People

Barnett, Mr Guy

  • Guy Barnett is a Principal Research Consultant in CSIRO Environment, Canberra. He leads CSIROs Future Cities initiative, which aims to integrate cities-related research from across the organisation’s 5,000 science and technology experts. His focus is on the science needed to understand and navigate cities as complex and adaptive systems, harnessing advances in digital and data technologies, while building the multi-sectoral partnerships and collaborations to both accelerate and de-risk innovation.

Cook, Mr Stephen

  • Stephen Cook is a Senior Environmental Scientist within CSIRO Environment’s urban research area. Stephen has extensive research experience in the urban water sector, which is focused on collaborating with industry and research partners to overcome social and technical barriers for transitioning to more sustainable urban water systems. Stephen has postgraduate qualifications in geographic information systems and previously worked in strategic land use planning and land suitability assessment. Stephen is currently undertaking a PhD part-time within Swinburne University’s Centre for Urban Transitions which looking to model how disruptive transport technologies might influence the socio-spatial equity of accessibility across Australian cities.

Frederiks , Dr Elisha

  • Dr Elisha Frederiks is a Senior Research Scientist at the CSIRO, based in Brisbane. She has a PhD in Organisational Psychology and a Bachelor of Psychological Science (Honours Class 1). Elisha has significant expertise across the fields of psychology, behavioural economics and social science. She specialises in applying key principles from these disciplines to investigate various challenges and opportunities in the residential energy domain. Elisha has experience leading a social science team that conducts integrated, longitudinal and nation-wide surveying of energy consumers in an effort to better understand the complex nature of household energy use. She also currently leads the Consumers and Resource Use team within CSIRO Environment’s Sustainability Pathways Program.

Gardner, Dr John

  • Dr John Gardner is a social psychologist specialising in behaviour change at the interface of technical and social issues. He currently works primarily in the energy domain, on projects involving energy consumption of residential and commercial end-users, as well as work informing the transition of the energy industry and energy policy in Australia. These projects involve State and Federal government agencies as well as energy businesses. He has also previously led projects for CSIRO in the domains of water and climate adaptation. Before joining CSIRO, he worked as an academic at the University of Queensland, and as a research consultant.

Po Greenhill, Dr Murni

  • Murni Po (formerly Murni Greenhill) is a social scientist working at CSIRO Environment in Canberra. Murni’s research interest is understanding people and how they make their decisions in relation to natural and land resource management. Murni has applied her knowledge in social and environmental psychology in many areas including urban water issues (e.g. water restriction, demand management, decentralised water systems, water reuse and recycling), climate change, research for development, agriculture, agroforestry and superannuation. She is currently completing her PhD with University of Western Australia looking at the adoption behaviour of farmers in Indonesia and Vietnam.

Lin, Dr Brenda

  • Dr. Brenda Lin is a senior research scientist in CSIRO Environment researching climate change impacts and risk in urban and natural systems. Her research focuses on the systems thinking and decision making under uncertainty. She was a lead developer of Climate Compass, working with the Department of Environment and a range of stakeholders through its development. Dr Lin’s work is inherently interdisciplinary, as the interactions between humans and their environment are complex to manage. Much of the research is highly applied with the hope that the research will inform on future public policy and help create resilient socio-ecological systems.

Dr Shuang Liu

  • Shuang Liu is a research scientist at the CSIRO based in Canberra. She has a PhD in Ecological Economics, and her transdisciplinary research integrates the study of humans and the rest of nature to address policy-relevant issues at multiple scales. Her general research interest is to facilitate collective environmental decision-making under uncertainty. Shuang’s expertise includes impact evaluation, risk assessment, participatory decision-making, ecological economic modeling, and ecosystem services valuation.

