Vivien Challis

Associate Professor Vivien Challis is a leading academic in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), affiliated with the Faculty of Science and the School of Mathematical Sciences. She earned her PhD in Mathematics from The University of Queensland in 2009 and has since built an international reputation in structural optimisation, computational mechanics, and high-performance computing.

Her research focuses on piezoelectric metamaterials, topology optimization, and GPU-accelerated computational methods, with recent work advancing robotics applications and biomedical prosthetics. She leads the 2022 Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP220102759 on optimising piezoelectric materials for robotics and contributed to ARC projects DP240102104 and DP170104307.

• 2025: GridapTopOpt.jl (Julia toolbox for level set optimization)
• 2025: Wave power absorption by floating plates (piezoelectric energy harvesting)
• 2025: FF-PINNTO framework (neural network-based optimization)

In 2024, she received the JH Michell Medal from ANZIAM, recognizing her contributions to industrial and applied mathematics. Her teaching includes first-year calculus (MXB105) and second-year computational mathematics (MXB226), and she directed QUT's Mathematics Summer School (2022-2024).