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Janeen Baxter is Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course and Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow in the Institute for Social Science Research.

Janeen has research interests in social disadvantage, gender inequality, household and family dynamics, life course and longitudinal studies and has published widely in these areas, as well as supervising the research of numerous higher degree students and research fellows.

Janeen has served on several editorial boards for national and international journals and has been a member and Chair of the College of Experts for the Australian Research Council. Janeen is an elected fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. She is currently a member of several government advisory committees including theCommonwealth Department of Social Services Child Support Expert Committee and the Australian Bureau of Statistics Life Course Data Initiative Household and Family Structures Working Group. Janeen is also a member of the CEDA Council on Economic Policy and the Social Policy Research Centre Advisory Board.

Dr Sandra Buchler is the Mary Lee Family Dynamics Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course. She is currently undertaking a research project on the life course trajectories of sole parents in Australia. Sandra holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Queensland. Her broader research interest lies in the role of gender ideology and labour market stratification in perpetuating gender inequality. Her areas of research and expertise include life course transitions, families, gender inequality, female labour force participation, gender ideologies, education, qualitative evaluation and quantitative research methods. Sandra was a Lecturer at the University of Bamberg from 2011 to 2013 and a Senior Lecturer at the Goethe University Frankfurt (2014 – 2024).

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.

Jenny leads the Inclusive Education and Employment research group 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 social justice and inclusion across education, employment, and social 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: Evaluation of the Community Refugee Integration and Settlement Pilot; Evaluation of the Extended Post Care Support Program; and FamilyLinQ Evaluation.

In addition to leading a research group, 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.