Alumni Profiles

Michael Hendryx PhD Distinguished Chair

Michael earned his PhD in psychology from Northwestern University in 1986, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Methodology at the University of Chicago.  For much of his career, his research focused on health services delivery issues, but beginning in 2006 Michael developed a strong interest in questions of environmental health for disadvantaged groups.  His research has investigated the health status of people who live near surface coal mining sites in Appalachia, and other environmental exposure topics. Michael will collaborate with researchers at the University of Newcastle on studies of possible health consequences of exposure to coal mining in Australia, and he will pursue additional studies using data from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health.

Professor Ruth Wallace Distinguished Chair

Ruth Wallace is the Director of the Northern Institute, the social and policy research institute at Charles Darwin University. Her research interests relate to the links between identity, marginalised learners and the development of effective learning and workforce development pathways. Her work is situated in regional and remote areas of northern Australia, and predominantly undertaken with Aboriginal people in remote and regional areas. Her critical thinking is driven by informed debate on the multifaceted issues that present in the unique political and geographic frontiers of northern Australia. Professor Wallace has extended this work to examine approaches to enterprise development in regional and remote areas of Eastern Indonesia. Her work incorporates areas of economic and social change through working with Indigenous land and sea managers undertaking key biosecurity and economic development roles. The Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Agriculture and Life Sciences Scholarship will allow Professor Wallace the opportunity to go beyond these northern borders to develop distinguished professional networks with a view to developing future collaborations.

Ruth was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy by Charles Darwin University in 2011. Her research focused on marginalized learners’ identities and the intersections with educational systems in regional areas. Ruth’s academic career started when she was awarded at Bachelor of Education (Primary) at the Queensland University of Technology, and she has gone on to postgraduate studies in Adult Education, Research Management and Mathematics. Ruth holds key leadership roles nationally and in northern Australia to improve research integration and utilization, particularly in remote areas. She leads the Workforce Development research theme and focuses on collaborative approaches with community, governments and industry that are sustainable and scalable. Ruth is committed to utilizing research’s potential to improve social, cultural and economic outcomes for marginalized people and works closely with Aboriginal researchers and community groups in regional and remote areas to support engaged and effective policy and enterprise development systems.

The Biosecurity Policy at the Margins Project is a major opportunity to build on research in northern Australia and focus on engaging regional and marginalized communities in biosecurity identification and response systems, at a national and local scale. Professor Wallace will work with researchers at the Research and Extension Division at Kansas State University to understand and articulate the ways that remote communities can contribute to, and partner in, the effective delivery of plant biosecurity surveillance through engaging a wide range of decision makers and knowledge systems. The project will contribute to understanding the processes that underpin priorities and decision making in policy networks and policy implementation.

Professor Jeremy Davey Senior Scholars

Jeremy Davey (PhD) is a Professor in the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety-Queensland (CARRS-Q) at Queensland University of Technology. Professor Davey was a co-founding academic of this internationally recognized, road safety research institute. Based at KSU, Professor Davey’s Fulbright will allow him to develop collaborative research into drug driving; a significant road safety issue in the U.S. and Australia where the proportion of drug driving fatalities has been rapidly increasing.

The Fulbright Scholarship provides for an international researcher to share and exchange knowledge and skills with scholars at KSU. Importantly, it will facilitate the establishment of collaborative opportunities for continuing research to target this high risk driving behaviour in both the U.S. and Australia.

Professor John Triantafilis Senior Scholars

John is an Associate Professor at UNSW Sydney. He leads a small group of PhD and Masters students at #UNSWSoilScienceCentral2018. His research aims to demonstrate how proximal (near soil) and remote sensing data can be used to develop digital soil maps in cotton areas of central (e.g. Trangie and Bourke) and northern (e.g. Wee Waa and Moree) New South Wales as well as in sugarcane fields of far north Queensland (e.g. Mossman, Ingham, Burdekin and Proserpine).

His most recent research has been in the use of proximal sensing electromagnetic (EM) induction instruments and application of inversion software to make two- and three-dimensional images of the soil. This innovative approach has been used to monitor soil moisture beneath irrigation systems in Cordoba (Spain) and California (USA) and map salinity and clay content in developing countries such as India (Karnal, Haryana) and Thailand (Khon Kaen), respectively.

In 2020, and as part of his Fulbright Futures Scholarship (funded by the Kinghorn Foundation), John will continue his research while at the University of Arizona (Prof Ty Ferre), Texas A & M (Prof Mark Everett and Prof Cristine Morgan) and University of Wisconisn-Madison (Prof Alfred Hartemink and Assistant Prof Jingyi Huang) with particular emphasis on studying problems of water use efficiency in irrigated systems and the impact of rising water tables and sea levels to monitor soil salinity.

