2025 CAUDIT Awards Recipients

First Name: Hannah
Last Name: Latham
Position/Title: Director of Digital Transformation Delivery
Organisation: Macquarie University

Hannah Latham leads a multidisciplinary division at Macquarie University, delivering strategic transformation with precision and purpose. She fosters a high-trust, high-accountability culture that empowers colleagues to lead, innovate, and collaborate across boundaries. Her remit spans two major digital transformation programs, multiple IT project delivery teams, PMO, and operational teams, each contributing to institution-wide change. Hannah’s leadership extends beyond her division; she has successfully guided cross-functional groups including legal, procurement, finance and academic stakeholders through complex digital initiatives. Her governance style is inclusive and outcomes-driven, supporting staff at all levels to grow, lead, and contribute meaningfully. She mentors emerging leaders, fosters psychological safety, and creates space for experimentation and continuous learning. Hannah’s ability to unite diverse teams around a shared purpose has been instrumental in delivering high-impact programs such as Student 360, which required navigating institutional complexity and aligning multiple business units. Her leadership consistently results in on-time delivery, strong stakeholder engagement, and enduring institutional value. She is a trusted advisor to senior executives and a role model for future leaders, demonstrating that transformation is not just about technology, but about people, purpose, and culture. 

The Research Management System (RMS) Replacement project was part of a broader University wide initiative to replace the aging and highly customised on-premise Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning platform with 2 new cloud-based systems from Cayuse and Workday. As a global leading research institution, the University of Melbourne receives around $700million annually in research funding from Australian and international funders, private and public sectors. This implementation was undertaken against the backdrop of a concurrent ERP implementation; diverse research needs across 9 faculties; operational requirements for scalability and proposed changes to government legislation that would affect international student enrolments. With the researcher and research support staff experience at the heart of the initiative, the University streamlined, standardised and improved the research grant application process supplemented with a modern ‘Software as a Service’ system. The RMS was one of the largest transformational initiatives to impact the research community and was successfully rolled out to more than 10,000 researchers and research support staff. The program has helped provide a single source of truth for grant applications, significantly improve the user experience, delivered operational efficiencies and introduced a scalable solution that supports future growth whilst driving consistency and collaboration across the University.
 

Virtual Peer is a scalable, AI-powered academic support tool co-developed by ITS, MQIT, and academic staff to enhance student learning and reduce staff workload. Built on GPT-4o with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), it delivers context-aware, pedagogically sound responses using educator-approved content. The initiative targets undergraduate and postgraduate students across Macquarie University, with expansion planned to 25 units and 15,000 students in Semester 2, 2025. It also supports teaching staff by streamlining communication and enabling more time for high-impact teaching. Virtual Peer fosters independent learning, improves academic outcomes, and models ethical AI integration in education. 

Our solution is a retrieval-augmented generative (RAG) assistant for students, staff and public that personalises answers by cohort, enforces AI governance in real time AND is a semantic search solution for our websites and knowledge bases.