Project team
The Enabling Resilience Investment approach is a collaboration between CSIRO and Value Advisory Partners (VAP). Our team works in an ethical, collaborative way, forming partnerships with stakeholders to co-design and co-learn about how to move into the emergent, disrupted future.
CSIRO
Dr Russell Wise
- Russ is a sustainability economist passionate about working with people to help understand the challenges caused by rapid technological and environmental change and economic development and to develop approaches that enable learning and decision making under uncertainty.
Dr Deborah O'Connell
- Deb has a background across many disciplines including: agriculture, ecology, forestry, hydrology, bioenergy, spatial and statistical analysis. Currently, she specialises in interdisciplinary and implementation sciences: her research in the last 20 years has focused on developing and applying integrated assessment frameworks and systems analysis approaches in the domains of water and energy; as well as sustainability science and adaptive responses to global change.
Dr Russell Gorddard
- Russell is an agricultural and natural resource economist by training with research interests in sustainability, adaptation to global change and the relationship between knowledge, values and rules in framing the decision context for adaptation planning and action. He has a strong research interest in emerging systems of transactions and exchange in social-economic systems and their implications for adaptation to change.
Dr Seona Meharg
- Seona Meharg is an integration research specialist who combines different methods and knowledges to solve complex global problems. Seona has over 15 years of experience at CSIRO working on adapting to global change. Seona has expertise in identifying and building the capacity and competencies necessary for agents to catalyse change, monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL), and project management for transdisciplinary research projects in Australia and overseas. Seona’s ability to integrate across disciplines to solve complex problems stems from her passion for learning and background in ecology, communication, environmental law, and social science.
Value Advisory Partners 
John Marinopoulos
- John Marinopoulos is an advisor to government and the private sector on cities and precincts to understand and realise the value and benefits from planning and delivery of infrastructure. John has over 25 years of experience in delivering strategic analyses and assessments to drive performance. Specific areas of expertise include financial modelling, quantitative modelling, strategy development, econometric analysis, market and customer research and analysis, risk assessment, stakeholder and reputation management and large scale project management.
Nic Mesic
- Nic Mesic is an advisor to government and the private sector on cities and precincts to maximise the value and benefits from the timely planning and delivery of infrastructure and the pathways to infrastructure financing and funding. Nic has over 25 years’ experience in senior roles in consulting and advisory services, business strategic planning, communications and marketing. In these roles Nic has worked with Boards, CEOs, senior executives, government officials and community leaders to design, develop and implement business growth and productivity initiatives in both the private and public sectors.
George Tieman
- George has more than 25 years of experience in planning and urban development in government, academia and the private sector. He combines advanced tertiary qualifications with strengths in strategic and analytic approaches in the urban context. George brings a blend of experience in transport and urban renewal covering a spectrum of assignments involving the development and application of value capture frameworks, policy advice, research. George’s range of clients encompasses government organisations, tertiary sector, development industry.
Past team members
Dr Rachel Williams
- Rachel Williams is a social scientist with interests in how communities and organisations respond to external change and how scientists, communities, the public sector and the private sector can learn to work together to enable effective adaptation to change.
Dr Ashlin Lee
- Dr Ashlin Lee is a Social Architect and Research Scientist at the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in the Environmental Informatics Group of Land and Water Branch. At the CSIRO, Ashlin acts as Social Architect, providing sociological and social science insights to assist in the development, deployment, and optimisation of information and data system. His key research interests include science and technology studies, with a focus on technology and society, and aspects of surveillance studies, including exploring digital/technological surveillance in society, and the experiential and subjective aspects of surveillance. He is also an honorary lecturer in Sociology in the School of Sociology, at the Australian National University (ANU), and a member of the Justice and Technoscience Lab (JusTech) in the School of Regulation and Global Governance, also at the ANU.
Joey Chan
- Joey has three years of experience in infrastructure consulting and advisory roles in Victoria. She has worked with clients across government, academia and the private sector, in diverse industries including aviation, retail property and banking. Her unique tertiary background and working experience come together to provide strengths in context and data analysis, GIS mapping, and pathways to resilience investment.
Professor Holger Maier
- Holger's research is focused on developing improved techniques for the sustainable management of infrastructure (with a particular focus on water, energy and the water-energy nexus) and natural resources (with a particular focus on water resources and natural hazards) in an uncertain environment. This includes elements of modelling (with a particular focus on machine learning and hybrid process / data driven models), optimisation (with a particular focus on evolutionary algorithms and other metaheuristics) and decision support (with a particular focus on strategic planning under deep uncertainty).
Dr Aaron Zecchin
- Aaron Zecchin has a strong interest and passion for research in the field of fluid line network dynamics. He is actively undertaking research in the development and analysis of partial differential equation solvers, and the analysis of two-dimensional and fluid-structure interaction effects within pipe flow. He researches Laplace-domain characterisations of hydraulic networks, and the utilisation of these characterisations for simulation and model identification. He is also working on the use of sparse linear solvers for the fast steady-state simulation of pipe networks.
He works in the broad area of system identification, and he is active in its theoretical and practical application to the condition assessment of hydraulic systems. In particular, he has focused on the use of statistical frequency- and time-domain methods for both parameter estimation and fault detection within pipeline networks.