Find an expert

I work in medical anthropology and critical global health in Indonesia and Fiji. Funded by the Australian Research Council, I am currently researching obstetrics and childbirth experiences in Indonesian maternity care settings. This project is conducted with Dr Els Rieke (Universitas Papua), Associate Professor Najmah (Universitas Sriwijaya), Dr Elan Lazuardi (Universitas Gadjah Mada), with further support from Dr John Wantania and Dr Grace Korompis (Sam Ratulangi University). We are looking at diverse experiences in North Sulawesi, West Papua, South Sumatra, and Central Java.

I also value recent collaborations with researchers at the National University of Singapore (Associate Professor Shefaly Shorey, Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies) and Fiji National University focused on maternity care. In 2026, I will begin working with collaborators in Fiji on community-based ethnographic research on maternity care and cultural difference, supported by an ARC Future Fellowship. This involves ethnographic research in health settings in Fiji, looking at interactions and cultural norms to understand local ideals and practices of respectful care.

Prior to this I have worked closely with West Papuan and other international researchers on studies of maternity care and hospital experiences, older women's life stories, and HIV/AIDS. I completed a study with Dr Els Tieneke Rieke and Meki Wetipo on how urban Papuans understand and experience hospital childbirth, as part of an effort to understand dire maternal health conditions in this location (2023, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology). This was published in a special issue on 'Reproducing Life in Conditions of Abandonment in Oceania', I edited with Alexandra Widmer (York University, Canada).

Other recent publications look at competing ideas of respectful maternity care in Singapore, gender inequality in Indonesia's frontier economy, older Papuan women’s narratives of economic agency and survivance (co-authored with Yohana Baransano), and the challenges faced by Indonesian newlyweds. My article in Asian Studies Review, "West Papuan ‘Housewives’ with HIV: Gender, Marriage, and Inequality in Indonesia," was awarded the 2025 Wang Gungwu Prize by the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA).

I am an experienced PhD supervisor in medical anthropology and welcome research students who wish to conduct anthropological research in Indonesia or the Pacific Islands, especially in medical anthropology and hospital ethnography. My teaching experience includes undergraduate and postgraduate courses in medical anthropology (ANTH2250/7250), Pacific anthropology (ANTH2020) and gender (SOCY2050). I also enjoy contributing to Oceania journal as an associate editor.

Herston Campus

Allyson Mutch is an Associate Professor in Health Systems in the School of Public Health, University of Queensland and a Senior Fellow in the Higher Education Academy. Her research uses qualitative methods to investigate the social determinants of health and the health and wellbeing of people who are socially excluded and experiencing disadvantage. Allyson's research is firmly embedded in community, with strong links to community organisations that ensure their needs are represented.

Kylie (Anderson) Navuku is a teaching-practice focused academic, teaching primarily in Communication (undergraduate and postgraduate) and Journalism (undergraduate). Her teaching schedule in 2026 includes: Public Interest Communication; Communication Theory; Communication Management and Leadership; and Intercultural Communication.

Kylie's teaching is both practice and research informed. As a communication practitioner, Kylie has worked with non-government, government, and inter-governmental stakeholders contributing to campaigns/ initiatives with the purpose of raising awareness and furthering public education on various themes (including conservation, climate change, and civic education). Recent areas of exploration are the challenges for island-based artists engaged in environmental communication and the ways in which individuals can use visual arts to promote environmental messages outside of organisational/ institutional partnerships. Since 2024 Kylie has been engaged in a collaborative project investigating ways to communicate bioeconomy. Kylie's research interest is at the intersection of communication (including media/journalism) and politics. Most recently her research has focused on climate change and international ocean journalism.

In addition to a PhD from UQ, Kylie has a MA (IntRel)(Res) [Master of Arts (International Relations) by Research] and a BIntSt (Hons) [Bachelor of International Studies (Honours)] from Flinders University.

