Canberra-local Andrew Wrigley graduated from the Australian National University (ANU) in 2017 with a Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours) degree.

“I chose the program because it looked interesting and I was genuinely excited by the course material, and I chose ANU because of its reputation in Australia and internationally”, said Andrew.

The calibre of ANU lecturers and the quality of students that the university attracts are some of the things that stood out for Andrew.

“The ANU attracts a really smart and diverse group of people and this leads to really interesting conversations.”

Andrew was a recipient of the New Colombo Plan scholarship which gave him the opportunity to study at the National University of Singapore during his Honours year, which saw him travelling to Singapore, Indonesia, and China.

“It was a life-changing experience. It gave me new perspective on Australia’s place in our region and the importance of Asia in global affairs. I met so many interesting and talented people in this time that had a profound effect on my future both academically and professionally.”

Presenting his research at an international conference made Andrew realise the international connections that ANU has.

“Despite being an international conference, I found that I knew many people there through ANU, which is a testament to the world-class research that the ANU is involved in.”

After graduating from the ANU, Andrew moved to Sydney to work on his business, Neliti. Neliti, which Andrew co-founded along with a contact he made while in Singapore, is an online platform for publishing and sharing free research in Indonesia. Neliti launched in January 2017 and has already grown to serve over 2 million users every month.

Andrew hopes to expand Neliti to other countries and change the way academic research is published and distributed.

“I hope to facilitate free access to the world’s scientific literature and data. Indonesia is home to over 4000 universities which do fantastic research, but the majority of this is not published electronically at all, so getting this knowledge online and searchable is our first step.”

Andrew has a strong interest in machine learning and hopes to pursue this further as well, possibly through a PhD. Currently, he has been selected as a Schwarzman Scholar for 2018/19, from over 4,000 international applicants. This is a competitive 1 year Masters program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China which focuses on Global Affairs.

“This will be enormously valuable both personally and for my future business goals, and I’m really excited about it.”

“Through my time studying, I have come to realise that a lot of innovation and commercial success comes from ordinary people. I don’t believe there are any particular magic skills that make it easy; it’s mostly about having passion for solving a problem that a lot people have, and a lot of persistence.”