Scientia professors excel in their fields

Psychology

Scientia Professor Kaarin Anstey is an ARC Laureate Fellow and Director of the UNSW Ageing Futures Institute. She is also a conjoint Senior Principal Research Scientist at Neuroscience Research Australia. From 2017 to 2024 Anstey was Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research. From 2010 to 2021 Anstey was Director of the Dementia Collaborative Research Centre. 

Psychology

Bernard Balleine received his BA with first class honours and the University Medal from the University of Sydney in 1987 and his PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK in 1992. Subsequently, he was elected to a Research Fellowship at Jesus College Cambridge and spent three years conducting post-doctoral research in behavioural neuroscience in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge University. 

Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences

I AM AN EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST who studies the evolutionary consequences of sex. These include: the evolution of mate choice, the costs of being attractive, sexual conflict, the reason animals age and the links between sex, diet, obesity and death.

Together with my fabulous research group (the SEX LAB) and collaborators, I explore the evolutionary and ecological consequences of sexual reproduction.

Psychology

Research areas: Post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety: assessment, cognitive processes, and treatment. Experimental and clinical investigation of dissociative processes: memory, trauma, and dissociation. Clinical and experimental hypnosis. Autobiographical memory in clinical disorders.

Psychology

Scientia Professor Kaarin Anstey is an ARC Laureate Fellow and Director of the UNSW Ageing Futures Institute. She is also a conjoint Senior Principal Research Scientist at Neuroscience Research Australia. From 2017 to 2024 Anstey was Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research. From 2010 to 2021 Anstey was Director of the Dementia Collaborative Research Centre.

Centre for Marine Science & Innovation

I explore large-scale ocean circulation and its influence on regional - global climate, with a particular focus on the Southern Hemisphere, including Antarctic climate processes. Using ocean and coupled climate models in combination with observations and theoretical approaches, I study what controls ocean currents and how these currents affect climate and climate variability on time-scales of seasons to millennia.

School of Physics

Over 500 publications in atomic, nuclear, elementary particle, molecular, solid state, statistical physics, general relativity and astrophysics including 68 papers in Science, Nature-Physics, Nature-Communications, Phys. Rev. X and Phys. Rev. Lett.,  7 Editor's suggestions (best papers), 7 featured in Physics (American Physical Society  highlights),  over 300 papers in journals listed in the  Nature Index list of the world best journals (top 1%).

School of Psychology

Affect and social cognition. Interpersonal behaviour. Social perception, person memory and attributions. Cognitive and interactional theories of personality. The perception of interaction episodes. Political perception and voting behaviour. Verbal and nonverbal communication. Group behaviour and group judgements. Multidimensional scaling methods in psychology.

Mathematics & Statistics

Scientia Professor Gary Froyland leads the ARC Laureate Centre for Dynamical Systems and Data.  His main areas of interest are Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, and Optimisation. His research ranges from pure mathematics through to computation and application to industry and other scientific disciplines.

Chemistry

Scientia Professor Justin Gooding is currently an NHMRC Leadership Fellow and a co-director of the Australian Centre for NanoMedicine. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and the International Society of Electrochemistry. He is the inaugural editor-in-chief of the journal ACS Sensors.

Physics

Alex Hamilton is one of Australia's leading experimental condensed matter physicists, working on topological materials and semiconductor holes in quantum devices. He is head of the Quantum Electronic Devices group in the School of Physics at UNSW, and Deputy Director of the Australian Research Council Centre for Future Low Energy Electronics (FLEET). Research group website http://www.physics.unsw.edu.au/qed

School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences

Director of the Centre for Ecosystem Science

Professor Richard Kingsford 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 worked for the NSW Government Environment agency from 1986-2004. He also worked with many different communities and governments across this region.

Dean's Unit, Science

Professor Sven Rogge is the Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of New South Wales, Sydney (UNSW). Sven’s research interest is in condensed matter physics, in particular quantum electronics, at the School of Physics. 

Climate Change Research Centre

I am the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes. This Centre, hosted by UNSW, started in 2017 and runs to 2024. 