He envisages that working with these scientists and their PhD students, various comparative studies can be undertaken with results leading to the publication of scientific papers in high impact geophysics, hydrological and soil science journals. In practical terms, application of the methods will provide farmers information to improve water use efficiency and soil use and management.

Dr Aiden Warren Professional Scholars

Aiden is a senior lecturer in International Relations in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of International Security, U.S. national security and foreign policy, U.S. Politics, International Relations, and issues associated with Weapons of Mass Destruction proliferation, deterrence, arms control, and disarmament.

As the Fulbright Scholar in Australia-U.S. Alliance Studies, based at the Arms Control Association in Washington DC, Aiden’s project will examine the tensions between U.S. nuclear force modernization and the global non-proliferation regime. To prevent a dangerous backslide, new scholarship will be critical for pushing back against unilateral U.S. actions that threaten future steps on arms control and for advancing policy options that prevent further fracturing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As such, Aiden’s proposal to study questions pertaining to U.S. modernisation and security strategy will seek to develop pathways for keeping disarmament momentum ‘alive’ under conditions of weakening U.S. disarmament leadership, and an increasingly challenging international environment.

Dr Stephanie Gilbert Postdoctoral Scholars

Stephanie is the Coordinator of Teaching Quality and Development at the University of Newcastle’s Wollotuka Institute. Her research focuses bringing disparate communities together through the provision of culturally minded social spaces, literature and tertiary curricula.

Stephanie’s Fulbright project, Living as Indigenous: Inside the Dysmorphic Body, provides a major opportunity to build on research into the creation of bodily informed identity particularly for Indigenous populations. She will explore the way body dysphoria might also be etched into psyche, body, and genetics across generations, and work with researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz to understand and articulate the ways that body dysmorphic concepts might exist in indigenous populations in the U.S.

Dr Felicity McCormack Postdoctoral Scholars

Felicity is a postdoctoral researcher in the Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative Antarctic Gateway Partnership at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania. Her research focusses on the physical processes that govern Antarctic ice flow. Antarctica contains enough ice to raise global mean sea levels by approximately 60m. However, the response of the Antarctic ice sheet to climate change, and its potential contribution to sea level rise, is highly uncertain.

Felicity will use the Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship to work with researchers at the University of California, Irvine. She will investigate the potential timing and magnitude of ice loss from East Antarctic glaciers due to warming oceanic and atmospheric temperatures. The findings will inform sea level rise estimates for the coming century.

Sarah Boyd Postgraduate Students

Sarah is a gender equality policy specialist, Principal of The Gender Agency, and a Practitioner Fellow at Monash Gender, Peace and Security Centre. She has worked as a diplomat, development practitioner, women’s rights activist and researcher for the Australian government (AusAID and DFAT), the UN, international NGOs and women’s rights organisations, including in postings to Pakistan, Myanmar, Nepal and Timor-Leste. Sarah is passionate about the potential of feminist foreign policies to advance women’s rights and their representation in foreign policy and national security decision-making.

Through a Master of Public Administration, Sarah intends to sharpen her policy and leadership skills to address the global challenge of gender inequality. She will use her Fulbright scholarship to build academic, practitioner and policy linkages between the US and Australia, and create an Institute for Feminist Foreign Affairs to increase women’s leadership in foreign policy, international development and national security decision-making in the Asia-Pacific. Sarah earned a Bachelor of Commerce, Diploma of Modern Language (Chinese) and Master of Development Studies from the University of Melbourne, and is currently studying at the Melbourne School of Government.

Anna Evans Postgraduate Students

Anna has a Bachelor of Chemical Engineering with First Class Honours and a Bachelor of Physics with Distinction. Specialising in energy technology and policy, Anna has improved solar cell efficiency with the CSIRO, worked as an engineer in a coal-fired power station, and developed national policies to reduce emissions from the electricity sector.

Anna hopes to build on this expertise through a Master of Public Policy, where she will specialise in energy. During this program, Anna will draw on leading interdisciplinary thinkers to navigate the significant policy and technical challenges faced in transitioning to a low emissions electricity sector. Anna hopes to build on her technical background and undertake rigorous training in public policy to prepare her for leadership roles in energy market regulation. Anna is a passionate supporter of women in science, and hopes to learn about initiatives underway in the United States to encourage greater representation
of women.

