Achievements and awards

Oscar Goode with his teacher and fellow competitor at the World Plumbing Day Apprentice Skills Contest

Swinburne student Oscar Goode placed first in the Plumbing Industry Climate Action Centre (PICAC) 2025 World Plumbing Day Apprentice Skills Contest this month. Studying a Certificate III in Plumbing, Oscar represented Swinburne in the annual contest. Oscar will now go through an interview process for the opportunity to represent PICAC and Australia as one of the 32 participants in the annual United Association's International Apprentice Skills contest at the Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

Celebrated on March 11, World Plumbing Day is an internationally recognised event to spread awareness and recognition of the essential role plumbers play in protecting public health and advancing water solutions. More than pipes and fittings, plumbing is the pillar of safe communities and empowering economic prosperity.

“It was a great day,” Oscar reflected. “I really enjoyed getting to talk to other people from different areas in the industry. The task we had to do really came down to being very precise with your measurements and having a good understanding of how it’s all going to look before even picking up a tool. Swinburne’s helped me learn to read plans and do neat work, and that’s what helped me win the competition at the end of the day.”

Professor Tsong Yueh Chen named an IEEE Fellow for inventing metamorphic testing and adaptive random testing.

Swinburne’s Professor Tsong Yueh Chen has been named as a IEEE Fellow for contributions to software testing through the invention of metamorphic testing and adaptive random testing.

Metamorphic testing identifies program bugs by analysing the relationships between inputs and outputs of multiple executions of a program under test. Two decades after its introduction, metamorphic testing is now widely used in online search engines, autonomous machines, compilers, Web APIs and deep learning.

Professor Chen, a Professor of Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, was also the recipient of the 2024 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award.

IEEE is the world’s largest technology professional organisation dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence. The IEEE Fellow is awarded to a select group of IEEE members whose exceptional achievements are celebrated and recognised by the community. 

Swinburne’s Dr Evie Kendal has been appointed as a non-resident Scowcroft National Security Fellow of the Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense, United States Air Force Academy (USAFA).

US Air Force Academy's Acting Director of the Eisenhower Center, Madison Walker J.D. (Air and Space Law), says the Fellowship is critical to advancing dialogue on space security.  

"The Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense's Scowcroft Fellowship is a program designed to gather all of the leading experts in space and national security policy together, to further the conversation of what is next for the space domain and the implications that has on our global security."

Dr Kendal is a bioethicist and public health scientist with expertise in the ethics of emerging technologies, including space ethics. She is a part of the planetary defence global consortium and has collaborated with the US Space Force and Harvard & Smithsonian. 

Dr Kendal has written papers on asteroid mining's practical, ethical and environmental issues and has contributed to collections in space ethics, law and aerospace medicine. Her interests include lunar miners' health, artificial gestation in space, genetic modification for astronauts and diversity in the space workforce. She also contributed to the Military Space Ethics text used at USAFA, and her work is featured in courses at the Australian Defence Force Academy.