Experts & partners

Experts

Associate Professor Bruce Bradbury

Associate Professor at the Social Policy Research Centre (SPRC) he undertakes research on poverty and inequality, the measurement of living standards, income support and labour market policies, consumer equivalence scales, and the geographic dimensions of social policies.

Emeritus Professor Peter Gordon Saunders

Director of the Social Policy Research Centre (SPRC) from February 1987 until July 2007, and now holds a Research Chair in Social Policy within the Centre. His research interests include poverty and income distribution, household needs and living standards, social security reform, comparative social policy and ageing and social protection in China.

Dr Trish Hill

Senior Research Fellow at the Social Policy Research Centre who employs a feminist economic and social policy lens to examine issues in the fields of poverty and inequality, informal care across the lifecourse and ageing and aged care.

Dr Jung-Sook Lee

Senior lecturer at UNSW Sydney who's research focuses on breaking the cycle of intergenerational disadvantages.

Dr Yuvisthi Sarashana Naidoo

Research Fellow at the Social Policy Research Centre. She is a social policy researcher and quantitative research analyst whose focus is on social disadvantage and social indicators specialising in poverty and inequality; deprivation and social exclusion; well-being and ageing societies.

Experts

Associate Professor Jayashree Arcot

Associate Professor in the Food and Health Cluster of the School of Chemical Engineering, she is also the Undergraduate Food Science Program Co-ordinator and Advisor.

Professor Johannes le Coutre

Johannes le Coutre joined UNSW in 2019 as Professor in Food & Health. With the goal to strengthen food security and to alleviate the agricultural burden on the environment he is developing a broad research agenda on cellular agriculture.

Associate Professor Alice Lee

Associate Professor & Postgraduate by Coursework Coordinator (Food Program) in the School of Chemical Engineering.

Professor Cordelia Selomulya

Professor (Food & Health) in the School of Chemical Engineering and as a Research & Commercialisation Director of the Future Food Systems CRC.

Associate Professor Jes Sammut

A/Prof Sammut has worked in the Asia-Pacific Region for over 25 years with a focus on improving aquaculture to increase fish, shrimp and lobster production. He leads the UNSW Aquaculture Research Group.

Experts

Professor John Piggott

Professor John Piggott is the Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR) at UNSW.

He has published widely on issues in retirement and pension economics and finance; and in public finance more generally; his research has appeared in the leading international economics and actuarial academic journals, and is an expert in research surrounding population ageing.

Experts

Professor Mina Roces

As a Professor of History in the School of Humanities & Languages in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture, Professor Roces studies twentieth century Philippine history, particularly women’s history, as well as the history of dress. Her most recent monograph, Gender in Southeast Asia, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and she has co-edited several anthologies on the topic of women in Asia.

Associate Professor Sue Williamson

Sue Williamson is an Associate Professor of Human Resource Management in the School of Business at UNSW Canberra. Her most recent research examines how various public sector agencies implement gender equality initiatives, including how middle managers can progress gender equality and how what the future of work will be in a post-pandemic world.

Dr Zora Simic

Dr Simic is the Convenor of History and Area Studies in the School of Humanities & Languages in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture. Dr Simic's recent work includes a feminist history of domestic violence in Australia and a contribution to a volume on the history of consent laws.

Experts

Professor Lucy Marshall

Professor Lucy Marshall is the Director of the Water Research Centre and Associate Dean (Equity & Diversity) of the Faculty of Engineering. She works towards new methods for quantifying available water resources through methods such as developing new types of hydrologic models, new analysis of field observations, and better ways of assessing and using existing models.

Professor Greg Leslie

Professor Greg Leslie is the Director of the UNSW Global Water Institute and the Director of the UNESCO Centre for Membrane Science and Technology. Prior to joining UNSW, he worked in the public and private sectors on water treatment, reuse and desalination projects in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong and the United States.

Water Experts

The UNSW Global Water Institute utilises the expertise and experience of over 40 water experts from diverse fields such as chemical engineering, biology, law, environmental humanities, biomolecuar science, earth & environmental science, biotechnology, and geography.

Experts

Professor Martin Green

Martin Green is a Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, involving several other Australian Universities and research groups. His group's contributions to photovoltaics include holding the record for silicon solar cell efficiency for 30 of the last 39 years, described as one of the “Top Ten” Milestones in the history of solar photovoltaics. The PERC solar cell that he invented in 1983, and his team developed to its full potential, accounted for 91.2% of worldwide silicon solar module production in 2021 (CPIA).

