APRA announces 2012 Brian Gray Scholarship recipients

The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) today announced the three recipients of the 2012 Brian Gray Scholarship to study topics in the financial sector.

The Brian Gray Scholarship program was established by APRA and the Reserve Bank of Australia in September 2002 in memory of Brian Gray, APRA's former Executive General Manager, Policy Research and Consulting, who spent more than two decades shaping regulatory policy in the financial area in his roles at the RBA and APRA. The scholarships are valued at $12,500 each.

The recipients of the 2012 scholarship are:

• Yen Bui — PhD candidate (Finance), Flinders University;
• Chung-Yu Liu — Honours candidate, Bachelor of Commerce (Actuarial Studies), University of New South Wales; and
• Ganesh Natraj — Honours candidate, Bachelor of Economics and Bachelor of Engineering, University of Western Australia.

Under this Scholarship program, the recipients will devote a substantial amount of time to an agreed research topic and present their findings to APRA upon completion of their research. The scholarship recipients will be researching the following topics:

• Developing a metric for assessing the efficiency of Australian superannuation funds — Yen Bui;
• Empirical estimation of claim-count models for general insurance — Chung-Yu Liu; and
• Applying optimal control methods to monetary policy: formulating a rule for optimising output and inflation — Ganesh Natraj.

The Scholarship program is open to Australian and New Zealand citizens and permanent residents who are currently studying a topic of relevance to prudential regulation. While the program focuses on honours year students, postgraduate students can also apply.

More information on the Brian Gray Scholarship is available on APRA's website.