Professor Oliver Burmeister is one of six Senior Research Fellows, appointed in July 2018 to lead the three CSU spheres of research, two co-leading each one. He is co-leading of the “Flourishing Communities” sphere. He is particularly interested in improving quality of life through social technologies, mostly in areas related to health informatics.  Examples of current projects he is working on include the National Mental Health Commission’s Equally Well web portal, an Australian Competitive Grants Register Category 1 grant to produce wearable technology to reduce the burden of care for care givers of people with dementia, and supervising a doctoral project involving autonomous (artificial intelligence) robotic health care of the elderly.

Associate Professor Dale Nimmo is a conservation biologist and ecologist whose research interest is in managing landscapes to minimise the effects on bio-diversity of large-scale disturbances such as fire, climatic extremes and habitat fragmentation.  Currently (2017-2020) he is the recipient of an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award for which he is investigating whether Indigenous land management techniques (and in particular fire regimes in Australia’s Western Desert region) can forestall an extinction crisis for Australia’s mammal communities. Related projects include research on northern quolls and buffel grass. In 2016 he was the recipient of the Wiley Next Generation Ecologist Award; a member of a project team which won the Nancy Mills Science in Parks Award; and the winner of an Australian Institute of Policy and Science Tall Poppy Award.