Professor Jeremy Moss

Professor Moss is Director of the Practical Justice Initiative and leads the Climate Justice Research program at UNSW as part of the Practical Justice Initiative (PJI). Current research interests include projects on: climate justice, the ethics of renewable energy as well as the ethical issues associated with climate transitions.

Associate Professor Kingsley Fong

Associate Professor Kingsley Fong is the Program Director of the Master of Financial Planning. He publishes in and review articles for leading international finance journals.

His course on ‘Sustainable and Responsible Investing’ was one of just eight business school courses from around the world recognised for an Aspen Institute Ideas Worth Teaching Award.

Associate Professor Neeraj Sharma

A/Prof Sharma is an ARC Future Fellow and has previously won the NSW Premiers Prize for Science and Engineering (Early Career Researcher in Physical Sciences, 2019), Australian Synchrotron Research Award (2018) and RACI Rennie Memorial Medal for Chemical Science (2018). His research interests are based on solid state chemistry, designing new materials and investigating their structure-property relationships.

Experts

Professor Chongmin Song

Professor Song is the Director of the Centre for Infrastructure Engineering and Safety. UNSW research led by Professor Song is helping structural engineers design buildings that will be more resilient against natural disasters. His research interests include computational mechanics, image-based analysis, dynamic soil-structure interaction, wave propogation, fracture mechanics and structural dynamics and earthquake engineering.

Professor Vinayat Dixit

Professor Dixit is the IAG Professor of Risk in Smart Cities and the Director of the Research Centre for Integrated Transport Innovation. His key research interest lies in studying risk in the transportation infrastructure system as it relates to highway safety, travel time uncertainty, and natural and human-caused disasters.

Professor Mark Bradford

Professor Bradford is the Research Director for the Centre for Infrastructure Engineering and Safety and is a world leader in structural engineering. His current research looks at achieving sustainability in construction: reducing the carbon footprint by using new materials; eliminating energy-intensive demolition; and encouraging recycling.

Professor Stephen Foster

Professor Foster, the Dean of Engineering and part of the Centre for Infrastructure Engineering and Safety, researches the behaviour of structural systems (buildings and bridges) constructed of reinforced and prestressed concrete, bringing new and advanced materials technologies to the engineering of structures.

Professor Wei Gao

Currently, Professor Gao of the Centre for Infrastructure Engineering and Safety is completing a substantial Australia Research Council Discovery Grant project entitled 'Unified non-deterministic dynamic safety assessment of softening structure' and an industry-based research project, 'Advanced analysis and safety assessment framework for structures under uncertainty'.

Professor Nasser Khalili

Professor Khalili is the head of geotechnical engineering at the Centre for Infrastructure Engineering and Safety and brings to this position an international reputation for innovation and setting industry standards. His research interests include geotechnical engineering, computational and constitutive modelling, continuum mechanics of multi-porous multiphase media, environmental engineering and non-isothermal mechanics and geothermal energy.

Professor Adrian Russell

Adrian Russell is a Professor in Geotechnical Engineering in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UNSW. He is also Deputy Director of the Centre for Infrastructure and Engineering Safety. As a geotechnical engineer, Russell looks to understand how infrastructure such as buildings, foundations, tailings storages, roads, tunnels, bridges, railways and ports interact with the ground. His research interests include soil mechanics, rock mechanics and the mechanics of fibre reinforced geomaterials and their use in infrastructure to increase strength and failure resistance.

Professor S Travis Waller

Professor Waller, of the Research Centre for Integrated Transport Innovation, studies mathematical representations of transport systems to support the planning and management of mobility and infrastructure. His key domain interests include new models for transport network performance that account for emerging applications spanning information, uncertainty and dynamics.

Associate Professor Taha Hossein Rashidi

A/Prof Rashidi is currently leading research into the interconnectivity between travel behaviour and time use and the potential of new mobility technologies to influence this paradigm as well as working on an industry partnership project with GoGet to undertake research on autonomous driving. He is also examining the capacity of social media data to complement existing data resources as part of the development of an integrated multi-level modelling framework to demonstrate the relationships between land use and transport systems and the consequences this has for city planning and travel behaviour more broadly.

Professor Shan Pan

Professor Shan Pan is the founding Director of the Digital Sustainability Hub (DS Hub), a knowledge hub that he recently created. DS hub specializes in the research and education of digital sustainability, with a specific aim to contribute to achieving the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).

Experts

Professor Jackie Leach Scully

Professor Scully is the Director of the UNSW Disability Innovation Institute and an internationally recognised bioethicist specialising in disability and feminist bioethics. With a background in molecular biology and further training in neurobiology, she held research fellowships at the Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne and the University of Basel, Switzerland, before helping to establish the first interdisciplinary unit for bioethics at Basel. She joined UNSW in 2019.