Lu, Dr Yingying

  • Yingying Lu joined CSIRO in 2017 as an economic modeller. She got her PhD in economics from Australian National University. Yingying's work has been focusing on economic modelling and policy analysis. In particular, her research interests include computable general equilibrium (CGE) modelling, input-output analysis, model-based energy and climate policy analysis. Since she joined CSIRO, Yingying has also been working together with the SCP team to integrate material flow accounting into CGE models. She is now involved in developing an agriculture focused CGE model in collaboration with ABARES. She is also the section editor of an academic journal Open Economics.
Photo of Marc Mariano

Mariano, Dr Marc

  • Dr Marc Mariano is an economist with CSIRO Environment. His expertise is in economic modelling and analysis. This has been demonstrated through his diverse experience in consulting, research and teaching in the private and public sectors, and academia. Marc has contributed to the development of state-of-the-art Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models, and have applied them to understand the economywide impact of major projects on industries at the regional, state and national levels. The assessment of economic impacts includes topics such as climate change, circular economy, energy and minerals, transport and other infrastructure, defence, tourism, international trade and pandemic outbreaks, among others. Marc has a PhD in Economics from Monash University, VIC, Australia.

Muster, Dr Tim

  • Dr Tim Muster is a Principal Research Scientist based in Adelaide, South Australia and Leader of the Adaptive Liveable Cities Team in CSIRO Environment. Tim leads CSIRO’s Urban Living Lab initiative which seeks to build a portfolio of innovation precincts that progress an agenda of place-based experimentation and learning, catalysing and de-risking change, and solving wicked urban problems using systems and co-development approaches. Tim’s research seeks to understand the enablers and barriers to place-based innovation and capacity-building projects, and to evaluate the ability of new solutions and/or policies to advance system aspects of liveability, sustainability and resilience.

Porter, Ms Natasha

  • Natasha Porter is a Social Scientist with CSIRO Environment. She has extensive research experience across a variety of domains including water research, energy, land use management, climate change, biodiversity, ecology and circular economy. Natasha has been involved in research focused purely on developing social theory as well as integrating with multidisciplinary projects. Her expertise covers the design and implementation of community based experimental research, quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis, and project management.

Schandl, Dr Heinz

  • Heinz Schandl, PhD in Sociology, is a senior science leader at the CSIRO based in Canberra. Heinz leads a research group for Urban and Industrial Transformations in CSIRO’s Environment Business Unit and his research looks at economically attractive opportunities for resource efficiency, waste minimization and greenhouse gas abatement. He leads CSIRO’s Circular Economy Initiative and looks after CSIRO’s global research for understanding the environmental impacts of population and consumption identifying policies and technologies that guide a transition to sustainable consumption and production.

Verikios , Dr George

  • Dr George Verikios is an economist with CSIRO Environment. He has extensive and diverse experience in economic analysis with an excellent national and international reputation in economic modelling. He is an expert in economic modelling and has built, overseen and contributed to the development of many global and national economic models, and their application to the evaluation of diverse topics. These include the economic effects of climate change, the circular economy, pandemic outbreaks, COVID-19 vaccination, tax policy, impact analysis, transport policy and projects, tourism policy, chronic diseases, trade liberalisation, and income distribution. George has consulting, research and training experience in the university, public and private sectors.

Wiedmann, Professor Tommy

  • Professor Tommy Wiedmann, PhD in Chemistry, is leading the Sustainability Assessment Program at UNSW Sydney and is an Adjunct Science Leader at CSIRO. In teaching and research, he is guided by the question on how to achieve concurrent human and planetary well-being. He has long-standing experience in integrated, quantitative sustainability assessment, industrial ecology and environmental footprint analysis. Tommy is leading the development and application of the Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory (IELab), a collaborative research platform for environmentally extended multi-region input-output analysis. His recent research is focusing on urban sustainability and sustainability transformations.

West, Dr Jim

  • Jim West has a PhD in Environmental Science and background in economic geology. He has worked at CSIRO, based in Canberra, since 2004. For over a decade Jim has been researching the physical economy, and the material requirements which underpin the functioning of societies at different levels of development, delivering key data sets and analysis to international bodies concerning sustainable consumption and production. Since 2017 he has had an increasingly focus on understanding the metals requirements of the energy transition and decarbonisation and is leading inhouse development of physical stocks and flows modelling capacity to that end.