Materials Science & Engineering

Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Professor Veena Sahajwalla is an internationally recognised materials scientist, engineer and inventor revolutionising recycling science. She is renowned for pioneering the high temperature transformation of waste in the production of a new generation of ‘green materials.’  

Physics

Professor Simmons is the Founder and CEO of Silicon Quantum Computing and the Director of the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology. 

Chemistry

Martina Stenzel is an ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor in the School of Chemistry. 

Mathematics & Statistics

Non-commutative functional analysis and its applications to non-commutative geometry; Banach space geometry and its applications.

Psychology

Behavioural and neural investigations of elementary learning processes.

School of Information Systems and Technology Management

Manju Ahuja is Professor of Information Systems and Technology Management, School of Business, University of New South Wales. She also hold the Frazier Family Professor of Information Systems at the College of Business, University of Louisville, Kentucky (on leave). 

School of Economics

School of Economics

Pauline Grosjean is a Professor in the School of Economics at UNSW,a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and a Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Previously at the University of San Francisco and the University of California at Berkeley, she has also worked as an Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. 

School of Economics

Richard Holden is Scientia Professor of Economics at UNSW Business School, Director of the Manos Innovation Lab in Education, and President Emeritus of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

School of Economics

Robert's research and teaching interests include Bayesian methodology, Variable selection and model averaging, Nonparametric regression models, Time series modelling, Multivariate Gaussian and non-Gaussian regression; and Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation algorithms.

School of Banking and Finance

Ron Masulis is the Scientia Professor of Finance at the UNSW Business School, University of New South Wales. Ron received his MBA and PhD from the University of Chicago. He is a recognised authority in the areas of empirical corporate finance and corporate governance.

School of Information Systems and Technology Management

Scientia Professor Shan L Pan is an AGSM Scholar and Deputy Head of School (Research) at the School of Information Systems and Technology Management, UNSW Business School. He is the founding director of the Digital Sustainability Knowledge Hub (DS Hub), which specialises in research and education on digital sustainability and aims to contribute to achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs). 

School of Economics

John Piggott AO FASSA is Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR) at the University of New South Wales, where he is Scientia Professor of Economics. A former Australian Professorial Fellow, 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.

School of Marketing

School of Accounting, Auditing and Taxation

Ken Trotman is a Scientia Professor and was Head of the School of Accounting from 1991 to February 2000. He has held visiting appointments at a range of overseas institutions including Cornell University, the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. 

Private & Commercial Law

My research interests are FinTech, RegTech, central bank digital currencies and the Consumer Data Right and, more broadly, the full range of issues that the rise of data and its algorithmic analysis pose for society. My joint research with Professors Doug Arner of HKU and Dirk Zetzsche of the University of Luxembourg on FinTech is currently downloaded from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) more frequently than that of any other legal scholars in the world.

Global & Public Law

Scientia Professor Louise Chappell is Director of the Australian Human Rights Institute at UNSW Sydney.

Global & Public Law

Rosalind Dixon is a Professor of Law, at the University of New South Wales, Faculty of Law. She earned her BA and LLB from the University of New South Wales, and was an associate to the Chief Justice of Australia, the Hon.

Division of VC & President

Scientia Professor Dr Megan Davis is the Pro Vice-Chancellor Society (PVCS) at UNSW Sydney. Professor Davis is also a UNSW Scientia Professor and holds the Balnaves Chair in Constitutional Law and the Whitlam Fraser Harvard Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University and is a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. 

Professor Jane McAdam AO BA (Hons) LLB (Hons) (Sydney) DPhil (Oxford) is Scientia Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Sydney, where she leads the Evacuations Research Hub.

Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing

Research efforts include the completion of the Maintain Your Brain trial, involving 6,326 participants, to prevent cognitive decline and dementia, with analyses ongoing, and the Memory and Ageing Study, which has followed 1,037 individuals aged 70-90 since 2006/07 to identify risk and protective factors for cognitive decline, now being repeated to assess changes in risk factors and decline rates.

School of Clinical Medicine

Engineering

Louisa is UNSW Scientia Professor and NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow and Deputy Director at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC), Faculty of Medicine, UNSW. She was awarded her PhD in 2003, examining the comorbidity of drug use and mental disorders in the Australian population. 

