University of Melbourne in the context of "Sandstone universities"

Stephen George Wheatcroft FASSA (born 1 June 1947) is a Professorial Fellow of the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include Russian pre-revolutionary and Soviet social, economic and demographic history, as well as famine and food supply problems in modern world history, the impact of media on history, and in recent developments in Russian and Ukrainian society. Wheatcroft speaks Russian fluently and has spent a good portion of his career researching in the Soviet archives, and he played a major role in publishing materials from the archives.

Wheatcroft was named a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 2005.

Julia Eileen Gillard (born 29 September 1961) is an Australian former politician who served as the 27th prime minister of Australia from 2010 to 2013. She held office as the leader of the Labor Party (ALP), having previously served as the 13th deputy prime minister from 2007 to 2010. She is the first and only woman to hold either office.

Born in Barry, Wales, Gillard migrated with her family to Adelaide in South Australia in 1966. She attended Mitcham Demonstration School and Unley High School. Gillard went on to study at the University of Adelaide, but switched to the University of Melbourne in 1982, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Laws in 1986 and a Bachelor of Arts in 1989. During this time, she was president of the Australian Union of Students from 1983 to 1984. In 1987, Gillard joined the law firm Slater & Gordon, eventually becoming a partner in 1990, specialising in industrial law. In 1996, she became chief of staff to John Brumby, the Leader of the Opposition in Victoria. Gillard was first elected to the House of Representatives at the 1998 election for the Victorian division of Lalor. Following the 2001 election, she was appointed to the shadow cabinet. In December 2006, Gillard became the running mate of Kevin Rudd in a successful leadership challenge to Kim Beazley, becoming deputy leader of the opposition. After Labor's victory at the 2007 election, she was appointed as deputy prime minister, and was also given the roles of Minister for Education, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, and Minister for Social Inclusion.

Carl May FAcSS (born 1961, in Farnham, Surrey) is a British sociologist. He researches in the fields of medical sociology and Implementation Science. Formerly based at Southampton University and Newcastle University, he is now Professor of Health Systems Implementation at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Carl May was elected an Academician of the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences in 2006. He was appointed a Senior Investigator at the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) in 2010. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners in 2020. He has honorary professorial appointments in primary care at the University of Melbourne, and in public health at Monash University.

May is best known for his contributions to Implementation Science and his work is represented by many studies of the interaction between health technologies and their users. In Implementation Science his work investigates how innovations become routinely embedded in health care and other organizational systems. This research has led to Normalization Process Theory, developed with Tracy Finch and others, including Victor Montori. This is a sociological theory of the implementation, embedding, and integration of new technologies and organizational innovations. May and colleagues have applied Normalization Process Theory to explaining patient non-compliance with treatment, proposing that a proportion of non-compliance is structurally induced by healthcare systems themselves as patients are overburdened by treatment. To counter this, they have proposed Minimally Disruptive Medicine, which seeks to take account of its effects on patients' workload.

C. John Powers FAHA (born 1 October 1957) is an American-born Australian scholar of Asian Studies and Buddhism, with particular expertise in Tibetan Buddhism. Much of his teaching career has been at the Australian National University in Canberra. As of 2025 he is at the University of Melbourne.

Joseph Lo Bianco AM FAHA (born 7 July 1953) is Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, and serves as past president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (the first educator elected to this role). From 2011–2017 he designed, led and implemented a 6-year, 3-country language and peace building initiative for UNICEF in Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand. He has previously worked on peace building activities in Sri Lanka in the late 1990s, and in several other settings. He is a language planning specialist, recognised for his work on combining practical problem solving language policy with academic study of language problems. He has published extensively on bilingual education, English as a second/additional language, peace building and communication, multiculturalism and intercultural education, Asian studies, Italian language teaching and the revitalisation of indigenous and immigrant community languages.

Formal hall or formal meal is a meal held at some of the oldest universities in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland (as well as some other Commonwealth countries) at which students usually dress in formal attire and often gowns to dine. These are held commonly in the colleges of Oxford, Cambridge and Durham, at Trinity College Dublin (where they are known as commons), and in some halls and colleges at St Andrews, and the Australian sandstone universities (Adelaide, Melbourne, Queensland, Sydney, Tasmania, Western Australia), and at Trinity College, Toronto.

In a number of redbrick universities, such as Manchester, Bristol, Leeds and Exeter, some halls practise similar traditions in order to increase interaction between academics and students, and to enrich the students' overall learning experience. Colleges of some Australian redbrick universities, including the Australian National University, Monash University, the University of New England, the University of New South Wales and the University of Southern Queensland, also hold gowned formal dinners.

Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer KCMG FRS (23 June 1860 – 14 July 1929), commonly referred to as Sir Baldwin Spencer, was a British-Australian evolutionary biologist, anthropologist and ethnologist. He is known for his fieldwork with Aboriginal peoples in Central Australia, contributions to the study of ethnography, and academic collaborations with Frank Gillen. Spencer introduced the study of zoology at the University of Melbourne and held the title of Emeritus Professor until his death in 1929. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1900 and knighted in 1916.