Find an expert

Elizabeth-Rose Ahearn is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Queensland (UQ). Her research centres on measuring and evaluating the impact of charitable not-for-profit organisations, as well as other purpose-driven entities, including those in the public sector, social enterprises, corporate social responsibility efforts, and social impact bonds. She has a particular interest in leveraging digital technologies to enhance impact measurement, improve management processes, and support evidence-based decision-making. Elizabeth-Rose has extensive experience as an evaluator, having collaborated with a diverse range of for-purpose organisations, including a research secondment with the Department of Social Services focused on digital tools for advancing Australia's social impact investing sector. Alongside her role at UQ, she serves as the Co-Chair of the Queensland chapter of the Social Impact Measurement Network of Australia (SIMNA).

A/Prof Stephen Bell is a senior social scientist, advisor and international development research consultant with 23 years’ experience tackling global health challenges in settings across South-East Asia, Africa, Western Pacific and Europe. He works respectfully with not-for-profits, public institutions, businesses and community organisations, using innovative, inclusive, people-centred approaches to identify sustainable solutions to critical health challenges and accelerate health equity.

As Principal Research Fellow and ‘Theme Lead - Social Science and Global Health’ at the Burnet Institute, Steve’s role includes:

• Research on young people's sexual, reproductive and maternal health, including adolescent-responsive health services and systems, contraceptive innovation, safe abortion, enabling socio-structural environments, and the intersections of health and climate change;
• Providing methodological expertise, technical support and mentoring in social science, co-design and community-based, community-led research practice across the Institute’s global health programs and business development across working groups and programs;
• Supporting a growing regional network of youth research, advocacy and thought leadership hubs across Asia and the Pacific;
• Managing and delivering consultancy, advisory and research work for institutional partners.

Steve’s work brings together lived experience, socio-ecological systems thinking and social theory to understand what works (or not) in global health and social development. He has researched and published widely on HIV, sexual and reproductive health, maternal health, neglected tropical diseases, TB and Indigenous health. He is particularly interested in understanding the socio-structural determinants of health and social inequities, and injustices associated with marginalisation due to gender, sexuality, age and geography. He has published two edited collections on interpretive and community-led approaches in research, design, monitoring and evaluation: ‘Peer research in health and social development: international perspectives on participatory research’ (2021), and ‘Monitoring and evaluation in health and social development: interpretive and ethnographic perspectives’ (2016). With international colleagues, he is working on a third edited collection called, ‘Lived Experience: Critical Perspectives in a Changing World’. Steve is currently taking on new PhD students who are interested in undertaking research in any of these areas, so please do reach out to him for a chat!

Steve is Commissioner on The Lancet Global Health Commission on People-Centered Care for Universal Health Coverage, Technical Consultant (Strategy and Insights) with PSI, and Member of the International Editorial Board at Culture, Health & Sexuality. Steve has served as a Senior Advisor to the Boston Consulting Group, and has worked in senior research and consultancy roles with international governments, NGOs, UNAIDS, UNFPA and WHO.

Dr Laetitia Coles is a Research Fellow within the Child Development, Education and Care group at the Queensland Brain Institute, led by Laureate Prof Karen Thorpe. As a mixed-methods applied sociologist, she leads the Workforces component of the Thriving Queensland Kids Brain Builders Initiative (https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain-builders) in support of the generation, translation, and application of knowledge from neurosciences into policy and practice, as well as leading the award-winning project entitled Families in Focus: Amplifying the voices of children with disability and their families (https://child-health-research.centre.uq.edu.au/event/5632/families-focus), in collaboration with Queensland Children's Hospital. She is committed to undertaking research that helps improve understandings of children’s care environments, with a specific focus on supporting those who care for and educate children. Dr Coles’ experience in multi-disciplinary research and in industry engagement underpins her strong track record in knowledge and research translation through both traditional and non-traditional research outputs.

Dr Coles completed her PhD in Sociology in 2020, looking at long work hours and fathers' engagement with children and caregiving – particularly focusing on the factors that facilitate participation in caregiving.

