Monash data science pioneer receives $3.9M Australian Laureate Fellowship for groundbreaking AI research
Professor Geoff Webb from the Faculty of Information Technology has received a prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC) Australian Laureate Fellowship. It provides $3.9M in funding to support his revolutionary work in temporal analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).
The Australian Laureate Fellowships are among the country’s highest research honours, only awarded to distinguished academics whose leadership and innovation shape the future of science and technology.
Professor Webb’s Fellowship project aims to transform the role of temporal analytics in AI by developing systems that interpret the world not as a static snapshot, but as an ever-evolving landscape as is the nature of much real data.
These advanced AI systems will be able to analyse the dynamic aspects of evolving data, offering vital insights across a wide range of sectors.
“I aim to develop temporal analytics tools that can extract insights from dynamic data – a limitation in today’s AI systems,” said Professor Webb.
“Technologies that can better understand change and embed this into important decisions will bring immense benefit to many sectors such as healthcare, education and defence. For example, the acclaimed AI tool AlphaFold won a Nobel prize for its capacity to predict the dimensional structure of proteins, enabling significant advances in biology and medicine.
I want to go even further, to encompass the dynamics by which proteins function and interact, to unlock more transformative advances.”
Professor Webb plans to make the developed technologies widely available through open-source software and public engagement initiatives.
“I greatly welcome this investment by the Australian Research Council in Australia's AI capability,” continued Professor Webb.
“However, more is needed if Australia is to avoid economic dependence on big tech companies. AI will continue to replace Australian jobs. And if we don’t dramatically increase domestic AI capabilities now, we run the risk of replacing Australian salaries with fees flowing to overseas firms.”
Head of the Faculty’s Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, and globally-acclaimed for his foundational and applied contributions to these disciplines, Professor Webb is no stranger to driving innovation – especially within Australia.
His novel algorithms are widely used across sectors including manufacturing, finance and medicine. In 2025, The Australian’s Research magazine named him the nation’s top researcher in Data Mining and Analytics following three consecutive years as the country’s top researcher in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.
“This Fellowship is well-deserved recognition of Professor Webb’s enduring contributions to two areas at the heart of our modern world,” said Professor Ann Nicholson, Dean of the Faculty of Information Technology.
“His work continually pushes the boundaries of what’s possible. It’s exciting to see research of such depth and vision supported – and we look forward to the impact it will deliver.”
Throughout his career, Professor Webb has attracted over $38M in research funding and received 31,000 citations. His research spans time series analytics, Bayesian networks, adaptive learning, and computational biology, addressing the challenges of making sense of complex, changing data.
A recipient of many high-profile accolades, Professor Webb was awarded the IEEE ICDM Research Contributions Award in 2024, became an IEEE Fellow in 2015, and received the IEEE Outstanding Service Award in 2013. In 2017, he won the inaugural Eureka Prize for Excellence in Data Science from the Australian Museum.
The Australian Laureate Fellowship will enable Professor Webb to take machine learning and understanding to new heights – driving widespread positive impact.