A/Prof Steve Bell is a senior social scientist at the Burnet Institute and has 22 years’ experience across South-East Asia (India, Nepal), Africa (Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe) and Western Pacific (Australia, Indonesia, PNG, Fiji) Regions. 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.
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 also published two books 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). He is currently taking on new PhD students in these areas, so please do reach out to him at the Burnet Institute for a chat!
He holds associate professorial appointments at UNSW Sydney and The University of Queensland, is a Member of the International Editorial Board at Culture, Health & Sexuality, has been a Senior Advisor to the Boston Consulting Group, and has worked in research and consultancy roles with international governments, NGOs, UNAIDS, UNFPA and WHO.
Dr Lutfun Nahar Lata is a Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Lutfun's primary research area focuses on the Sociology of work and employment including the gig economy and the future of work.
Prior to joining the University of Melbourne, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Queensland. Currently, Lutfun is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Queensland.
She has written about gig economy, urban marginality, poverty governance, housing and place-based disadvantage. She is a mixed-methods researcher with extensive experience in conducting and publishing qualitative, quantitative and digital research and working with multidisciplinary teams that include stakeholders from academia, industry and local and central governments.
Lutfun is the author of Spatial Justice, Contested Governance and Livelihood Challenges in Bangladesh (Routledge 2023). Her research has been published in journals such as Current Sociology, The Sociological Review, Sociology Compass, Gender, Work & Organization, Cities, Geographical Research, Housing Policy Debate, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Government Information Quarterly.
I am a Sociologist from Universidad Central of Chile. I have studied for a Master's (MSc) in Social Policy (research) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and I am finalising a PhD research in Sociology at the Australian National University (ANU). I have at least ten years of professional experience designing, organizing, implementing and leading qualitative and quantitative research projects in the public and private sectors. In this work, I have worked in research teams to evaluate public programs and market research and marketing evaluation for different study centres and private companies. My doctoral thesis analyses the subjective perceptions of inequality and its effects on today's society. My subjects of interest are inequality, subjective perceptions of society, social classes, social stratification and social mobility.
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.
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.