Professor Karen Fisher

Part of the Social Policy Research Centre, Professor Fisher's research interests are the organisation of social services in Australia and China, disability and mental health policy, inclusive research and evaluation, and social policy processes. She applied mixed methodology and adopts inclusive research methods with people with disability, families, policy officials and service providers.

Professor Ilan Katz

Part of the Social Policy Research Centre, Professor Katz's research interests include evaluation of complex interventions, parenting, child protection, youth justice, prevention and family support, children, families and communities, comparitive child welfare systems, migration, race and ethnicity.

Professor Bingqin Li

Part of the Social Policy Research Centre, Professor Li's research is on social policy and governance. Her current projects include governance of age-friendly communities, local government motivation in delivering complex social programs, social inclusion and integration, urban governance and social spending.

Professor Iva Strnadová

Professor Strnadová is the Academic Lead for Research at the UNSW Disability Innovation Institute and a Professor in Special Education and Disability Studies. Her research aims to contribute to better understanding and the improvement of the life experiences of people with disabilities, especially people with intellectual disabilities. Her research is grounded in an innovative inclusive research approach, in which people with intellectual disabilities are included in the role of researcher.

Associate Professor Bruce Bradbury

A/Prof. Bradbury of the Social Policy Research Centre undertakes research on poverty and inequality, the measurement of living standards, income support and labour market policies, consumer equivalence scales, and the geographic dimensions of social policies.

Associate Professor Natasha Cortis

A/Prof. Cortis of the Social Policy Research Centre explores the organisation, delivery and evaluation of human services, focusing on issues of financial sustainability in not-for-profit organisations, funding and workforce issues in community services, and women's employment and economic security.

Professor Gemma Carey

Professor Gemma Carey is the Director of the Centre for Social Impact UNSW, where she leads a multi-disciplinary team of researchers and educators committed to addressing inequality. She works with governments and non-government organisations to identify and change structures and processes that impact inequality. At the moment, her research is primarily focused on the implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Experts

Professor Hal Pawson

Hal Pawson is Professor Housing Research and Policy and Associate Director at the City Futures Research Centre, UNSW. In this role he has led several major research projects funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) and by the Australian Research Council (ARC). Hal's work focuses on advancing understandings of cities and peoples, and how we can use these understandings to build sustainable futures.

Professor Susan Thompson

Susan's Thompsons extensive resume gives her a strong background in urban planning for sustainable development. She is Head of the City Wellbeing Program in the City Futures Research Centre. City Wellbeing focuses on planning, designing and building environments that support people’s health and well-being as part of every day life.

Professor Christoper Pettit

Christopher Pettit is the Director of the City Futures Research Centre, inaugural professor of Urban Science, and Plus Alliance Fellow at UNSW Sydney. Prof Pettit’s expertise is in the convergence of the fields of city planning and digital technologies including Geographical Information Sciences (GIS). This research will help with future geo-designing of cities and the urban scape.

Professor Jill Bennett

Jill Bennett is Professor of Experimental Arts and founding Director of NIEA, and formerly Associate Dean Research, UNSW Art & Design, 2006–2016. Her research has focused on the aesthetic value of art and its practical deployment both in exhibitions/galleries, as well as beyond in science, looking at the ways this can shape sustainable development of cities.

Dr Felicity Fenner

Dr Felicity Fenner is the Director of UNSW Galleries. She is a renowned curator of contemporary art, having curated over 30 exhibitions of Australian and international art. Felicity’s research focuses on aspects of place and curatorial place-making, and how these can impact education and understandings of sustainability in urban spaces.

Professor Richard Goodwin

Goodwin established the Porosity Studio at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, in 1996, which marries a practical, immersive teaching practice with themes and concerns related to Goodwin's research on the relationship between art, architecture and movement. Goodwin's work emphasises the connections between art, architecture and urbanism.

Experts

Scientia Professor Veena Sahajwalla

Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Professor Veena Sahajwalla is an internationally recognised materials scientist, engineer and inventor revolutionising recycling science. She is renowned for her research into the transformation of waste into 'green materials' and commercialised 'green' steelmaking process that have revolutionised consumption practices.

Professor Sami Kara

Professor Sami Kara is a researcher and a lecturer in the School of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering, opens in a new window at UNSW. He is an engineer with a PHD in manufacturing, focusing on projects related to Reuse and Recycling of products, Energy and Eco-efficiency of products and process, as well as Life Cycle Assessment and Costing to create sustainable, environmental design for development and manufacturing.

