The Team
The CSIRO Circular Economy research team offers deep cross-cutting science and research expertise in socioeconomics, data science and operations, technology development, innovation and implementation, manufacturing, risk management, and resource sustainability.
We take a global view of improving design, standards, production, consumption, waste management and resource recovery, while understanding how materials flow through the economy, and how to value-add to resources, wastes and new materials. The knowledge contribution of the Circular Economy research will allow Australia to become a global leader in circularity and to achieve the economic, social, and environmental benefits of a circular economy transition.
Find out more about the team below.
Heinz Schandl
- Heinz Schandl is an international science leader for sustainable materials management and the decoupling of economic activity environmental pressures and impacts. He is an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Environmental Studies at Nagoya University in Japan and a member of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) International Resource Panel. His research focuses on social theory, industrial metabolism, and environmental and sustainability policy to support evidence-based policy for resource efficiency, waste minimization, greenhouse gas abatement and the circular economy.
Naomi Boxall
- Naomi Boxall is a research scientist with more than 15 years’ experience in mining, waste treatment and resource recovery from strategic urban, industrial and problematic wastes. Her areas of expertise are technical development incorporating industrial and environmental biotechnology for waste treatment and resource recovery, including process design, development and optimisation, and techno-economic assessment. Naomi’s technical research is bolstered by the application of policy, economic and social lenses, which help to identify barriers and opportunities to the application of technology at scale in waste and resource recovery. Currently, Naomi is researching innovation for emerging waste streams, practical application of circular economy principles in Australia, and the impact of hazardous chemicals on safe waste reuse.
Colleen MacMillan
- Colleen MacMillan is a scientist fascinated by plants and fibres and their uses for renewable commodities and products, with 25+ years of experience in cotton biotechnology, forest biotechnology, and fundamental plant biology. Colleen leads cotton fibre science research to create solutions for sustainable fibre-based industries and communities and incorporating fibre molecular biology, gene-networks for helping accelerate precision-breeding, and pan-value-chain engagement in the emerging areas of textiles and fibres. She is also active in strategic initiatives in the transition of the Australian circular economy, including the bio-circular economy, textile and fibre circular products, and collaborative communities. In addition to science, Colleen is firmly committed to inclusion and diversity and is the inaugural inclusion and diversity executive lead for CSIRO Agriculture and Food.
Natasha Porter
- Natasha Porter is a Social Scientist and the CSIRO Circular Economy research program manager. Natasha has extensive research experience across various science domains, including water research, energy, circular economy, sustainable land use, climate change, biodiversity and ecology. Natasha has managed projects of multiple scales, from regional-scale to large international collaborative projects. Natasha’s research has focused on developing social theory, integrating it with multidisciplinary projects and with expertise covering the design and implementation of community-based experimental research, quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis and project management.
Michael Ambrose
- Michael Ambrose is a senior experimental scientist with over 25 years of experience in building energy consumption, both operational and embodied. He leads analysis of house rating data obtained through the NatHERS energy efficiency compliance requirements for new dwellings. He created the Australian Housing Data portal – a series of interactive data visualisation dashboards that allow users to explore the data geospatially to discover area specific trends and practices in the residential building space. The underlying data from the 1.3 million dwellings in the database allows modelling of the operational energy requirements as well as the embodied energy requirements of these dwellings and enables us to explore how our built environment fits into the circular economy.
Jane Hodgkinson
- Jane Hodgkinson has over 17 years’ experience working in geological resources, working with industry, government and academic institutions. She has expertise in spatial evaluation of mineral and geological provinces, including the fusion of disparate datasets to explore anomalies. Jane works with industry collaborators to seek opportunities for avoiding loss and waste for Earth and planetary environments and consider the ‘value from every grain moved’. Jane is an advocate of circular economy, with a goal to assisting the mining industry reutilise, repurpose and recycle resources towards zero waste.
Taryn Kong
- Taryn Kong is a transdisciplinary scientist with a background in qualitative intercultural research, environmental sciences, and accounting. She integrated participatory, qualitative, and quantitative methods on various sustainability issues, including climate change adaptation, large-scale ecological restoration, and Indigenous enterprise development in the USA, South Africa, and Australia. Taryn’s current research interests include business models and partnership pathways to harness the private sector’s resources and capabilities to accelerate a just transformation to a circular economy.
Melissa Skidmore
- Melissa Skidmore is a senior research scientist with over 20 years of experience in polymer, synthetic and computational chemistry and polymer analysis and characterisation. Melissa combines her expertise to investigate the redesign, reuse and recycling of plastics. Melissa’s current research includes new polymer development- “recyclable-by-design”, the management and processing of problem plastics and the promotion of circular economy principles to turn plastic waste into a resource. Melissa co-authored the report titled “The recycled plastics market: global analysis and trends”.
Andrew Terhorst
- Andrew Terhorst is a computational social scientist with extensive research and consulting experience across various domains, including corporate sustainability, mineral exploration, environmental impact assessment, natural resource management, and urban and regional planning. Andrew has expertise in spatial data analysis, social network analysis, and natural language processing. His current research focuses on open innovation, particularly knowledge diffusion and brokerage. Andrew is particularly interested in sustainable business models and how open innovation can facilitate the emerging circular economy.
Andrea Walton
- Andrea Walton is a Senior Research Scientist and Group Leader with the Sustainability Pathways Program, CSIRO Environment. Andrea leads research into social acceptability frameworks to enable sustainability transitions that deliver community wellbeing and regional prosperity. Andrea’s recent work includes social license in the waste and resource recovery (WRR) sector investigating social acceptance of WRR infrastructure including energy from waste facilities and advanced recycling. Her group also investigates industry transitions at the regional scale to further regional prosperity in Australia’s regions, including from the energy transition. In combination, this research contributes to the responsible development of innovative approaches as Australia transitions to a circular economy.
Emma Yuen
- Emma Yuen manages business development for CSIRO’s Circular Economy research initiative and other critical science domains aimed at enabling more sustainable production for Australia’s industries. Emma’s expertise is linking CSIRO researchers and technology developers to key industry stakeholders for managing contaminants and wastes, monitoring and remediating contaminated sites and waters and producing value-adding products from materials, wastes and resources that would otherwise be lost from our economy.
Natalie Kikken
- Natalie Kikken has over 15 years’ experience working in communications across the government, industry and not for profit sectors. She has expertise in the development and delivery of communications campaigns, storytelling and writing, media and issues management, content and digital assets including video and social media, stakeholder engagement, collateral, training and employee engagement.