Other university employment includes the University of the South Pacific (USP) and Flinders University of South Australia. At USP, Kylie was based at Laucala Campus in Fiji but her role also took her to the campuses and centres in Majuro (Marshall Islands), Honiara (Solomon Islands), Nuku'alofa (Tonga), Alafua (Apia, Samoa), and Rarotonga (Cook Islands). At Flinders, Kylie was based at the Bedford Park Campus, while at UQ she is based at St Lucia campus in Queensland.

Dr Naydenova is an emerging early-career researcher in the field of quantum biotechnology with a rare cross-disciplinary expertise in quantum biotechnology and molecular biology. She specialises in single-molecule detection and optical trapping of proteins using biomolecular optomechanics approaches at the University of Queensland’s Quantum Optics Lab led by Prof. Warwick Bowen. She is interested in fundamental research questions such as the relationship between function-dynamics-structure in proteins, as well as applications of biomolecular optomechanics for sensing in sport (e.g. anti-doping) and in biosecurity contexts (e.g. plant pathogens).

Dr Naydenova holds a PhD in Pharmacognosy and Phytochemistry by the Medical University-Sofia, Bulgaria, where her research focused on plant biotechnology, epigenetics and plant-derived chiral metabolites with anti-cancer properties. Chiral metabolites have a property called chirality, also known as handedness, that underpins many interactions between molecules, including drugs binding to molecular targets such as proteins and enzymes to modulate activity. Her work was recognised with the Medical University – Sofia’s Award for best research in pharmacy, an annual distinction for outstanding doctoral and early-career researchers.

In 2023, she was awarded a Postdoctoral Research Grant to investigate protein dynamics using molecular optomechanics approaches. She joined Prof. Bowen's lab and successfully transitioned to the field of quantum biotechnology, securing over $1.2M in external research funding from Australian and Queensland Governments in the past two years. Previous experience in industry engagement and program management in Australia's higher education sector further provides a strong foundation for translating cutting-edge science into real-world applications, bridging academic innovation with practical impact.

In addition to her research development, Dr Naydenova is also committed to her leadership development. Through her affiliation with the Centre of Excellence in Quantum Biotechnology (QUBIC), she served as the inaugural co-Chair of the centre's EMCR Committee and is an active member of the centre's Outreach and Engagement Portfolio, engaging in STEM outreach to school students.

Dr Naydenova's goal is to harness and continue building skills and expertise to drive impactful cross-disciplinary research that can drive both applied and cutting-edge fundamental research.

Dr Giselle Newton (she/her) is a digital health sociologist at the Centre for Digital Cultures and Societies and a Research Fellow on the Australian Ad Observatory in the Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Giselle's research focuses on how commercial digital platforms shape individuals' experiences of family and intimate life. Giselle has led projects considering how reproductive and genetic technologies shape personal life and family relationships, for example on donor-conceived people's use of digital technologies, direct-to-consumer DNA testing and digital advertising of fertility treatments and services. Giselle has developed and applied ethical participatory, creative and digital methods in social research. She is experienced working in interdisciplinary teams developing and employing digital tools and observatories to better understand individuals' (often unobservable and ephemeral) digital social worlds. Giselle has published in Sociology, Human Reproduction, New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, Sociology of Health & Illness. Giselle was awarded the Early Career International Visiting Fellowship, University of Sheffield for 2024-25. In 2025, she was a keynote speaker at the Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand Annual Conference in Adelaide. Giselle has been an invited speaker in Japan (Donor Link Japan) and Denmark (LGBT+ Danmark).

Current projects:

-Ethical, social and regulatory implications of informal sperm donation, ARC Discovery Project

-Targeted digital advertising in fertility, reproduction and parenting, the Australian Ad Observatory

-Technologies of the Body: Women, Visibility and Museum Collections

Past projects:

-Engaging consumers to work towards social license for implementation of AI in healthcare

-Understanding stakeholders’ perspectives on public inquiries in sexual and reproductive health

-DNA datascapes: how individuals seek information about family via direct-to-consumer DNA testing

-How alcohol and gambling companies target people most at risk with marketing for addictive products on social media, using the Australian Mobile Ad Toolkit (contract research project commissioned by the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education Limited, with Prof Nic Carah and Lauren Hayden)

-On target: Understanding advertising in the fertility sector with data from the Australian Ad Observatory 1.0, a winter research collaboration (with Romy Wilson Gray and Maria Proctor).