Experts

Professor Katrin Meissner

Professor Meissner is the Director of the Climate Change Research Centre. She is interested in abrupt climate change events, as well as thresholds and feedbacks in the climate system. She uses Earth System Climate Models in conjunction with paleoclimate records to improve our understanding of the basic mechanisms underlying climate variability and climate change, particularly in the context of terrestrial biogeochemical cycles and ocean circulation.

Professor Chris Turney

Professor Turney is the Director of the Earth and Sustainability Science Research Centre. He explores past climates and their relevance to future change. Working across the planet (from Antarctica to the tropics and up into the Arctic), he is developing new records of past climate that extend historical weather records over millennia.

Professor Steven Sherwood

Professor Sherwood is the Deputy Director of the Climate Change Research Centre. He studies how the various processes in the atmosphere conspire to establish climate, how these processes might be expected to control the way climate changes, and how the atmosphere will ultimately interact with the oceans and other components of Earth.

Associate Professor Melissa Hart

A/Prof. Hart is the Director of the Researcher Development Program at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, and is also involved with the Climate Change Research Centre. Her research looks at the impact of cities on climate and climate on cities, and the meteorological controls on air pollution.

Professor Rose Amal

Professor Rose Amal is a UNSW Scientia Professor, a chemical engineer, leader of the Particles and Catalysis Research Group, opens in a new window and was an ARC Laureate Fellow. Professor Amal is recognised as a pioneer and leading authority in the fields of fine particle technology, photocatalysis and functional nanomaterials having made significant contributions to these related areas of research over the past 15 years.

Professor Andy Pitman

Professor Pitman is the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEx), opens in a new window.

Professor David Sanderson

Professor Sanderson is the Inaugural Judith Neilson Chair in Architecture and has 30 years' experience working across the world in development and emergencies. In 2021 he led a project with Snowy Valley Councils and surrounding local communities affected by the extensive 2019/2020 bushfires, to help prepare for future fire and other climate change related disasters.

Associate Professor Bryce Kelly

Associate Professor Kelly has over 27 years of international lecturing, consulting and research experience in greenhouse gas measurements, hydrogeology, geology, and geostatistics. His current atmospheric research focuses on measuring methane emissions from coal seam gas, coal mining and agricultural sources. In 2021 he worked with the United Nations Environment Programme in a world-first aerial survey of coal seam gas emissions in Queensland.

Experts

Associate Professor Paul Gribben

A/Prof. Gribben is the Director of the Centre for Marine Science and Innovation. He focuses on on the ecology of coastal marine ecosystems and is interested in using fundamental ecology to improve our understanding of the response of marine communities to global change and to develop more robust conservation and restoration efforts for critical marine foundation species such as oysters and seagrasses.

Professor Robert Brander

Professor Brander of the Centre for Marine Science and Innovation is a beach safety researcher who combines elements of coastal geomorphology and hazards with an understanding of social and demographic aspects of beachgoers. The overall goal of his research is to understand the physical-social interaction of beach hazards in order to reduce the incidence of drowning and injury on beaches and other coastal environments.

Professor Moninya Roughan

Professor Roughan's work focuses on improving dynamical understanding of the coastal ocean including physical forcings, nutrient enrichment processes and their biological impact. She uses a combination of observations and numerical models to study the oceanography of the East Coast Region and coordinates research in this field.

Associate Professor Suhelen Egan

A/Prof. Egan of the Centre for Marine Science and Innovation has a broad interest in the areas of environmental microbiology, marine ecology and biotechnology. Her recent work in these areas aims to gain a better understanding of the interactions between marine microorgansims and their eukaryotic hosts from both an ecological and cellular/mechanistic perspective.

Dr Laura Parker

Dr Parker is the Deputy Director (Indigenous Engagement) for the Centre for Marine Science and Innovation. She is interested in understanding and overcoming the impacts of climate change and environmental stress on marine organisms. Her research focuses specifically on building resilience in marine molluscs to current (e.g. salinity, food availability) and future (e.g. ocean warming and acidification) stressors and understanding the underlying physiological, molecular and epigenetic mechanisms involved.

Dr Ben Milligan

Dr Ben Milligan is a Scientia Fellow based at the Environmental Law Cluster, Centre for Applied Economic Research, and Centre for Ecosystem Science. His interdisciplinary research, teaching and advisory work predominantly focuses on the use of environmental information in policymaking, and the design or legal, institutional and policy frameworks for sustainable development.

Associate Professor Will Glamore

Dr William Glamore is an Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow at the Water Research Laboratory in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His primary fields of interest are related to estuarine hydrodynamics and water quality including restoration of estuarine environments, acid sulphate soils, coastal wetlands, boat wake waves, outfall hydraulics and field testing, and related physical and numerical models.

