Associate Professor Renata Borovica-Gajic is developing smarter database systems to help scientists and other professionals uncover discoveries hidden in vast amounts of data.
Her work addresses a growing challenge across science, healthcare, government and industry: while organisations collect unprecedented amounts of data, extracting meaningful insights from it remains difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.
We are truly drowning in data, but we are just starving for insight.
Her research is transforming databases from passive storage systems into active collaborators in discovery. By learning from users’ interactions, her systems can adapt to the data and the questions being explored, identify information with potentially valuable properties and help users develop analyses that could lead to new discoveries.
The technology has already been applied to many data-intensive disciplines, from helping clinicians make more informed decisions and researchers accelerate scientific discoveries to improving traffic management in smart cities.
Traditionally, preparing data and configuring databases can consume up to 80 per cent of the time required for data analysis, creating a significant bottleneck for researchers and professionals who may not have specialist database expertise.
Associate Professor Borovica-Gajic’s work aims to automate these complex processes so users can focus on what the data reveals, rather than the technical work required to access it.
Her research also addresses the need to protect privacy and security when analysing sensitive information, particularly in healthcare and other highly regulated environments. Her work has also contributed to patented technology and influenced commercial database technologies at Microsoft and Google.
Associate Professor Borovica-Gajic said receiving the inaugural award from ATSE was an incredible honour, recognising both her team’s work and the importance of the infrastructure that enables discoveries across industries.
Data engineers in many industries are enablers for many things to happen, but they are frequently overlooked because the ultimate goal is the focus of the business.
“I’m very excited that there is recognition of so much work that happens behind the scenes in bringing that data to the people and society and helping us interpret it.”
Data engineer and ATSE Fellow Professor Shazia Sadiq was the driving force behind the creation of the new award, seeing it as an opportunity to raise awareness of the vital role data scientists and engineers regarding data resilience.
Data scientists and engineers safeguard the integrity of our data systems, and with it, the trust in our science and our innovations.
"The paradox of data work is that too often this work goes unnoticed except when it goes wrong.
"It was time to recognise at a national level the people who keep our data trustworthy. The award celebrates this invisible work that makes so many high-impact innovations possible."
The winners of the 2026 ATSE Awards were announced at the annual ATSE Awards Gala Dinner in Sydney on 28 October.
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