Climate and Energy College

A/Prof Malte Meinshausen is Director of the Australian-German College at The University of Melbourne since 2012 and is affiliated with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany. He holds a PhD in "Climate Science & Policy", a Diploma in "Environmental Sciences" from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and an MSc in "Environmental Change and Management" from the University of Oxford, UK. Before joining the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in 2006, he was a Post-Doc at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Tansu Alpcan’s research involves applications of distributed decision making, game theory, communicaton and control to various security and resource allocation problems in networked and energy systems. 

Professor Jon Barnett is not available for supervision

Jon is Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Geography at Melbourne University. He is a political geographer who researches the impacts of and responses to environmental change on social systems in Australia, East Asia and the South Pacific. Jon is a Lead Author for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Working Group II, Ch 12), and he is co-editor of Global Environmental Change.    

Dr. Grant Blashki has been a practicing GP for over 20 years and is an Associate Professor in Global Health at the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners and has served as an examiner for the fellowship. His three themes of teaching and research are general practice/primary care, sustainability and mental health. He has co-authored over 100 publications in peer reviewed journals, 4 books, over 30 peer reviewed conference abstracts, and more than 20 government/policy reports. 

Michael Brear is the Director of the Melbourne Energy Institute at the University of Melbourne. He guides the Institute’s research on the technical, economic, environmental and social impacts of energy systems. His own research is collaborative with industry and government on the technical, economic and environmental analysis of transport and energy systems; systems with reciprocating engines and gas turbines; combustion of conventional and alternative fuels.

Dr Peter Christoff teaches and researches climate politics and policy in the Department of Resource Management and Geography. He is a member of the Victorian Ministerial Reference Council on Climate Change Adaptation, and member of the Board of the Australian Conservation Foundation. He was formerly a member of the (Victoria) Premier's Climate Change Reference Group, the Vice President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, and the Assistant Commissioner for the Environment (Victoria).

Adrian has extensive experience with developing international collaborations as a researcher, policy maker and program administrator. Adrian completed his PhD at James Cook University before leading several projects as a biologist for the Queensland Department of Primary Industries. He then joined the International Collaborations unit within the Queensland Department of the Premier and Cabinet, helping to establish a number of international agreements and programs in support of international research and collaboration.

A/Prof Robert Crawford has broad research expertise and interest in the built environment, sustainability, life cycle assessment and renewable energy. His research focuses on building environmental assessment, with a particular emphasis on sustainable resource use, the environmentally appropriate selection of materials and sustainable building design and feasibility.

Dr Roger Dargaville is a senior lecturer at Monash University. Roger was the Deputy Director of the Melbourne Energy Institute and Research Fellow in the School of Earth Sciences, The University of Melbourne. His fields of expertise are in modelling of integration of renewable energy technologies into large energy system and large-scale storage technologies including pumped hydro and liquid air energy storage. He was co-lead on the ARENA grant ‘Least Cost Carbon Abatement in the Australian Electricity Sector’ that attracted $1.4M in funding.

Richard is Professor and Director of the Primary Industries Climate Challenges Centre (www.piccc.org.au), a joint research initiative between the University of Melbourne and Agriculture Victoria. He is a science advisor to the Australian, New Zealand and UK governments, and the UN FAO and European Union, on climate change adaptation, mitigation and policy development in agriculture.

Ottmar Edenhofer is Professor of the Economics of Climate Change (appointment together with the Michael Otto Stiftung) at the Technische Universität Berlin and Co-Chair of the Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He is Deputy Director and Chief Economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and is currently leading Research Domain III - Sustainable Solutions - that focuses on research in the field of the Economics of Atmospheric Stabilisation.

Lee Godden (PhD, MA, B.Leg S, BA Hons) is the Director, Centre for Resources, Energy and Environmental Law. She researches in environmental resources law, natural resources law, water law, and indigenous people's land and resources rights. Recent publications include Environmental Law: Scientific Policy and Regulatory Dimensions 2010 (with J. Peel), Comparative Perspectives on Communal Lands and Individual Ownership: Sustainable Futures 2010 (with M. Tehan) and Australian Climate Law in Global Context 2013 (with A. Zahar and J. Peel).