I am a sociologist currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR) at the University of Queensland. I hold a PhD in Sociology from the Australian National University (ANU) and a master’s degree in social policy (research) from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). With extensive experience spanning over a decade, one of my specialisations is based on designing and executing qualitative and quantitative research projects across public and private sectors. My expertise lies in evaluating the effectiveness of social policies through data analysis and critical assessment, aiming to inform evidence-based recommendations for improving social programs and interventions. My doctoral thesis used quantitative methods and secondary data to analyse the subjective perceptions of inequality and its effects on today’s society. My research focuses on subjective perceptions of inequality and its societal implications, social classes, social stratification, and social mobility.

Joemer’s main research area is on adolescent health epidemiology and program evaluation.

Joemer focuses on pragmatic approaches in epidemiology to identify social determinants and mental health risks in adolescents including young mothers. Apart from applications of modelling techniques on cross-sectional and panel data, he has expertise in conducting evidence synthesis including meta-analytic methodologies.

Joemer also has an extensive experience in monitoring and evaluation of health and social programs. He previously worked as a research fellow and health systems consultant in government agencies and international NGOs focused on adolescent health and reproductive health services at local and national contexts. Now, he is involved with evaluation of programs targeting young people with complex mental health issues and those who are victims of domestic and family violence.

Joemer has strong research interests on contextualizing adolescent reproductive health through mental health risks, and mental health integration in primary care in low resource settings.

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.

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

His work examines multiple forms of exclusion and social harms. Cameron's research focuses on the nature and experience of poverty, homelessness, and domestic and family violence. He is interested in understanding what societies do to respond to these problems, and what societies ought to do differently to address them. In collaboration with researchers and partners from not-for-profit organisations, Cameron’s program of research seeks to identify how citizens experiencing exclusion and practitioners working with them can work with governments to bring about systematic societal change.

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

Dr Stefanie Plage is 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. Currently, her research seeks to understand and improve the interactions of families experiencing social disadvantage with the social and health care systems.

Professor Wojtek Tomaszewski is Deputy Director (Research) and a Research Group Leader at the Institute for Social Science Research, and is also Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (the Life Course Centre). He holds a BSc and MSc in Mathematics, as well as an MA in Sociology from the University of Warsaw, Poland and a PhD in Social Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Wojtek joined UQ from the National Centre for Social Research in London and has specialist expertise in quantitative research methods and advanced statistical analysis.

Wojtek has a strong research interest in the impact of disadvantage on educational and labour market outcomes in young people. He has undertaken a number of research projects for the State and Commonwealth Governments in Australia, and previously for the British Government. He has published in high-profile international academic journals across the fields of social sciences, education, and beyond.

Charlotte Young is a research fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research at The University of Queensland. Charlotte is a qualitative researcher with interdisciplinary interests spanning sociology, public health, health promotion, and migration studies. Her research focuses on the systemic drivers of migrant health inequities and how they can be redressed. Charlotte is also interested in the ways migrants adapt and respond to systemic and structural drivers of inequity. Recently, she has been exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted migrant and refugee background tertiary students and how young culturally and linguistically diverse social media influencers have been promoting COVID-safe behaviours online. Charlotte also explores immigrant organisations as critical settings to influence health and wellbeing. She is passionate about producing impactful research to affect positive change and tackling migrant health problems in solidarity with the communities they affect. Charlotte also has experience conducting evaluation research for large-scale health interventions.

Tomasz holds a MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of Warsaw, Poland. He has joined Wojtek Tomaszewski’s team at ISSR, coming from the University of Warsaw where he was an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Sociology and a researcher at the Education Quality Evaluation Unit (PEJK). Moreover, he worked at the National Processing Institute (OPI) in Warsaw where he was a member of the team responsible for developing the Polish Graduate Tracking System (ELA) on behalf of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

He was also a visiting scholar at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley and The Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences (BAGSS), University of Bamberg, Germany. Tomasz’s research interests include individual educational trajectories especially within tertiary education, labour market outcomes of graduates, and social inequality and its impact on the educational and professional paths of young people.