-Everyday belongings: how Australian donor-conceived adults’ use digital technologies to bond, sleuth, educate and strategise. Giselle's PhD study won Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Theses in 2022.

-Understanding care endings: Sociological and educational approaches to support pathways out of caring Research supervision and development

Current students:

-Lauren Hayden(PhD candidate, Communications and Arts, UQ) - Digital advertising and cultures of alcohol consumption on social media platforms (with Prof Nicholas Carah, Prof Dan Angus) (2022-2026)

-Quita Olsen (PhD candidate, Queensland Digital Health Centre, UQ) - Developing an Inclusive Framework and Communication Strategy towards the Public’s Willingness to Share Health Data for Secondary Purposes (with Prof Jason Pole, Dr Leanna Woods, Dr Amalie Dyda) (2025-2028)

-Juan Ospina Deaza (PhD candidate, Communications and Arts, UQ) How digital platforms shape experiences of male (in)fertility/parenthood (with Dr Giang Nyugen-Thu) (2026-2029)

-Sai Tang (PhD candidate, Communications and Arts, UQ) How digital technologies shape intergenerational care: An investigation of the Chinese “Lao Er Dai” and Chinese families (with Dr Giang Nyugen-Thu) (2026-2029)

-Gabrielle Cournoyer (Master of Genetic Counselling, UTS) Understanding patients’ perspectives of reproductive genetic carrier screening (RGCS) in donor conception in Australia (2026-2027)

-Rishika Chattopadhyay (Master of Genomic and Health, The University of Melbourne) How Australian IVF clinics promote genetic testing services (2026-2027)

Past students:

-Adriana Saab (Master of Genetic Counselling, UTS) - Understanding targeted advertising of reproductive genetic technologies (with Julia Mansour and Dr Lisa Dive)

-Phoebe Price-Barker (Honours, Criminology, UQ) - Assessing cyber vulnerabilities in direct-to-consumer genetic testing platforms (with Dr Caitlin Curtis) (2025)

-Simone Sanders (Master of Genetic Counselling student, UTS) - Representations of breast cancer predisposition testing on TikTok: a qualitative analysis (with Julia Mansour and Dr Lisa Dive)

-Lina Choi (Master of Genetic Counselling student, UTS) - Unpacking Narratives about Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing in TikTok Videos: A Thematic Analysis (with Julia Mansour and Dr Lisa Dive)

-Cushla McKinney (Master of Genetic Counselling student, UTS) - The impact of direct-to-consumer DNA testing on genetic counselling practice (with Dr Lisa Dive, A/Prof Aideen McInerny-Leo, Dr Vaishnavi Nathan).

-Diya Dilip Porwal (Master of Genetic Counselling student, UTS) - Experiences of carrier screening and genetic testing in gamete donors (with Julia Mansour and Dr Lisa Dive).

Areas of supervision:

Giselle welcomes research proposals focused on social research in digital identities and cultures; family relationships and practices; DNA and genetic testing/screening; reproductive health issues including endometriosis and menopause; assisted reproduction. Giselle is a member of the School of Communication and Arts HDR Committee. Teaching Giselle has coordinated and lectured across undergraduate and postgraduate programs in courses in humanities, social sciences and health. She has delivered guest lectures to students of Masters of Public Health on 'Digital Methods' and to Master of Diagnostic Genomics on 'Direct-to-consumer genetic testing’. She was course coordinator for COMU2030 Communication Research Methods in 2023, lecturer in HHSS6000 HASS Honours Research Design in 2024 and HHSS6040 Honours Research Design in Arts and Culture in 2025 and will continue in 2026.

From the politics of climate change to defending democracy, Professor Daniel Nyberg is seeking to understand how corporations, governments, and citizens negotiate different priorities when facing key challenges of our time.

This qualitative researcher takes an interdisciplinary approach to his work across two main areas:

1. climate change, where he interrogates the links between climate change and corporate capitalism, and
2. defending democracy, where he seeks to untangle the relationships between industry and government.

