Research Team

Peter Coghill

  • Peter has 20 years of experience in developing instrumentation for the minerals industry, and have led many of these projects. His particular field of interest currently is applying measurement techniques, such as magnetic resonance and gamma activation analysis to ore sorting and modelling the effects of deposit heterogeneity on sorting performance.

Andrew Filisetti

  • Andrew Filisetti is a Mechanical Engineer in the Engineering and Technology (E&T) program within CSIRO’s National Collections and Marine Infrastructure (NCMI) Business Unit. He provides engineering and technical support to scientists, specialising in system design in the marine and atmospheric research fields. Andrew has been responsible for several important instrument and system designs used extensively by the Marine National Facility (MNF) and other research scientists within O&A. Particularly noteworthy is the work Andrew performed in collaboration with the Bureau of Meteorology and MNF to build a system to stabilise large instruments at sea, by driving a platform to counteract vessel motion, to make previously impossible atmospheric data to capture – possible.

Neil Francis

  • Neil is a senior engineer in the Geoscience and Algorithms team in Mineral Resources. He makes predictive models to provide automated or semi-automated interpretation of sensor data. Past work is tightly integrated with industry problems, and methods have been incorporated into commercial instrumentation widely used in industry. Neil is currently most interested in small data problems, and especially in decision making and human factor issues when sensor observations are ambiguous. He believes that current trends undervalue model-driven methods, and that often the answer is not entirely in the data. Prior to his focus on instrumentation, he would work in minerals processing research, particularly on software tools for detailed modelling of unit operations, especially solid-liquid separation, and on chemometrics and signal processing problems.

Ema Frery

  • Emanuelle Frery is a research scientist with expertise in multidisciplinary projects. She loves to synthesis work from different disciplines and apply her expertise in structural geology to comprehensive assessments of energy production impact on the groundwater systems and the environment. She is passionate about fluid and gas circulation along natural faults and the impact of those circulations on the seismic cycle. She works with a multi-scale approach, from fieldwork to laboratory analyses and to numerical modelling. She acquired a worldwide academic expertise in this field with a PhD thesis on the circulation recorded in the well-known red sandstone of the Colorado Plateau and her implication in the IODP research. Before joining CSIRO, she also worked in the oil and gas industry as a seismic interpreter and a petroleum system analyst.

Brianna Ganly

  • Brianna started with CSIRO in 2014 as an industrial trainee in the sensing and sorting program during her undergraduate degree. She went on to do a PhD in physics with the University of New South Wales and traveled to Canada in 2016 to conduct part of her PhD research with the PIXE research group at the University of Guelph. In 2017 she was hired as a research scientist in the CSIRO X-ray technologies team at the conclusion of her PhD. Brianna is now the team leader of the X-ray Science team within the Sensing and Sorting research program. Brianna also has a keen interest in In-situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU) for space exploration research, and is part of the CSIRO ISRU project funded by the Space Technologies FSP.

Stephen Gensemer

  • Stephen a senior scientist in the Optical Systems Team. He has developed optical devices for satellites and remote sensing, monitoring of agricultural crops, lakes and rivers, along with many other applications. He has worked as an experimental physicist for over 20 years, studying atomic interations at extremely low temperatures using laser cooling. Stephen’s Ph.D. was completed at the University of Connecticut, and he has worked in research at NIST, the University of Amsterdam, Penn State University, and University of Sydney. Stephen’s research areas of interest included fundamental aspects of atomic physics, quantum mechanics, and precision measurements using atomic clocks.

Abdelwahed (Abdo) Khamis

  • Abdelwahed Khamis is a Research Scientist at Data61, CSIRO. He has a PhD degree in Computer Science and Engineering from UNSW, Australia and BSc and MSc in Computer Science from Zagazig University, Egypt. His Ph.D. research focused on the use of RF technologies and Machine Learning for medical sensing applications including Hand Hygiene tracking and vital sign monitoring. His research interests include ubiquitous and device-free sensing , Multimodal Sensing and Edge AI.

Brano Kusy

  • Dr. Brano Kusy is a principal research scientist and Group Leader of the Distributed Sensing Systems in CSIRO. His research is on the new frontiers in networked embedded systems, mobile and wearable computing, and Internet of Things. His work has focused on scalability and energy efficiency of resource-constrained distributed systems and algorithms for coordinated control, spatio-temporal synchronization, reliable wireless communications, on-device machine learning, and adaptive sampling. Brano has applied wireless sensing technologies across several domains, including behavior sensing of wildlife, pasture intake of livestock; high-granularity sensing of user comfort in commercial buildings; surface mine rehabilitation; and scalable underwater environmental surveys.

Jacques Malan

  • Jacques is an electronic engineer and team leader in NCMI of the Engineered Systems team. He has been involved in various marine projects since 2008 and specialises in hardware and embedded firmware development.

