Climate and Energy College

Patrick Baker is an ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Silviculture and Forest Ecology in the Department of Forest and Ecosystem Science, Melbourne School of Land and Environment, at the University of Melbourne. He has a BA from Bowdoin College (1989) and a Masters of Forestry from Yale University (1993). He completed his PhD in Forest Ecology and Management at the University of Washington in 2001. His PhD research focused on understanding the historical stand dynamics of a seasonal tropical forest in western Thailand.

Professor Beverley-Ann Biggs leads a group of clinicians and researchers with interests in infectious diseases, maternal and child health, and immigrant health. International health activities are based in the Mekong countries and have focused on; the introduction, evaluation and expanded use of new and under utilised vaccines; strengthening the capacity for research and control of malaria and parasitic infections; the prevention of micronutrient deficiencies and helminth infections in women and young children, and integrated approaches for improved child growth and development.

Kathryn Bowen is a social epidemiologist working at the nexus of global change, health and governance issues. Her formal qualifications are BA/Psyc (Hons) (Newcastle) and MSc (International Health) (Humboldt & Frei Universities, Berlin). She submitted her PhD in early 2014, through the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, ANU.

Adam’s work focuses on the business, policy, and communication pathways to a low carbon future. He works on how clean energy entrepreneurship can be scaled up, how firms respond to a clean energy future, and how new technologies are enabled by new business models.

He is currently an ARC DECRA fellow on clean energy entrepreneurship, examining clean energy innovation and acceleration in Australia, the US, Europe, and internationally. Adam has a Doctorate in Geography and the Environment from the University of Oxford, a Masters in Globalisation from the University of London, and started his studies in Ecology and evolutionary biology.

Lars Coenen joined MSSI in January 2017 as the inaugural ‘City of Melbourne Chair of Resilient Cities’, an initiative between the City of Melbourne and University of Melbourne aimed at improving the city’s resilience to sustainability challenges.

Working closely with the city’s chief resilience officer, Lars seeks to strengthen Melbourne’s role as a leader in knowledge based urban resilience, leverage opportunities to attract research funding and provide a new model for collaborative research.

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.

Robyn Eckersley was educated at the University of Western Australia, Cambridge University (UK) and the University of Tasmania, and taught political science at Monash University from 1992-2001 before joining the University of Melbourne in 2002. She has published widely in the fields of environmental politics, political theory and international relations, with a special focus on the ethics and governance of climate change, including in journals such as Political Studies, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, Ethics and International Affairs and Global Environmental Politics. 

Katja Frieler holds a Diploma in Mathematics of the University of Bielefeld and a Ph.D. in “Physics of the Atmosphere” of the University of Potsdam. As Ph.D. student she worked at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI, Potsdam) on chemical modelling of polar stratospheric ozone losses. Before joining the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in July 2008 she was a Post-Doc at the Department of Biostatistics and Clinical Epidemiology, Charité, University Medicine Berlin.

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.

Dr Rachel Hughes is a cultural and political geographer with wide-ranging interests in the geographies of law, geopolitics, social memory and visual and material cultures. Her prior research has examined issues of memory, justice and geopolitics in reference to late twentieth century Cambodia. She is the author of a number of book chapters and journal articles on the contested and internationalised memory of the Cambodian genocide, and an editor of the collection Observant State: geopolitics and visual culture.

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.

Dr Lisa Palmer is a human geographer who teaches and researches on human-environment relations and indigenous approaches to environmental and social governance. Her research takes a critical ecological approach and is focused on south-east Asia (particularly Timor Leste) and indigenous Australia. 

Dr Murray Peel is a Senior Research Fellow and ARC Future Fellow in the Department of Infrastructure Engineering at the University of Melbourne. He has a PhD (Geography) and a BSc (Hons) from the University of Melbourne. His hydroclimatology and comparative hydrology research interests include understanding differences in inter-annual variability of annual runoff around the world, hydrologic impacts of land use change and potential climate change impacts on inter-annual runoff variability.

Professor Chris Ryan, Director of the Victorian Eco Innovation Lab at the University of Melbourne, has worked for over 30 years across various areas of science, technology, environmental policy and design, and in projects that span the community sector, academia, governement and international agencies and business.

Dr Schofield is a lecturer for Climate System Science in the School of Earth sciences. Her recent research encompasses many areas of atmospheric chemistry, such as the Southern Hemisphere climate implications of Antarctic stratospheric ozone losses, climatic relevance of aerosol formation from the Great Barrier Reef and climate / radiation implications of aerosol and clouds over the Southern Ocean.

Dr Jason N E Varuhas (BA LLB (Hons) VUW, LLM UCL, PhD Cambridge) is Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, and Co-Director of Studies for the Government Law and Public and International Law programmes on the Melbourne Law Masters. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Public Law at the University of Cambridge and a Bye-Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge.

Dr Ying-Ping Wang completed his PhD in plant ecophysiology from the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, University of Edinburgh in 1988, and moved to CSIRO, Australian in 1990. He currently is a chief research scientist in CSIRO. He is one of three key scientists responsible for developing the Australian community land surface model (CABLE) that has over 100 registered users from 51 institutions in 13 countries. He has published over 130 papers in major international journals including 13 papers in Science, PNAS, Nature and its family journals.