“These are some of the biggest threats facing humankind,” he affirms.

“How could you not be interested?”

Climate Change

Professor Nyberg’s interest in climate change came from a growing sense of urgency. As public interest in green products grew, corporations were beginning to address climate change internally, through the design and delivery of green products and services. At the same time, the climate emergency led to attempts to contain or regulate polluting industries, for example through carbon offsets and other measures.

“It’s important to understand what corporations are doing in order to mitigate and/or minimise the effects of climate change,” Professor Nyberg explains.

“We also need to have knowledge about what they’re doing so we can regulate their activities.”

Working alongside Professor Christopher Wright from the University of Sydney's Business School, and Dr Vanessa Bowden from the University of Newcastle's School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences, this ground-breaking research has been published in a number of leading international journals. The three colleagues collaborated on the book, Organising Responses to Climate Change: The Politics of Mitigation, Adaptation and Suffering (2022, Cambridge University Press), building on the success of Professor Nyberg and Professor Wright's book, Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-Destruction (2015, Cambridge University Press), which attracted wide attention across both the social and natural sciences.

Defending Democracy

Building on this work, Professor Nyberg has developed a strong interest in corporate political activity, both in how public policy is interpreted and implemented in practice, as well as in how corporations seek to influence public policy. This shift from the narrow focus on corporate outcomes to the broader understanding of democratic processes, is particularly relevant in the fraught debates around climate policy.

“I’m currently exploring how corporations influence democracy,” he states.

“The clearest example is the Labor Government’s super profit tax proposal of 2010, which the mining industry vehemently opposed. Even though it spent $22 million doing so, calculations by the Australian Financial Review suggest it saved $10 billion by agreeing to a truce with then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard. So, you can see it’s often much easier and cheaper for corporations to deal with public policies than it is for them to deal with their processes.”

Dr Martin O’Flahertyis a research fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course located in the Institute for Social Science Research. Martin has made important contributions to the evaluation of nationally significant social policy, often working with the Department of Social Services. Notable highlights include designing the impact evaluation for the $90 million Try, Test, and Learn Fund and leading the evaluation of the Building Capacity in Australia’s Parents trial and the National Community Awareness Raising initiative. He is the quantitative lead for recently announced Community Refugee Integration and Sponsorship Pilot, funded by the Department of Home Affairs, which is investigating the feasibility of alternative settlement pathways for unlinked humanitarian migrants.

Martin’s broader research centres on the intersection of family, health, and disadvantage over the life course, using advanced quantitative methods to unlock causal and longitudinal perspectives on important social problems. Recent work has investigated patterns and determinants of children’s and adolescents’ time-use, including for adolescents with disability and LGBTQ adolescents. He has also led research using state-of-the-art machine learning methodology to study heterogeneous effects of teenage motherhood on later life mental health. Martin’s current research is primarily focussed on understanding the nature, causes of, and solutions to, poverty and financial insecurity among children with disabilities and their families. His work has appeared in leading international journals including Demography, Child Development, and The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health among others.

Ass. Prof. Jacinta O’Hagan is an Associate Professor in International Relations in the School of Political Science and International Studies. A former diplomat with the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, Jacinta O’Hagan has held prior appointments at the Australian National University and held visiting fellowships and affiliations at the University of Southern California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and the European University Institute.

Her principal areas of teaching are international history, humanitarianism and culture in world politics. Her research and publications have focused on the role of culture and civilizational in world politics and the politics of humanitarianism, including the role of non-state actors in humanitarianism, and humanitarian diplomacy. She has worked on collaborative projects on the relationship between digital media and political violence and the globalization of international society. Her most recent research and publications have focused on the international humanitarian system, and civilizational politics in international society.

I study how people lead, decide, and organize under the most demanding conditions imaginable, and what those environments reveal about leadership and practice more broadly. My research examines how leaders make consequential decisions under uncertainty and time pressure, how embodied skill and expertise develop in operational settings, and how teams sustain coordinated performance when conditions are most demanding. My central argument is that organizations at the edge of their capability show us things about leadership and human coordination that ordinary settings conceal. This work sits at the intersection of practice-process theory and phenomenology, and draws on my twenty-three years of service across the US Army Infantry, the 75th Ranger Regiment, and Special Forces, experience that affords access to empirical settings and practitioner networks rarely available to management researchers. I bring this research and experience directly into the classroom and engagements with industry, government, defense, and law enforcement partners, using what extreme contexts reveal about leadership to help practitioners in any organizational setting decide, lead, and act more effectively.