The Kirby Institute

Professor Dore is Head, Viral Hepatitis Clinical Research Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, and Infectious Diseases Physician, St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney, Australia. He has been involved in viral hepatitis and HIV epidemiological and clinical research, clinical care and public health policy for 25 years. 

School of Clinical Medicine

In the area of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, special areas of focus include epidemiology, genetic underpinnings, neurocognitive processes and clinical presentation of neurodevelopmental disorders such as Tourette Syndrome, Autism, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

The Kirby Institute

Andrew is an internationally renowned authority in the transmission and prevention of HIV and sexually transmissible infections (STIs) and in the epidemiological relationship between immune deficiency, infection and cancer.

The Kirby Institute

Professor Guy (BAppSc, MAppEpid, PhD) is a NHMRC Fellow (Investigator Grant, L2) and is Head of the Surveillance Evaluation and Research Program with 70 staff, at the Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney. Prof Guy also serves as a Member of the Institute’s Executive Committee and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Committee. 

The Kirby Institute

Professor Dore is Head, Viral Hepatitis Clinical Research Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, and Infectious Diseases Physician, St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney, Australia. He has been involved in viral hepatitis and HIV epidemiological and clinical research, clinical care and public health policy for 25 years. 

School of Population Health

Scientia Professor Rebecca Ivers AM FAHMS FRSN is Head, School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney, and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the George Institute for Global Health. Ivers leads a global research program focusing on the prevention and management of injury. Her work has a strong focus on equity, implementation, sustainability and capacity development. She has published over 360 peer reviewed publications and supervised 22 PhD students. 

The Kirby Institute

John Kaldor is a NHMRC Leadership Fellow and UNSW Scientia Professor. He holds a doctorate in Biostatistics from the University of California. Berkeley, and began his research career at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France. For over 30 years he has built and led internationally recognised research programs at UNSW on the epidemiology and prevention of infectious diseases.

The Kirby Institute

Professor Anthony (Tony) Kelleher is a clinician scientist. He graduated from Medicine at UNSW in 1986. He trained in internal medicine and pathology at St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney at the height of the HIV epidemic, qualifying as a Clinical Immunologist and Immunopathologist in 1995.

School of Clinical Medicine

Professor Matthew Kiernan is the Chief Executive Officer and Institute Director at Neuroscience Research Australia. He holds appointments as Scientia Professor of Neuroscience at UNSW and Senior Staff Specialist in Neurology at South Eastern Sydney Local Health District, based at Prince of Wales Hospital.

School of Clinical Medicine

Professor Stephen Lord is a Senior Principal Research Fellow at Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) and Scientia Professor at UNSW. Over the last 30 years, he has worked in the areas of applied physiology, instability, falls and fractures in older people.

Philip Mitchell AM, FAHMS, FASSA, MB BS (Hons I; Syd), MD (UNSW), FRANZCP, FRCPsych | Scientia Professor, Discipline of Psychiatry and Mental Health, School of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of New South Wales; NHMRC Leadership Fellow (L3) | Postal address: Level 1, AGSM Building, UNSW, NSW 2052, Australia 

School of Clinical Medicine

I am an academic psychiatrist specialising in mood disorders, with a particular interest in the optimal ways to model and account for heterogeneity in both their diagnosis and treatment.

The Kirby Institute

Anushka Patel is Chief Executive Officer of The George Institute for Global Health and Scientia Professor at UNSW (University of New South Wales) Sydney. She is a cardiologist, with research interests in the prevention and management of common chronic conditions through large-scale clinical trials and implementation science.

School of Clinical Medicine

Professor Parsons is an internationally recognised leader in Stroke Medicine and a highly sought-after speaker, instructor and mentor, both nationally and internationally, in all aspects of clinical Neuroscience. 

School of Clinical Medicine

Professor George Paxinos is the scientist who mapped the brain of humans and the principal experimental animals. He studied at Berkeley, McGill and Yale and was a visiting scientist at Cambridge, Oxford, Stanford and UCLA. As brain cartographers before him, he publishes his work principally in books, 57 in his case. His first, The Rat Brain in Stereotaxic Coordinates, is the most cited publication in neuroscience and, for three decades, the third most cited book in science.

