Honours Year Research Bursaries
What is the Research Bursary?
Each year, the Foundation awards 3 bursaries of $1,000 each to Honours Year students whose research projects are found to be worthy of support. They are judged by the ISAQ BEF Advisory Committee according to preset criteria which includes a Statement of Need.
What is the purpose of the Bursary?
The purpose of the grants is to advance knowledge and education in the Surveying and Spatial Sciences sector. Students are supported in the collection and acquisition of data, travel and accommodation related to their project, the purchase of equipment or software during their project, and/or other related honours project costs.
What are the criteria for judging?
The projects are judged for novelty, expected outcomes of the research, risks to success, value to the Surveying and Spatial Sciences sector, and the student's statement of need for support.
Bursary Awards 2026
Rhys Alexander
His Project: Reducing subjectivity in mountain bike difficulty rating using phone based lidar and photogrammetry.
How the Bursary Helped: Rhys said the funding supported the purchase an iPhone 17 Pro, which was essential for the LiDAR-based data capture central to his research. Funding was also needed for Pix4D processing software, survey consumables, and travel for fieldwork and GNSS control establishment.
Rhys was balancing care of 2 young children with work and research pressures.
Connor Fox
His Project: Classification of Lantana Camara and Opuntia Tree Pear: a comparison of remote sensing platforms and classification methods in a sub-tropical wooded parkland in Queensland.
How the bursary helped: Connor said that as a student raising a family in Tasmania, the bursary helped defray the cost of travel and accommodation expenses to attend the residential school.
He said his work would provide extensive analysis on sensor platforms and spatial features, and as well, provide important insights into classification algorithms which will offer diverse solutions to invasive species classification for prospective researchers and technicians.
Iurii Matvienko
His Project: Monitoring Bunya Pine decline in the Bunya Mountains using remote sensing.
How the bursary helped: Iurii was grateful for the defraying of costs of the multi-day field trip to ground-truth the remotely sensed results with real world conditions. It involved travel to the park and accommodation enabling validation of the research outputs. He said without this support, the ability to verify the accuracy and reliability of the spatial analysis would be significantly reduced.
Bursary Awards 2024
Bryan Knight
His project: Optimising Dam Deformation Monitoring: Evaluation of techniques for horizontal and vertical movements
How the bursary helped! Bryan said he is grateful for the assistance the bursary provided for the purchase of technical equipment essential to the accuracy and consistency of his results. He also used the funds to help defray costs for his travel to the Project Conference from Sydney.
Mark Wildes
His project: Determining Control Requirements for RTK Drone Surveys of Bridges
How the Bursary helped!
Mark said the that with a full time study load on top of full time work, the bursary allowed him to cut back some hours of work for study and helped finance an online training course essential to his project. Mark and his partner welcomed their first child in June.
His project: Detection of Land Subsidence: Leveraging InSAR for a Case Study on the Jordan Springs East Development
How the Bursary will help:
Eric said the Bicentennial Education Foundation bursary helped him upgrade his computer storage to analyse his project data and also support his expenses to attend the project conference.
Eric Brifford