Dr Valentin Heimhuber

Dr Valentin (Tino) Heimhuber is a postdoctoral researcher within the EcoEng group at the UNSW Water Research Laboratory. Tino is also an expert on satellite and drone remote sensing climate change, global sustainability and carbon markets.

Experts

Professor Richard Kingsford

Professor Kingsford is the Director of the Centre for Ecosystem Science. He is a river ecologist and conservation biologist who has worked extensively across the wetlands and rivers of the Murray-Darling Basin and Lake Eyre Basin. He is also researches effective ways of implementing effective conservation actions through developing adaptive management approaches and engagement with communities.

Professor Angela Moles

Professor Moles is the Director of the Evolution & Ecology Research Centre. Her primary research goal is to quantify the ecological strategies employed by plant species in different environments, and to better understand the selective processes underlying global patterns in ecological strategy.

Professor Martin Van Kranendonk

Professor Van Kranendonk is the Director of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology. His research interest is the early Earth, how it formed, how crust developed on the surface and changed over time, and how life gained a foothold on our developing planet.

Associate Professor Will Cornwell

Part of the Centre for Ecosystem Science, A/Prof. Cornwell's research interests lie at the intersection of plant eco-physiology, community ecology and ecosystem ecology. He is especially interested in using basic ecological tools, especially functional traits, to understand the effects of climate change on terrestrial biodiversity.

Experts

Scientia Professor Jane McAdam AO

Jane McAdam AO is Scientia Professor of Law and Director of the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW. In 2021, Professor McAdam was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) 'for distinguished service to international refugee law, particularly to climate change and the displacement of people'.

Professor Eileen Baldry

As Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Equity and Diversity, and a professor of criminology at UNSW, Eileen Baldry has a strong focus on academic and institutional research into criminal and social justice reform and looking at all forms of disadvantage during the political and criminal justice systems.

Professor David Dixon

A professor, and former Dean, in the UNSW School of Law, Society, and Criminology, David Dixon has a strong focus on how regulation affects policing practice. David Dixon's research emphasises the impacts of policing in Australia, England, and the US, and looks at how policy reform and regulation can better improve policing in each justice system.

Professor Gary Edmond

Gary Edmond is a law professor in the School of Law at the University of New South Wales, where he directs the Program in Expertise, Evidence and Law. His research focuses on evidence-based forensics and its impact on institutional and societal justice measures.

Professor Jill Hunter

Jill Hunter is a Professor at UNSW's Faculty of Law and Justice. Jill Hunter's areas of teaching and research centre on the law, policies and practices relating to criminal trials. Her research has a strong focus on law reform in areas of laws and procedures in practice, particularly inequities and disadvantage in sentencing and criminal procedures.

Professor Luke McNamara

Luke McNamara is Professor and Co-Director of the Centre for Crime, Law and Justice in UNSW's Faculty of Law and Justice.  His research focuses on the deployment of criminalisation as a public policy tool, with a focus on public order and anti-social behaviour, and safety from violence. In particular, Luke McNamara's recent research has had a focus on how racism influenced particular Australian laws and legal practice, as well as their implications for human rights.

Professor Sarah Williams

Dr Sarah Williams is a Professor in UNSW's Faculty of Law and Justice. Her teaching and research is focused around global law, with a strong focus on alternative methods for reparative justice and the impact of fitness and capacity on criminal justice proceedings.

Professor Pamela Hanrahan

Dr Pamela Hanrahan is a lawyer, legal academic and author who specialises in corporate law, corporate governance, financial services regulation, data governance and business ethics. Her research has a strong focus on corporate and financial law, as well as the regulation of financial markets.

Professor Melissa Crouch

Professor Melissa Crouch is an author and academic in the Faculty of Law and Justice with interests including Constitutionalism in the Global South, Constitution-making, Law and Society, Asian Legal Systems, and Law and Religion in Asia. At UNSW, she runs the Asia Law & Policy Forum and is the co-director with Theunis Roux of the project on Constitutionalism in the Global South.

Dr Michael Salter

Dr Michael Salter is the Scientia Associate Professor of Criminology at the School of Social Sciences at UNSW. Dr Salter helped persuade 73 UN member states to sign onto a call to action on the removal of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from the internet. Dr Salter worked with international peak bodies in Canada, Austria and the UN to achieve this, as well as partnerships with UNSW colleagues Professor Jan Breckenridge, Dr Tim Wong, Dr Noam Peleg, and frontline police and medical experts.

He also chaired the national Working Group on CSAM Survivors in Australia which helped develop Item 10 of the Commonwealth Action Plan about compensation options for victims of sexual offences.