Craig William McCormack Postgraduate Students

Craig is a PhD candidate at The University of Western Australia (UWA), in Perth, Australia. He holds an Australian Postgraduate Award, allowing him to research the discipline of Space Architecture and how the built environment in outer space is situated within and impacts the terrestrial discipline of architecture. Craig received an NVQ Level IV in Music from The London Music School in 1999, a Bachelor of Arts (Art) from the Curtin University of Technology in 2006, a Bachelor of Environmental Design from UWA in 2009, and a Masters of Architecture with High Distinction from UWA in 2011. As well as teaching and lecturing at UWA for the past six years Craig is also a director of felix. laboratories, a multi-disciplinary architecture and design practice that, as part of Felix, Giles, Anderson & Goad, were creative directors of the Australian Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibition, Augmented Australia 1914-2014, utilised augmented reality technology to realise significant, yet unbuilt contemporary and historical Australian architecture.

When not teaching and researching at university or designing within felix., Craig enjoys the outdoors leading an active lifestyle, and is an avid runner and climber. Widely travelled, he has climbed Mont Blanc and Mount Kilimanjaro in recent years. He believes that as an academic and a designer it is important to be active and involved in the world in order to design for it and write about it. Recently Craig has taken up the sport of motorcycle racing where he intends to qualify for his race license in the near future and add a little adrenaline to his weekends.

For his Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship, Craig will conduct research at the University of Houston, in the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture. The project will examine the feedback loop between the space industry and popular culture, such as film, through a study of relevant institutional and private archives, to articulate the cultural role that space exploration has played upon modern culture, and reciprocally, the impact that ideas stemming from popular culture as the ‘imagining’ of a future, or multiple futures has had upon programs of scientific research into manned exploration of space, and which has spawned new fields of research, such as ‘space architecture’. Combining archival, primary, and contemporary research through an ambitious theoretical framework, Craig intends to conceptualise the ‘space project’ within Western culture’s tradition of utopian thought.

Daniel McNamara Postgraduate Students

Daniel is a PhD candidate in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. He is an external student based in the Machine Learning Research Group at Data61, the digital innovation unit of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

Daniel’s research focuses on the development of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions about data. In particular, he investigates methods for learning representations of data that can be used to demonstrably improve prediction performance. The success of machine learning algorithms is highly dependent on the features they receive as inputs, which have traditionally been handcrafted by human experts. However, cutting edge techniques allow the algorithm to learn such features itself from raw data, similar to the way that humans learn more abstract representations of complex sensory inputs. This has led to state-of-the-art results in applications such as natural language processing and computer vision. Daniel’s research focuses on the theoretical foundations behind such methods in order to better understand and improve upon them.

Daniel has authored academic publications from previous research projects in data mining and the digital humanities. He completed his Honours year in Computer Science at ANU, for which he received a University Medal. He holds a Bachelor of Science/Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne, which included receiving the Google Computer Science Prize. He also has experience in the intelligent use of data in professional contexts, including at the online analytics platform Kaggle, the management consulting firm Nous Group, and the Australian Labor Party. He is the founder of the website lovemetender.com.au, an open democracy project allowing individuals and businesses to visualise government spending on commercial tenders.

Daniel will be spending several months at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh. During his stay he will be hosted by A/Prof Maria-Florina Balcan and will be based in the Machine Learning Department within the School of Computer Science. CMU sits in the elite tier of universities worldwide for computer science, and is particularly known for its strength in fundamental theoretical research in machine learning. Daniel is looking forward to the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with CMU academics and students. Following his return to Australia, he will use the skills gained from the visit within academia and industry.

Holly Ransom Postgraduate Students

Holly Ransom is an expert interrogator of organisational strategy. Elevated by an ability to synthesise complex issues and unpack problems for public discourse, Holly is determined to ensure that accelerated technological capability is deployed for the good of humanity. With undergraduate degrees in Law and a Bachelor of Arts (Economics Major) from the University of Western Australia, Holly’s career has spanned leadership roles across the corporate, non-profit and policy sectors, focusing on organisational change, stakeholder engagement, and leadership development. Holly runs consulting firm Emergent, a company she founded with a specialisation in disruptive strategy and digital innovation, with clients such as P&G, Microsoft, Virgin, Cisco and the AIS. An accomplished company director, Holly was appointed by the Australian Prime Minister to Co-Chair the G20 Youth Summit in 2014, to Co-Chair the United Nations Coalition of Young Women Entrepreneurs in 2016, and was the youngest Director appointed to an Australian Football Club joining Port Adelaide in 2016. Named one of Australia’s 100 Most Influential Women by the Australian Financial Review, Holly was Sir Richard Branson’s nominee for Wired magazine’s ‘Smart List’ of Future Game Changers to watch in 2017.

For her Fulbright Scholarship, Holly will pursue a Masters of Public Policy, with a focus on emerging technology ethics and governance. She is eager to develop strategic policy frameworks to evaluate and balance the economic and commercial technology interests with the social and ethical ramifications, and to evolve institutions to create a more agile and organised technology governance approach.