Dr Jon Olsen is an Associate Professor & Deputy Director (Research) at the Institute for Social Science, The University of Queensland. He serves as Director of URBANiQ: Urban Intelligence for Healthy & Equitable Places @ The University of Queensland, the AURIN UQ-Node, and leads research focused on place and health inequalities. His work explores how the built and natural environments, along with urban planning policies, influence health outcomes and disparities. Jon is also committed to advancing understanding of the intersections between human health and planetary health.

He is Co-I of the NIHR Global Health Research Unit in Social and Environmental Determinants of Health Inequalities (SEDHI) and the NIHR Public Health Research (PHR) Programme-funded Orienting Policy Towards Inequality Minimising Actions (OPTIMA) project, a systems science approach to 20-minute neighbourhood policy and evaluation.

Jon is Senior Editor of the new journal Urban Transitions, Editorial Board Member of Wellbeing, Space and Society. He is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, UK and Honorary Professor at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand.

Rebecca Olson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Queensland, cutting-edge translational qualitative researcher, mentor and award-winning educator with expertise in the sociologies of health and emotions. Her work advances the human aspects of care. It empowers students, teachers and researchers to foreground social and emotional aspects in addressing emerging health challenges through collaborative, interdisciplinary research with in-built impact. As Co-Founder and past Director of SocioHealthLab, she leads an interdisciplinary collective of researchers, health professional educators and practitioners interested in doing health and healthcare differently: more socially aware, more relational, more inclusive and more just. As Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Social Science, she prioritises collaborative, reflexive, creative and emotions-centred practices in higher education. As Joint Editor-in-Chief of Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, Olson fosters dialogue across theory-curious clinician researchers and critical health social scientists. With 100+ scholarly publications – as well as news media and creative video productions – Rebecca is a prolific contributor to public debate. With research interests spanning medicinal cannabis and health professions education to climate anxiety, Olson is internationally renowned for bringing sociological insight to complex challenges related to emotions, wellbeing, healthcare and caregiving.

Cameron is an Australian Research Council Industry Fellow in partnership with Micah Projects.

Cameron’s research spans three linked areas of society. The first theme examines social problems. Cameron is interested in how social problems are framed, experienced, and contribute to the alienation of people affected and social dislocation. Cameron’s second theme of enquiry engages the myriad things society does about social problems. He is interested in the link between the framing and experience of social problems and the funded and practice solutions delivered. This includes both formal human services and voluntary and ground up community actions. The third theme of Cameron’s research seeks to uncover and extend empirical, theoretical, and ethical ideas for what a society that ends and prevents social problems would look like. This body of work is interested in not only how competing ideas for social cohesion can co-exist, but also how people holding competing ideas can come together to progress social cohesion through a diversity of disagreement.

In his first book, The Homeless Person in Contemporary Society, Cameron sought to highlight how the representation of people who are homeless as distinct informs a policy and practice agenda that he characterised as a poverty of ambition. Cameron's second book with Andrew Clarke and Francisco (Paco) Perales, Charity and Poverty in Advanced Welfare States, takes on the question how can we be just by soothing the consequences of poverty without addressing the causes of poverty.

Cameron's most recent book published by Polity Press, Homelessness, demonstrates that homelessness is a punishing, predictable, yet solvable social problem.https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=9781509554492

Sarah Percy arrived at UQ from the University of Western Australia in 2016. Prior to her appointment at UWA, Sarah was University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow in International Relations at the University of Oxford (Merton College). At Oxford, Sarah was on the steering committee of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War. Sarah did her M.Phil and D.Phil as a Commonwealth Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford.

