Lessons from >25 Years at School

The EECS Early and Mid Career Academic (EMCA) Advocacy Committee invites you to the following Informal Talk seminar. This is a seminar series for sharing life stories and important career experiences – more information can be found below.

Event: EECS EMCA Informal Talk Seminar

Speaker: Joel Mackenzie

Host: Rocky Chen

Talk Title: Lessons from >25 Years at School

Abstract: I started school when I was around 5 years old, and somehow I am still coming back to “school” every day! Throughout the years, I have had the chance to interact with and learn from many incredible people – peers and mentors, heroes and villains (don’t ask me about my first calculus course!), and many more. These interactions have uniquely shaped the way I think about and approach my work. In this talk, I will reflect on some of the challenges I have faced, the lessons I have learnt, and the things I wish I knew “before”. I hope the talk will be interesting, fun, and helpful for other ECRs who are going through their own learning and development, and can provide a chance for reflection on their own philosophy towards their scholarship.

Speaker Bio: Dr Joel Mackenzie was awarded his PhD from RMIT University in 2020, where he worked on scalable algorithms for large-scale search engines. He then had a two year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Melbourne before joining UQ as an ongoing T&R staff member in 2022. His research focuses on efficient and effective representations for large-scale search and data processing problems, including indexing, compression, and retrieval. He is also interested in measurement and methodological aspects of empirical research. He has been at school for a very long time.