JOHOR BAHRU, 17 December 2017 – An academic staff in the Department of Geoinformation, Faculty of Geoinformation and Real Estate (FGHT) UTM, Sr Dr. Nurul Hazrina Idris are among the four Malaysian scholars and professionals awarded with the prestigious and highly competitive 2018 Endeavour Australia Fellowships.
The Australia Endeavour Scholarships and Fellowships are an international scheme designed to facilitate links between Australia and its neighbours.
The program is fully funded by the Australian Government. For round 2018, 698 scholars are awarded worlwide and only 11 scholars from Malaysia.
Dr. Nurul will travel to Australia next year as part of her Postdoctoral Program.
She conducts research related to the satellite coastal altimetry for improving the coastal observation and forecasting/hindcasting monitoring system for coastal disaster management, storm surge and climate change monitoring. It is a joint-collaborative research with the Australian University of Newcastle and Bureu of Meteorology.
The research should benefit both countries, in which the Operational Australian Ocean Observation and Modelling System, called as “the BLUELINK” can be improved for shelf area within 200 m isobath. The system covers not only the Australian water but also the Malaysian and the Southeast Asia.
The pioneer system can be embedded in any national early warning system for near real time coastal disaster management not limited to Malaysia and Australia but also the ASEAN countries.
Her journey with Endeavour has started since 2009 when she was awarded the Endeavour International Postgraduate Research Scholarship to conduct her PhD study in the University of Newcastle Australia.
Since then, she worked actively in the area related to satellite coastal altimetry, and developed networking with national and international major researchers from the European Space Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) the United States, and leading universities of Denmark Technical University, the University of Pisa Italy, the University of New South Wales and the University of Tasmania.
It takes through three career stages that got her to where she is today. She started as a part time Research Officer at FGHT in 2005, and then as an academic tutor in 2006. After completion of her PhD study in 2014, she became a Senior Lecturer.
“My career journey, like many, has not been all smooth sailing. At times, especially early on, it was challenging, and stressful. But I stayed at my career path because I love the challenge, the work, and the people.
“I was ambitious to reach the stage of Postdoctoral since I was 13 years old. I remember there were a Career Path Seminar held in my school in SMK Teluk Datuk Banting Selangor. There, they exposed the pupils with the Malaysian academic path, and that was when I told myself to get to the top level of the Postdoctorate.”
” I hope in future, Malaysia will has it’s own sophisticated near real time ocean observation system, and the local and ASEAN communities will gain benefits from it,” she said.