Discrete Mathematics

Congratulations to Marc Distel who has submitted his PhD thesis entitled “Global Structure of Minor-Free Graphs and Beyond” (supervised by David Wood). Marc’s candidature has been a tremendous success, producing 16 papers, including publications in Advances in Combinatorics; Combinatorics, Probability & Computing; Electronic J. Combinatorics; Innovations in Graph Theory; and SIAM J. Discrete Math. The thesis is based on five single-authored papers within the themes of coarse graph theory and graph product structure theory, which have been hot topics in structural graph theory over the past few years.

Monash University has once again been ranked by The Australian newspaper as the leading institute in Australia in the field of Discrete Mathematics, and David Wood is the leading researcher in the field of Discrete Mathematics.

The discrete mathematics research group will organise and host the 48th Australasian Combinatorics Conference (48ACC) at Monash on 7-11 December 2026. The website is now live:
https://48acc.github.io.

Prof Nick Wormald has been awarded the 2025 medal of the Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia.

This medal is awarded at most once every three years, and recognises lifetime achievements in research, student supervision, service and promotion of the discipline of combinatorics.

Melissa Lee is a star researcher. We knew that, but it was nice to have it recognised today with her winning an Early Career Researcher award from the Faculty of Science at Monash.

Today we got the very exciting news that Jack Allsop’s PhD thesis on Latin Subrectangles (supervised by Prof Ian Wanless) has been passed without amendments. Both assessors were glowing in their praise and rated the thesis as exceptional in all categories. It really is an outstanding result. Well done Jack!

Devastating news: Our PhD graduate Harald Bögeholz has passed away while on a cycling holiday in Mallorca. Our sincerest condolences to his family and friends for this devastating loss.

Harald’s 2022 PhD thesis “A Relational Model for Parallel Computation” was supervised by Michael Brand and Graham Farr.

Massive congratulations to Afsane Ghafari Baghestani who today submitted her PhD thesis entitled “When Transversals Collide”. Her thesis was supervised by Prof Ian Wanless. This is the third PhD submission from one of Prof Wanless’ students within the last 6 months!

Huge congratulations to Dr Michael Gill, who graduated PhD today, Tues 16 Sep 2025. His thesis “Enumeration and Isomorphism for 1-Factorisations and Latin Squares” was supervised by Ian Wanless, with David Wood as Associate supervisor.

Michael with his Supervisor

Huge Congratulations to Jack Allsop for submitting his PhD Thesis “Latin Subrectangles”. His thesis was supervised by Ian Wanless, with Daniel Horsley as Associate Supervisor. Jack already has a postgraduate job lined up in Berlin.