Fiona Haines is Professor of Criminology at the University of Melbourne. Her research, which encompasses work on society/industry relationships including grievances and multinational enterprises, centres on white collar and corporate crime, globalisation and regulation. Her most recent book is Regulatory Transformations: Rethinking Economy Society Interactions, Hart Publishing, 2015, co-edited with Bettina Lange and Dania Thomas.

Ben is a Research Fellow in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne, working with David Karoly, Murray Peel, Rory Nathan and Ailie Gallant on the Victorian Drought Risk Inference Project, VicDRIP (www.vicdrip.org). VicDRIP is an ARC Linkage Project investigating megadrought likelihood and its water resource impacts in Australia (LP150100062), and assembles a team of leading hydrologists, climate scientists and water managers to investigate the history and future risk of decadal to multidecadal droughts.

Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is the inaugural Director of the Global Change Institute and Professor of Marine Science at the University of Queensland. Prof Hoegh-Guldberg is deeply-motivated by a desire to communicate science effectively, undertake game-changing research and to find high-impact solutions to address several of the most pressing and serious challenges facing humanity worldwide, such as climate change, food security, clean energy and population growth.

Ken graduated from Cardiff University with a first class degree in applied chemistry before spending 20 years with BP globally.  His energy sector experience spans markets in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia/NZ across alternative energy, fuels, lubricants, biotech, global shared services, refining and corporate HQ. More recently Ken was MD of the private-equity owned hrl: technology group, a specialist engineering and testing business operating nationally and across SE Asia, before joining its board of directors in 2017.

Professor David Karoly is an internationally recognised expert in climate change and climate variability, including greenhouse climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion and interannual climate variations due to El Niño-Southern Oscillation. He was heavily involved in preparation of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released in 2007, in several different roles. 

Daniel was previously Fellow in Global Politics in the Department of Government, London School of Economics, ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Sussex, and Lecturer in Security Studies in the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University. His research interests are International Relations theory, Science and Technology Studies, theories of social power, historical materialism and American foreign policy, particularly in relation to the role of technology and the non-human world in global politics.

Philomena Murray is Professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She is the Director of the Research Unit on Regional Governance ast the EU Centre on Shared Complex Challenges, University of Melbourne. From 2000 to 2009, she was Director of the Contemporary Europe Research Centre, Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence. She holds Australia's only Personal Jean Monnet Chair (ad personam) awarded by the European Union.

Rory Nathan has over 35 years’ experience in engineering and environmental hydrology. He has spent the majority of his career in private industry, and now focuses his time on research and teaching in the Department of Infrastructure Engineering. He has made a substantial contribution to industry best practice in a range of engineering and environmental fields, particularly in the use of stochastic methods of flood estimation, the characterisation of hydrologic risk, regional estimation techniques in catchment hydrology, and the assessment of sustainable limits on water resources.

Alan is a Senior Industry Fellow at RMIT. He was previously an Adjunct Professor at RMIT, and taught part-time in the environment program from 2002 until 2015.

Alan has worked in the sustainable energy and environment fields since the late 1970s for community groups, government and the private sector. While working for the Victorian government in the 1980s, he helped develop and implement programs such as the Home Energy Advisory Service, public information and education, appliance energy labelling and mandatory building insulation regulations.

Prof Rayner's main research activities focus on the estimation of surface sources and sinks of CO2.
He uses satellite and in-situ measurements with models to quantify and understand the patterns and mechanisms of CO2 release and uptake with a focus on the tropics and Southern Hemisphere.
In 2002, Prof Rayner was awarded the Priestley Medal of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the major research award in this field within Australia.

Prof Mike Sandiford is an ARC Professorial Research Fellow studying tectonic activity within the Indo-Australian tectonic plate, particularly focussing on the factors that have shaped the landscape of Australia, and in our near northern neighbors such as Timor and Indonesia. His work on the thermal structure of the Australian crust provides an important framework for understanding the extraordinary abundance of Uranium in Australia, and has lead to the current upsurge of interest in geothermal energy exploration in South Australia.

I have held posts at Macquarie University and Swinburne University, Australia and been an Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore where my main research focus was on extreme event modelling and statistical computing.