Tim Malthus

  • Tim Malthus is Research Group Leader of the Coastal Monitoring, Modelling and Informatics Group in the Coastal Management and Development Program of CSIRO’s Oceans and Atmosphere Business Unit. He previously led the Environmental Earth Observation Program in the CSIRO Division of Land and Water. He combines skills in calibration, validation and field spectroscopy with analysis of airborne and satellite Earth observation data, to develop improved monitoring tools for the management of land and water resources informing wider environmental policies. Tim’s research career has focused on earth observation of both the aquatic and terrestrial environments.

John Rayner

  • John has worked in the area of contaminated site assessment and remediation for 30 years with a focus on understanding the way contaminants partition between soil, surface water, groundwater, infrastructure and air. This provides the underlying basis of assessing environmental and community risk from contamination and the best approach to remediation. The contaminants have included petroleum hydrocarbons, heavy metals, nutrients, munitions, and halogenated organics including PFAS. The environments have included the polar regions (Antarctic, sub-Antarctic, Canada), tropical regions and most others in between. He currently leads the Pollutant Fate and Transport Team that has strong field, laboratory, data handling and modelling skills. This team has a successful history of conducting large scale projects with industry, regulators and research collaborators. He has worked for CSIRO for nearly 2 decades as well as 5 years with the Australian Antarctic Division, 4 years with BP and started out with a consulting firm. This drives research and new science opportunities based on strong collaborations with clients and very much aimed at achieving tangible environmental and commercial outcomes.

David Silvera

  • David is a Research Scientist at the CSIRO’s Australian e-Health Research Centre. He is a mechatronics researcher with strong record relative to opportunity in the fields of digital health, human-computer interaction (HCI), human-robot interaction (HRI), social robotics and tactile sensing. His ongoing research focus is to expand current understanding of technology within a socially assistive context, including the design, development, delivery, implementation and evaluation of e-health services. His specialties are in the areas of: autism, socially assistive robotics, tomographic imaging, the autonomous interpretation of human behaviour using machine learning techniques and tactile sensing for robotics applications.

Andrew Tulloh

  • Andrew leads the Transitional Technologies & Prototyping Team within the CSIRO Manufacturing Business Unit. His interests lie in machine vision, real-time systems and automation, materials modelling and software engineering. Before joining CSIRO he gained R&D experience across the power generation, biomedical instrumentation, automotive software and manufacturing, and financial software industries. At CSIRO Andrew has focussed on translating research in transport and infrastructure monitoring systems, airport security systems and manufacturing processes into outcomes for Australian industry.

Erik Van Ooijen

  • Erik van Ooijen graduated at the Utrecht University in Experimental Physics and received his PhD in 2005 in the field of Atom Optics. After one year working as a Postdoc at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen he moved to Brisbane in 2006 to work as a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. Here, he was in charge of the Atom Optics Laboratory and supervised 5 PhD students and 7 undergraduate students. He has published 14 papers in peer-reviewed journals and has 1 patent. Erik moved to CSIRO Hobart in 2011 to join the Ocean Carbon Observation Team. He is responsible for the IMOS (and former ACCSP) Ocean Acidification Mooring Program. For this he has managed the deployment, instrumentation and data processing of over 65 successful deployments of pCO2 moorings. He is also responsible for the development and deployment of SeapHOx pH sensors, where he cooperated with IMAS, UQ, the National Fishery College PNG and the AAD. He participated in several cruises where he was responsible for the building and running of a mass spectrometers enable the underway measurement of the biological O2 production. He is has been involved in the CCS project for the development of new sensor platforms for real-time data and is currently leading a project in the Autonomous Sensor FSP.

Nina Welti

  • Nina is a biogeochemist with a specialisation in isotope methods, to quantify sediment and soil-based biogeochemical processes. Of particular interest is developing tools which combine modelling and monitoring approaches in order to gain a better understanding of how anthropogenic changes impact key biogeochemical reactions. As part of the Trusted AgriFoods Exports Mission, Nina leads a work package aimed at verifying the provenance of agricultural products, linking traditional environmental measurements with rapid scanning, remote sensing, and digital supply chains. Additionally, she is part of the Agriculture and Food Impact Initiative, leading the Trusted Supply Chains impact area. Locally, Nina is the point of contact for the Waite Campus Indigenous Artist in Residence Program, which explores the nexus of western and indigenous knowledge using art to translate science.

Maryam Yazdani

  • Dr Maryam Yazdani, works on IPM methodologies, and biological control. On winning an International Postgraduate Research Scholarship, she moved to Adelaide in 2011 to study for her PhD and has remained in Australia since, lecturing on biosecurity and pest management, and researching Light Brown Apple Moth and citrus gall wasp (University of Adelaide) and Queensland fruit fly (Macquarie University) with a view to improved monitoring and control. Maryam is an entomologist who’s work aims to improve our understanding of insect pest biology and ecology in agricultural systems, towards developing practical, cost effective and environmentally sensitive pest management. Her passion is to facilitate the transition from “great idea” to commercial product.