Previously I was at the Public Service Research Group in the UNSW Canberra School of Business as a Lecturer in Public Policy. While at UNSW Canberra I worked on projects related to identifying and measuring the hidden value in complex systems, and I taught in the UNSW Canberra Business School at the postgraduate level, lecturing courses on people and systems, and driving organisational performance.

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From 2020 to 2021 I was a Research Fellow in Social Policy at the Centre for Social Impact, UNSW, where I completed research on a range of different social and public policy issues. My major projects at CSI examined issues related to wealth inequality, ultra high net worth philanthropy, systemic underfunding across the not-for-profit sector, issues related to mental health stigma in the Australian social security system, and the structural barriers to good financial wellbeing for disadvantaged households.

 

From 2019-2020 I was the inaugural ANZ Tony Nicholson Research Fellow at the Brotherhood of St Laurence, where I worked on employing economic dignity as a concept for evaluating ideas, structures and policies related to financial wellbeing. My work draws heavily on Amartya Sen’s capability approach to understand how different kinds of disadvantage can constrain people’s freedom in established democratic societies. 

 

In 2018 I completed my PhD in Political Theory at the University of Melbourne, where I have taught political theory and research methods. My PhD thesis, 'Freedom as Capability: How the capability approach can improve our understanding of freedom in established democracies', examined the way that freedom is conceptualised in the measurement of democracy, and I developed a new measure of democracy drawing from the capability approach. The measure developed in the thesis has been used to compare different wellbeing outcomes across different welfare regimes, highlighting that different types of welfare state have different outcomes in the wellbeing that they produce for disadvantaged citizens.