Dr Sebastian Thomas is an interdisciplinary researcher with a background in climate strategy and environmental social science. His work examines human-nature relations – the interconnected economic, social, and policy dynamics of sustainability innovations, climate governance, and environmental management.

Kevin Walsh is a professor in the School of Earth Sciences. He specialises in tropical meteorology, climate change and climate variability.

John Wiseman is a Professorial Fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and with the School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. He is also a Research Fellow with the Centre for Policy Development, Sydney.

A/Prof Margaret Young is the Director of Studies, Environmental Law at the Melbourne Law School. She researches and teaches in the fields of public international law, international trade law, climate change law and the law of the sea. She is the author of the prize-winning Trading Fish, Saving Fish: The Interaction between Regimes in International Law and Regime Interaction in International Law: Facing Fragmentation. A former Gates Scholar, she is currently working on a project on fossil fuel subsidies. 

Cathy Alexander has eight years’ experience as a political journalist in Australia. For most of this time she covered environmental policy and politics, with a major focus on climate change. She worked from the press gallery in Parliament House, Canberra, for three years with Australian Associated Press (2007-2010). More recently she was deputy editor of the website Crikey, where she continued to write on the environment and climate change. Cathy has also worked for a federal Coalition shadow cabinet member.

Ceren holds her undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Sociology from Middle East Technical University. Before joining to the Climate and Energy College, she worked at the European Climate Foundation as Turkey senior associate between 2013-2018 and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) as conservation supervisor between 2006-2013. Ceren will be focusing on the disruptive power of solar in terms of community organizing of coal to clean transition. A Turkish national, Ceren speaks English, Spanish and some Italian.

Tim's research interests are diverse but centre around climate change law, broadly construed to include corporate social responsibility, torts, planning and administrative law, as well as the more traditional concern with United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change-led processes and domestic climate politics.

Poomphan is an energy analyst who is specialised in low-carbon technologies as well as energy modelling. He earned his Masters in Renewable Energy and Environmental Modelling from the University of Dundee (UK). He previously worked across a range of clean energy projects in ASEAN, Italy, the Pacific region, and the United Kingdom. He built up a good track record of consultancy experience in private equity-owned, international agencies as well as several government agencies in the Asia-Pacific region.

Kate holds an MSc in Environmental Technology from Imperial College London, and a BA from Latrobe University. For the past 10 years Kate has worked with environmental non-governmental organisations on forests, climate change and human rights, particularly the European Union’s policy responses to forest governance reforms and illegal logging, and the development of the REDD+ mechanism (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) at the UNFCCC.

With a degree in economics and honours degrees in development studies and law, Adrian began his career as a solicitor with a leading Australian law firm before moving in-house as a corporate lawyer with a global beverage company.  He then worked in corporate partnership and innovation roles with international development and environment organisations in Australia and the United Kingdom.

PhD Project:  Household Solar Power Policy

Until early 2011, Ellycia worked a Marine Scientist, with Oceana – the world’s largest marine conservation organization. As part of the Climate Change and Clean Energy team in their Washington DC headquarters, Ellycia played a significant role in communicating and translating information about climate change and ocean acidification to policy makers and the general public, in an effort to raise awareness about their impacts and advocate for policy creation to protect the oceans and those that depend on them.

Dimitri is from the Netherlands, but has been living in Australia for the last 8 years. He graduated from the University of Utrecht with an MSc in geology/geophysics and has been working as a geoscientist for Shell for 11 years in the Netherlands and Australia. He returned to academic life in pursuit of a PhD researching the climate impact of fugitive emissions of the fossil fuel industry, and unconventional gas in particular. In his free time he can be seen cycling in the Dandenongs.

Alex grew up in Germany, but spent some of his adolescence in Canada.  He enrolled at the European Business School (EBS) in Germany for his undergraduate studies and pursued an exchange semester in Mexico.  After completing his thesis examining the feasibility of alternative fuels, he went on to complete a Master in International Business in Melbourne.  His PhD research centres on the transition to Renewable Energy Systems and optimizing hybrid systems through a holistic approach.

