Rate My Professor Barbara Maenhaut

Associate Professor Barbara Maenhaut serves as Head of Mathematics and Deputy Head of School in the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Queensland. She obtained her Bachelor of Mathematics with Honours from the University of Waterloo and her PhD in Mathematics from the University of Queensland in 1999. Her doctoral thesis, titled "Substructures of cycle systems with applications to access schemes," was completed in the School of Physical Sciences. Maenhaut's research focuses on combinatorial design theory and graph theory, with particular emphasis on graph decompositions, including common multiples of pairs of graphs and decompositions into 2-regular graphs, as well as Latin squares where any pair of rows defines a full cycle permutation, and Latin cuboids as a three-dimensional generalization. She has authored or co-authored numerous papers in prestigious journals such as the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, Australasian Journal of Combinatorics, Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series B, Journal of Graph Theory, and Journal of Combinatorial Designs. Key publications include "An infinite family of connected 1-factorisations of complete 3-uniform hypergraphs" with Jeremy Mitchell and Anna Puskas (2024), "Perfect 1-factorisations of complete k-uniform hypergraphs" with Sara Davies and Jeremy Mitchell (2023), "Decompositions of complete multigraphs into cycles of varying lengths" with Darryn Bryant, Daniel Horsley, and Benjamin R. Smith (2018), "New families of atomic Latin squares and perfect 1-factorisations" with Darryn Bryant and Ian M. Wanless (2006), and "Decompositions of complete graphs into triangles and Hamilton cycles" with Darryn Bryant (2004).

An accomplished educator, Maenhaut teaches first- and second-year discrete mathematics courses and received a teaching excellence award from the University of Queensland Faculty of Science in 2018. She chairs the School Teaching and Learning Committee and has delivered invited talks, including "50 years of the Oberwolfach problem" at the 5th International Combinatorics Conference in Melbourne (2017) and "Hamilton decompositions" at the 30th Midwestern Conference on Combinatorics and Combinatorial Computing (2016). Her work has been funded by Australian Research Council grants, such as the Discovery Project "Fractional decomposition of graphs and the Nash-Williams conjecture" (2024-2028, externally administered by Monash University), "Factorisations of graphs" (2013-2015), and the Linkage Project "Virtual Transport Networks" (2012-2014). Maenhaut supervises postgraduate students and maintains active collaborations with researchers including Darryn Bryant, Daniel Horsley, and Ian M. Wanless, contributing significantly to advancements in discrete mathematics.