Sarah's research focuses on international security and the history of war. She has had a long-standing interest in unconventional combatants, and has published widely on mercenaries, private military companies, and pirates. She is interested in how historical developments in war shape modern practices, examining mercenaries, women in combat, the history of international law, and weapons control. She is the author of two books: Mercenaries: The History of a Norm in International Relations (OUP: 2007) and Forgotten Warriors: The Long History of Women on the Front Line (Hachette: 2023) as well as numerous articles. Sarah is also a broadcaster and has made three radio series for ABC Radio National, including Why the Cold War Still Matters and two seies of An Object in Time.

Associate Professor Maree Petersen is a social work academic in the School of Nursing, Midwifery, and Social Work. Maree's program of research centres on older people experiencing disadvantage. Underpinning her research is the recognition of the rights of older people to participate in healthy ageing, and as such be housed well with access to community aged care services. Her work incorporates a number of themes but the central aim is to use research to improve the delivery of health and welfare services in the context of elder abuse, housing, homelessness with particular emphasis on the intersection of the policy areas of housing, health and income security necessary for ensuring wellbeing as people as they age. A key focus is understanding how economic abuse across the life course results in housing precarity for women in later life. The results from her research have implications for how we think about older people without access to their rights, and living in poverty and at risk of homelessness with restricted access to community aged care and support.

Maree has taken on a leadership role with the National Older Women's Housing and Homelessness Working Group advocating for policy change and more effective strategies to enable older women to access affordable, safe, secure and appropriate housing. Maree engages in evaluation of housing and homelessness programs within the community sector, and reviews of retirement village legislation.

Maree's teaching draws on her research and practice experience to teach undergraduate courses that explain and critique welfare structures in Australia, and foundational practice courses in health and ageing. Maree supervises higher degree students in the fields of elder abuse, loneliness amongst older migrants, and vulnerable people experience of aged care reforms. She has supervised in areas of housing and homelessness.

Dr Stacey Pizzino is a global health expert specialising in the intersection of conflict, disasters, and climate change. She is a Fellow with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) Conventional Weapons Programme, contributing to international policy dialogue on the humanitarian impacts of weapons systems. She also holds a visting fellow appointment at the Centre for Conflict and Health Security at Kings College London. Her research examines the health and environmental impacts of armed conflict, explosive ordnance and climate-driven extreme events - issues that increasingly shape the global public health landscape.

She led the world’s largest epidemiological study on casualties from landmines and explosive remnants of war, analysing data from over 100,000 individuals across 17 countries. This landmark research contributes to global strategies aimed at mitigating the health consequences of explosive ordnance.

Dr Pizzino brings a unique perspective shaped by frontline experience as a paramedic alongside her academic expertise. She is the co-editor of a textbook on Disaster Health Management, contributing to the education and training of the next generation of disaster health professionals.

She is Co-Lead of CliMigHealth Asia Pacific, part of a global network advancing research, education, and policy on the intersections of climate change, migration, and health to build resilient, inclusive, and responsive health systems.

She has extensive experience in public health partnerships and policy translation, working collaboratively with diverse stakeholders to inform research and transform findings into actionable policies that enhance population health outcomes.

Dr Pizzino is a skilled communicator and advocate, and regularly presents in global policy forums such as the United Nations. Her ability to engage policymakers, humanitarian agencies and global audiences ensures that her research drives real-world impact.

Dr Stefanie Plage is an ARC DECRA Fellow at the School of Social Science researching health and social care in the context of housing instability. Prior to her DECRA Fellowship, she was a Research Fellow with the Life Course Centre at the School of Social Science at UQ. Her expertise is in qualitative research methods, including longitudinal and visual methods. Her research interests span the sociology of emotions, disadvantage and health and illness. Stefanie has taught introductory and advanced courses in sociology and medical sociology, research design and qualitative inquiry, including the use of software for qualitative research (i.e. NVivo). Her work is multi-disciplinary. She completed her PhD at the Centre for Social Research in Health at The University of New South Wales. In her study she employed a mix of longitudinal qualitative interviews and visual elicitation methods to explore the lived experience of people with cancer.