Division of VC & President

Vlado Perkovic is the Provost at UNSW Sydney, and previously the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health and Scientia Professor at UNSW, a Professorial Fellow at The George Institute, Australia, and was a Staff Specialist in Nephrology at the Royal North Shore Hospital. 

Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing

Perminder Sachdev AM, MBBS, MD, PhD, FRANZCP, FAAHMS is Scientia Professor of Neuropsychiatry at UNSW Sydney (UNSW), Co-Director of the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA), UNSW, and Clinical Director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute, Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney, Australia. 

School of Optometry and Vision Science

Scientia Professor, School of Optometry and Vision Science, UNSW Sydney

Professor Fiona Stapleton was awarded her PhD from City University and Moorfields Eye Hospital in London for her research on the pathogenesis and epidemiology of contact lens-related disease and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at University College London.

I am recognised nationally and internationally as a research expert in intellectual and developmental disability health and mental health. My research aims to reduce the health inequalities experienced by people with intellectual and developmental disability.

Scientia Professor, Particle and Catalysis Group, School of Chemical Engineering

Professor Rose Amal is a UNSW Scientia Professor and was an ARC Laureate Fellow, Prof. Rose Amal is a chemical engineer and the leader of the Particles and Catalysis Research Group, and Co-Director of ARC Training Centre for the Global Hydrogen Economy (GlobH2E). 

School of Chemical Engineering

Prof. Cyrille Boyer is the codirector of Australian Centre for NanoMedicine and Deputy Head of School (Research), School of Chemical Engineering (Information).

School of Chemical Engineering

Professor Liming Dai is a UNSW Scientia Professor, an ARC Laureate Fellow and an Australian Academy of Science Fellow. He is the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Carbon Science and Innovation. 

Engineering

Professor Andrew Dzurak is an innovator and entrepreneur in the global quantum technologies ecosystem, leading teams in both industry and academia. He is CEO & Founder of Diraq, a full-stack quantum computing company employing the silicon CMOS qubits developed by his team at UNSW Sydney over the past two decades. 

Biomedical Engineering

Professor Goldys is Deputy Director of the flagship interdisciplinary ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale Biophotonics (CNBP) in which the ARC investment of $23,000 000 has been matched by funding from academic and commercial partners of $17,000 000 (2014 – 2021).

Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering

Martin Green is Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney and Director of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, involving several other Australian Universities and research groups. His group's contributions to photovoltaics are well known and 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.

Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engine

Xiaojing Hao is a Professor in the Faculty of Engineering, School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering. She was a Scientia academic prior to this promotion in 2022.

She is interested in renewable energy conversion, developing energy materials for solar photovoltaic and solar fuel applications, and her research focuses on the development of thin film and tandem solar cells, solar fuel devices (hydrogen production and CO2 reduction) through materials and associated devices design and synthesis as well as scientific understanding of the fundamental processes involved.

Computer Science and Engineering

I have been an academic at UNSW since completing my PhD in 1991. I am a full professor since 2002. Since 2009 I hold the John Lions Chair of Operating systems, and since 2011 the title of Scientia Professor.

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Nasser Khalili is the Head of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Director of the ARC Research Hub for Resilient and Intelligent Infrastructure Systems (RIIS), President of the Australian Association for Computational Mechanics (AACM), a core member of the International Technical Committee on Unsaturated Soil (TC106), a member of the ARC College of Experts, and a Fellow of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (FTSE).

Biomedical Engineering

Nigel Lovell is currently a Scientia Professor and Head of the School of Biomedical Engineering, UNSW working in the areas of bionics, biomonitoring and physiological modelling.

Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications

Andrea Morello is an electrical engineer and a quantum physicist. He obtained a M.Eng in electronics engineering at the Politecnico di Torino (1998), a PhD in experimental physics at the Kamerlingh Onnes Laborary in Leiden (2004), followed by a postdoc at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering

Professor Prusty is an esteemed expert in composite mechanics, spanning the nano, micro, and macro scales. His innovative interdisciplinary approach melds the mechanics of materials with the latest in automated manufacturing technologies for both composite structures/components and biomechanics applications. 

