APRA announces 2025 Brian Gray Scholarship recipients

The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has announced the four recipients of the 2025 Brian Gray Scholarship. 

The Brian Gray Scholarship program was established by APRA and the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) in September 2002 in memory of Brian Gray, APRA's former Executive General Manager, Policy Research and Consulting, who spent more than two decades shaping regulatory policy in the financial area in his roles at the RBA and APRA. 

The recipients of the 2025 Brian Gray Scholarship and their areas of study are:

• Allegra De Jager – Honours candidate, Bachelor of Economics, University of Sydney;
• Arlene Janse van Rensburg – Honours candidate, Bachelor of Science (Actuarial Science), Curtin University;
• Christopher Finnegan – Honours candidate, Bachelor of Economics, University of Sydney; and
• Ajay Murugasu – Honours candidate, Bachelor of Economics, University of Sydney.

Under this Scholarship program, the recipients will devote a substantial amount of time to an agreed research topic and present their findings to APRA and the RBA upon completion of their research. The scholarship recipients will be researching the following topics: 

• A Private Matter: Monetary Policy and The Rise of Private Capital in Australia – Allegra De Jager;
• Comparing Risk Based Regulatory Capital Requirements for Market Risk Using Copula Models – Arlene Janse van Rensburg;
• Drivers of Australia's natural rate of interest – Christopher Finnegan; and
• Optimal monetary policy with downward nominal wage rigidity – Ajay Murugasu.

The scholarship program, jointly funded by APRA and the RBA, supports up to four scholarships each year to the value of $15,000 each. The purpose of the scholarship is to support research students pursuing careers in finance, economics, actuarial science, econometrics, statistics, or related disciplines. It is open to Australian and New Zealand citizens completing their honours year or postgraduate studies on topics of relevance to APRA and/or the RBA, broadly. Applications for the 2026 scholarship will open in December 2025.

More information on the Brian Gray Scholarship is available on the APRA website at: Brian Gray Scholarship program.