs the WA Premier Science Awards Selection Committee.
Since joining Pawsey in 2020, she has combined deep technical expertise with sustained community leadership across Australia's life sciences research sector.
Congratulations Sarah!
Sonia Ramza, ARDC User Support Manager (Nectar), has been highly commended in the 2026 AeRO Early Career eResearch Excellence Prize.
Sonia manages the Distributed Help Desk Service across the Nectar Cloud federation, maintaining satisfaction scores above 95%, and has led onboarding and support for new Nectar Cloud nodes at Adelaide, Pawsey and the ARDC/AARNet national node. She has trained more than 200 researchers directly, developed online Nectar Cloud training modules, and built feedback mechanisms including the annual User Survey and bi-annual User Forum.
Earlier in her career at the University of Melbourne, she scaled the Researcher Training Service to support 1,600 researchers a year and evolved Research Bazaar Melbourne into the broader Researcher Connect programme.
Congratulations Sonia!
Dr Jenna Wraith, Head of Sustainable Futures & Principal Data Scientist at QCIF Digital Research, has been highly commended in the 2026 AeRO Early Career eResearch Excellence Prize.
Jenna leads cross-functional teams of software engineers and data scientists across a national platform portfolio backed by more than $10 million in project funding, including EcoCommons Australia and the Wildlife Observatory of Australia (WildObs).
She is leading the integration of these platforms — alongside Marxan MaPP, Open Ecoacoustics and emerging eDNA data streams — into a unified national ecoservices platform, and has established a partnership with Google DeepMind to explore AI integration into national research workflows. Her career reflects a sustained trajectory from domain researcher to national digital infrastructure leader.
Congratulations Jenna!
Edoardo Tescari, Senior Research Data Specialist at the University of Melbourne's Melbourne Data Analytics Platform (MDAP), has been highly commended in the 2026 AeRO Early Career eResearch Excellence Prize.
Edoardo re-engineered the Empirical Dynamic Modelling framework, reducing runtime on an 80,000-point dataset from around 15 minutes to 9 seconds, and modified R's native libraries to enable a national biosecurity risk model to run at 1 km resolution for the first time.
Since joining MDAP in 2019, he has led or co-led 13 of 23 long-term research collaborations across all nine University of Melbourne faculties. In 2025 he founded the national eResearch Network, now spanning 28 professionals across 19 institutions in Australia and New Zealand.
Congratulations Edoardo!
Renuka Sharma, Senior Data Scientist & Team Lead (Applied ML/Computer Vision) at QCIF Digital Research, has been highly commended in the 2026 AeRO Early Career eResearch Excellence Prize.
Renuka leads the delivery of computer vision systems built into national biodiversity infrastructure, including automated wildlife species detection models within the Wildlife Observatory of Australia (WildObs) and endangered species detection for the Queensland Department of Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation.
She has mentored more than a dozen students and early-career researchers, and her earlier work at CSIRO produced an openly published cattle behaviour dataset supporting livestock welfare and precision agriculture research.
Congratulations Renuka!
Nature of the Prize
The prize supports a diverse and sustainable eResearch workforce; it is:
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Recognition of non-linear and technical career pathways
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Inclusive consideration of enabling, service, and operational roles
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Bias-aware judging guidance
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Supportive of regional, distributed, and virtual eResearch contributions
The prize supports professional development and sector capability, including:
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Full access to the eResearch 2026 (eRA26) conference and workshops
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Return economy airfares to eRA26 (<5 nights at the conference recommended hotel)
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$500 debit card for expenses
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Secured speaking position at eRA26 (20 minutes)
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$2,000 stipend to support further education OR $2,000 voucher to obtain a new laptop or similar relevant tool
The Prize selection panel can award up to 3 highly commended awards who will receive $1,000 gift card
What the prize recognises
Applications are assessed holistically across six areas. Nominees must demonstrate sustained contribution over at least two years.
Demonstrable depth and quality in technical work — whether in software, infrastructure, data management, or research platforms.
Evidence that the nominee's work has meaningfully improved research outcomes, enabled new capabilities, or expanded researcher access.
Novel approaches, efficiency gains, or improvements to eResearch practice — including sustainability of systems, teams, or methods.
Contribution to the broader eResearch community — mentorship, knowledge sharing, cross-institutional collaboration, or sector-building activity.
Demonstrated awareness of and alignment with national or institutional research strategies and priorities.
Contributions reflect consistent, meaningful engagement over time — not a single project or event.
Prize Panel
All submissions will be independently reviewed and assessed by the Prize Panel against a defined evaluation rubric aligned to the published selection criteria. Panel members will score and discuss nominations based on evidence provided in each application, ensuring a fair, transparent, and consistent assessment process.
Following individual assessments, the Panel will meet to consider the highest-ranked nominations, discuss their relative merits, and seek consensus on the recipient of the Early Career eResearch Excellence Prize. The Panel reserves the right to request additional information or to determine that no award be made if submissions do not meet the required standard of excellence.
Outcome of process is passed to the AeRO Executive for endorsement and publication of result.
Panel Members
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Ryan Fraser (Chair, AeRO Prize Committee)
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Kiowa Scott-Hurley
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Karina Nunez Machado
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Emma Crott
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Nick Jones
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Joe Shapter
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Amanda Lawrence