As part of her DECRA, UQ offers a PhD opportunity. While the DECRA itself is not focussed on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the project will support a PhD Candidate to address their experiences. The scholarship is advertised here https://study.uq.edu.au/study-options/phd-mphil-professional-doctorate/projects/dying-dignity-caring-people-without-home-end-life . Please reach out to Stefanie directly for more information.

Jenny leads the Wellbeing, Equity, and Inclusion Research Group: Transforming education, employment and human service systems through evidence, innovation and partnership at the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Queensland. She is a Psychologist and obtained her BA Honors, MA and PhD from the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa. Before coming to ISSR, Jenny worked as a Chief Researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa in the area of education effectiveness.

Jenny’s research focuses on advancing wellbeing, equity and inclusion across education, employment, and human service systems. She evaluates programs and policies that support marginalised populations navigating complex service systems. Jenny’s work integrates lived experience with rigorous analysis of the services, institutions, and policy environments that shape life trajectories, identifying evidence-based levers for change within families, organisations, and government systems. She is a mixed-methods researcher with expertise in integrating large-scale population and administrative data with survey and in-depth qualitative data to generate nuanced, practice-relevant insights. Through large-scale evaluations and long-term research partnerships with government and community organisations, Jenny produces generalisable knowledge with demonstrable real-world impact, while strengthening research and evaluation capability within the human services sector. Her research is grounded in participatory and co-production approaches, ensuring that people with living or lived experience are meaningfully involved in shaping research design, interpretation, and impact.

Jenny has worked closely with Government Departments and Ministries both in Australia (e.g., Tasmania DHHS; Australian DoE; Qld DoE; CESE NSW; Australian DSS; Qld DCSSD; Department of Home Affairs) and internationally (e.g., South Africa, Eritrea, Cambodia and the Solomon Islands) to gather research evidence from a wide range of disadvantaged communities to inform policy. Jenny is a Chief Investigator on an ARC Linkage project which investigates how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous children experience Out-of-Home Care (OOHC) using elicitation methods and a longitudinal qualitative research design to provide evidence to improve service agencies’ understanding of children’s experiences in OOHC and how agencies can best support families, carers and communities to promote the social, emotional, and cultural well-being of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous children in OOHC. This research will improve service provider capability and test Government reform interventions. Jenny leads large-scale complex commissioned evaluations and is currently leading the following evaluations: FamilyLinQ Evaluation and the Journi Online Road Safety Education Program Evaluation.

In addition to leading a research group and complex evaluation, Jenny delivers hands-on professional training and capability-building in evaluation, statistical, and social research methods for policymakers, practitioners, and service leaders, contributes as an Associate Investigator to research for the ARC Centre of Excellence on Families and Children over the Life Course (the Life Course Centre), and supervises HDR and placement students.

I’m a researcher and lecturer at The University of Queensland Business School. My expertise is in critically evaluating how people and organisations use language to communicate about themselves and shape the world around them. I’m committed to doing research that promotes justice and equity, and helps government, the media, and industry communicate for the common good.

My recent research has explored sustainability in the arts and culture sector, news reporting on violence against women and girls, and COVID-19 crisis communication.

I’ve recently collaborated with various peak bodies in the Australian arts and culture sector such as Theatre Network Australia, and arts companies of various sizes (e.g., Queensland Ballet and La Boite Theatre) to develop a free peer coaching program known as “Creating out Loud.” This program builds networks of mutual support for artists and arts workers across all levels of the arts and culture sector.

Enriching the arts and culture sector is of high importance to me. In 2021, I was awarded an Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellowship to support arts workers recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.

To find out how I can help your organisation, email me at k.power@business.uq.edu.au. You can also follow me on LinkedIn.

John Quiggin is a Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland. He is prominent both as a research economist and as a commentator on Australian economic policy. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and many other learned societies and institutions. He has produced over 1500 publications, including six books and over 200 refereed journal articles, in fields including decision theory, environmental economics, production economics, and the theory of economic growth. He has also written on policy topics including climate change, micro-economic reform, privatisation, employment policy and the management of the Murray-Darling river system. His latest book, Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work so Well and Why they can Fail so Badly, was released in 2019 by Princeton University Press.