Dylan is a Chemical Engineer, with experience as an energy analyst. He has a detailed understanding of the cost structure of energy technologies and the electricity market. He was an author of the Melbourne Energy Institutes Renewable Energy Technology Cost Review, commissioned by the Garnaut Review, an investigation of renewable technology costs and projections. He has also developed detailed energy market models for analyzing the National Electricity Market electricity dispatch and price-setting system, in the context of understanding the effect of distributed solar photovoltaic systems and other technologies affecting wholesale electricity demand.

Rachelle graduated with a bachelor's in wildlife biology from the University of Montana and an M.S. from the University of Melbourne. She worked for the United States Forest Service for the following 8 years, writing syntheses addressing fire ecology of plant and animal species. While there she devoted increasingly more time to local sustainability efforts and sustainability research, including investigating barriers to implementation of energy efficiency measures in the Forest Service.

Zebedee completed his undergraduate Masters course in Physics at St.John’s College, University of Oxford. There he specialised in Atmospheric and Biological Physics and completed his Masters project under the supervision of Professor Myles Allen. His thesis focussed on building a simple integrated assessment model to analyse the factors which influence how much an economically rational decision maker might choose to let the Earth warm.

Graham is an electronic and industrial engineer with a technical, R&D, and management career in small business. His experience covers analog electronics, industrial automation, energy efficiency, and HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning). Following the completion of a Masters in Sustainable Energy at RMIT in 2008, he has made contributions to the energy and climate areas. His research developed an improved systems-based methodology for EROI (energy return on investment) for fossil and non-fossil electricity generation.

Marina Povitkina is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science and Quality of Government Institute at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research is in comparative environmental politics with the focus on democratic institutions and quality of government. Marina is currently a visiting PhD student at the School of Social and Political Sciences and the Australian-German Climate & Energy College at the University of Melbourne in February-March 2017. 

Yann obtained a Master’s in climate, ocean and atmosphere science (Pierre and Marie Curie University) as well as a Magister in theoretical physics (University of Paris-Sud). He has various research experience in oceanography (Equatorial Atlantic, Arctic, Antarctica), hydrology, cosmology and sea ice rheology at the universities of Pierre and Marie Curie, Harvard, Berkeley, Oxford, Copenhagen and McGill, respectively. After a year of field research in Benin and a sailing journey across the Arctic North-West Passage, Yann enrolled in the College and modelled national greenhouse gases emissions scenarios following a combination of different vision of climate justice:

Climate justice: Can we agree to disagree?
Operationalising competing equity principles to mitigate global warming

Kate studied an Honours in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Queensland. During this period the 2010-2011 floods occurred and she developed an interest in disaster modelling. Pursuing this interest she worked in a Natural Hazards group at CSIRO with a focus on flood modelling. This interest continued in her PhD studies at the University of Melbourne, where she worked on fitting statistical models to help understand how ENSO impacts the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall events.

Completion: 2018

Kieran completed a Bachelor of Engineering (Chemical) at the University of Queensland in 2010, before working as a professional engineer in project management and delivery roles throughout Australia. He completed a Master of Energy Studies jointly awarded by the University of Queensland, the University of Newcastle, and the University of Western Australia. During this program, he developed an interest in emergin business models and disruption of the energy sector as it moves towards decarbonisation.

Skye has a background in environment and development issues across the Asia-Pacific region, with a focus on responding to environmental and climate change risks and uncertainty. She works on the development of climate change adaptation and environment projects in the Asia-Pacific region for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Changlong Wang grew up in China, studied at the Australian National University and has an engineering degree in Sustainable Energy Systems, Electronic Systems, Mechanical and Material Systems. In his honours project with the Australian Solar Institute Laboratory at the ANU, he developed several routine methods for detecting and distinguishing the most important defects (Iron and Oxygen) in silicon solar cells.

Annabelle Workman completed her undergraduate degree at Melbourne, majoring in Politics and Chinese. In her Honours year, she investigated China's environmental policies in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics. After completing her studies, Annabelle worked at the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) for five years. In 2014, Annabelle completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Environments (Public Health). She began her PhD in 2015, supported by the Australian-German Climate and Energy College and the EU Centre on Shared Complex Challenges.