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Professor Brian Uy was appointed Scientia Professor of Structural Engineering in 2023. He was Professor of Structural Engineering and Head of the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney from 2016-2022. 

Biomedical Engineering

Scientia Professor David Waite, from the UNSW Water Research Centre and School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is a researcher of international standing who has made a significant contribution to the field of environmental chemistry over the last four decades.

Computer Science and Engineering

Toby Walsh is Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales, research group leader at Data61, adjunct professor at QUT, external Professor of the Department of Information Science at Uppsala University, an honorary fellow of the School of Informatics at Edinburgh University and an Associate Member of the Australian Human Rights Institute at UNSW.

Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering

Scientia Professor Chun Wang is currently the Head of the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering and the Director of the ARC Research Hub for Connected Sensors for Health.

Computer Science and Engineering

Jingling Xue is a Scientia Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW Sydney where he leads the Programming Languages and Compilers group.

School of Humanities & Languages

Alison Bashford is Scientia Professor in History and Director of the Laureate Centre for History & Population. She also directs the New Earth Histories Research Program. Her work connects the history of science, global history, and environmental history into new assessments of the modern world, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. 

Arts, Design & Architecture

Jill Bennett is Scientia Professor and Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow. She is Founding Director of the Big Anxiety Research Centre [BARC] ; and is part of the leadership team of the Ageing Futures Institute.

In 2017, she founded The Big Anxiety – festival of people + art + science, a research-driven, mental health festival, which won ‘Best New Event’ at the Australian Event Awards in its inaugural year, 2017 https://www.thebiganxiety.org/.

Centre for Interactive Cinema

Scientia Professor Dennis Del Favero is an ARC Laureate Fellow and research artist. He is a Chair Professor of Digital Innovation; Executive Director of the iCinema Research Centre; Director | Research of EPICentre, Visiting Professor IUAV University of Venice, Visiting Research Fellow University of California Santa Barbara, Member of the Editorial Board of Quodlibet Studio Corpi and Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts.

Education

Andrew Martin, BA (Hons), MEd (Hons), PhD, is Scientia Professor, Professor of Educational Psychology, and Chair of the Educational Psychology Research Group in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is also Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford and a Registered Psychologist (Psychology Board of Australia). 

School of Built Environment

Dr. Michael J. Ostwald is Scientia Professor of Architectural Analytics at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney (Australia) where he was previously Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture and in the Faculty of the Built Environment.

City Futures Research Centre

Professor Chris Pettit is the Director of the City Futures Research Centre UNSW – an internationally renown institute which has been conducting scholarly applied public interest research on our cities since 2005.

School of Built Environment

Distinguished Professor (Scientia) Deo Prasad AO FTSE is now an international authority and recognised as a national leader in the field of sustainable buildings and cities and among the leading advocates for sustainability in Australia, with his contributions having been widely acknowledged at all levels of government and professions in Australia.

City Futures Research Centre

Professor Alison Ritter, AO is an internationally recognised drug policy scholar and the Director of the Drug Policy Modelling Program (DPMP) at the University of New South Wales. She is an NHMRC Senior Research Fellow leading a multi-disciplinary program of research on drug policy. 

School of Built Environment

Mat Santamouris is the Anita Lawrence Professor of High Performance Architecture in the University of New South Wales in Australia. He is a past a professor at the University of Athens, Greece and visiting Professor at the Cyprus Institute, Metropolitan University of London, Tokyo Polytechnic University, Bolzano University, Brunnel University and National University of Singapore. Past President of the National Center of Renewable and Energy Savings of Greece.

Centre for Social Research in Health

Carla Treloar is Scientia Professor with the Centre for Social Research in Health and the Social Policy Research Centre.

Carla's research interests are in the fields of hepatitis C and injecting drug use. She is a primarily qualitative researcher and is grounded in the disciplines of health and social psychology, public health and health policy.