Our people

Katharine Kemp is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney, and leads the UNSW Public Interest Law & Tech Initiative. 

Katharine’s research focuses on competition, data privacy and consumer protection regulation. She has published widely in these fields, including "Misuse of Market Power: Rationale and Reform" (Cambridge University Press), "Competition Law of South Africa" (LexisNexis) with PJ Sutherland, and numerous peer-reviewed journal articles. In 2023, she was awarded the Emerging Leader Award at the national Australian Financial Review Higher Education Awards. 

Before joining the faculty, Katharine was a Research Fellow on the UNSW Digital Financial Services Research Team, conducting in-depth research into the regulation of digital financial services in developing countries in particular. 

Dr Teresa Crea is a narrative and simulation researcher, a writer|director and an academic passionate about emerging technologies and how they are impacting our narrative understandings from a neuroscientific perspective.

Her work in the field of simulation has included a range of industry collaborations with the defence sector on narrative sensemaking and information processing in immersive environments and pilot studies with the Simulation Unit at the Department of Anaesthesia, Royal Adelaide Hospital. Teresa has acquired broad multi sector knowledge of simulation and immersive environments through her industry networks and she continues to foster industry and academic partnerships to design solutions for a better future. 

She obtained her Doctoral Degree from UTS Sydney, winning the UTS Chancellor's Award and is currently the Program Lead for the Master of Simulation and Immersive Technologies in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture.

Dr Sushmita Ruj is Senior Lecturer at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW, Sydney. Her research interests are in applied cryptography, post quantum cryptography, blockchains and privacy enhancing technologies. She designs practical, efficient, and provably secure protocols that can be deployed in real-world applications. She explores security and privacy issues in cloud, smart grids, and data sharing platforms. She has extensively worked on cryptographic key distribution, identity and access management, secure cloud storage, search/analytics on encrypted data and blockchain security, privacy and scalability.

She has won several competitive grants like Samsung GRO Award, NetApp Faculty Fellowship, Cisco Academic Grant and IBM Research grant. She is an Associate Editor of the Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Elsevier Journal on Information Security and Applications (JISA) and Elsevier Journal on Pervasive and Mobile computing (PMC). She served as a Program Co-Chair of ACISP 2021 and Indocrypt 2019.  She served as a working group member of The National Blockchain Roadmap of Australia and a working group member of the First Blockchain initiative by Reserve Bank of India.

Before joining UNSW, she was a Senior Research Scientist at CSIRO's Data61, an Associate Professor at Indian Statistical Institute and an Assistant Professor at Indian Institute of Technology, IIT, Indore. She held positions in Lund University, Sweden and University of Ottawa, Canada.

Sushmita is a senior member of both ACM and IEEE.

Associate Professor Ben Turnbull is a researcher and practitioner working in the Digital Forensics, Cyber Security, Knowledge Representation and Visual Analytics domains. His research interests include novel approaches to securing computers and networks, automated learning from large datasets, forensic analysis of non-traditional devices, cyber security, cyber situation awareness, knowledge management, network analysis and visual analytics. Ben believes in real-world research that helps the community at large, and implementation is a large part of this. Additionally, he also work with the US Naval Research Laboratory, conducting research on the Tor network.

His research goal is to provide comprehensive situation understanding and decision support for all areas integrating cyber systems. As part of this, Ben's research the nexus of cyber security and kinetic effect to understand the true impacts of cyber-attack, best-practice automated analysis and visual techniques to aid decision support.