Professor Marco Amati is an accomplished environmental scientist with a deep-seated passion for urban research. His expertise spans a broad range of topics related to city environments, including extensive studies on urban greening. His work has involved everything from large-scale surveys of metropolitan trees to examining the impact of indoor plants on mental well-being.

Currently, Professor Amati's research focuses on the future of urban outdoor spaces. He combines his interest in the cooling benefits of shade and trees with a strong emphasis on social sciences. His innovative approach aims to enhance our understanding of how urban greenery can contribute to both environmental sustainability and community well-being.

My vision is to help build a more inclusive society where everyone, regardless of circumstance, is empowered to flourish.

As Director of the Social Equity Research Centre at RMIT University, I lead a large, high-performing interdisciplinary research team committed to understanding and redressing inequities through social justice. My research focuses on the built environment, health, wellbeing, and inequity—both in Australia and internationally—particularly among populations disadvantaged by systemic barriers or inadequate policies. My current major themes include enhancing the social determinants of health for people with disability and reducing inequities in early childhood development.

My career has been driven by a commitment to real-world impact, collaborating extensively with policymakers, government, and non-government organisations to translate research into positive change. I earned my PhD in public health researching the associations between the built environment and adult travel behaviours. Since then, I have held research and research leadership roles internationally, published over 180 articles in leading interdisciplinary journals, and secured more than $24M in competitive research funding.

I am privileged to have received over 40 national and international awards and prizes, and to contribute as an Associate Editor for Health & Place amongst other editorial appointments. Recognised as the inaugural Australian Health Promotion Thinker in Residence, a Salzburg Global Fellow, and among the Top 2% of Scientists worldwide, I am currently an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. My ongoing focus is on leading and enabling innovative, collaborative research that breaks new ground on social equity and improves lives.

Dr. Sarah Barns brings two decades of strategic policy, research, and creative practice to her work on the digital lives of cities and communities. A multi-disciplinary scholar-practitioner, Sarah champions the importance of cultural and political imaginaries as they shape emerging digital ecosystems and practices in urban settings, while being committed to industry and community-based collaborations that advance new civic capabilities and literacies.

In 2023 Sarah commenced a Vice Chancellor's Senior Research Fellowship at RMIT, exploring emerging organisational sensibilities and place strategies for platform civics in an era of climate vulnerability. She co-founded STORYBOX.CO as Australia's first public space media platform, is a trusted adviser to government and industry, and is a champion of multi-disciplinary storytelling practices in building communities of connection.

Sarah's book Platform Urbanism was published in 2019 by Palgrave, and she is an International Contributing Editor of Urban Studies Journal. Over the past fifteen years she has has led over 30 creative, practice-based works incorporating sound design, creative digital storytelling and multi-sensory interpretation practices for a range of cultural and museum institutions and organisations, building on her PhD in urban sensory history and interpretation through the University of Technology, Sydney.

Andrew is a Professor in Sustainability and Urban Planning in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies (GUSS) and the Centre for Urban Research (CUR) at RMIT.

Andrew is a planning educator and researcher with a focus on rural and regional planning issues. He has a background in planning practice and his current research and supervision is in the area of land use change and planning policy associated with regional Australia, food systems and peri-urban development.

Andrew has worked for over 30 years in planning practice, research and teaching in Australia and elsewhere. He has undertaken several industry-funded research projects with government agencies in the areas of rural planning, regional development and demographic analysis.  He has been involved in curriculum design, development and review at several universities internationally.

Dr. Manoj Chandrabose (PhD in Public Health specialising in Environmental Epidemiology; MPhil in Statistics) is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban Research, where he primarily contributes to the ARC Discovery Project Designing Liveable Neighbourhoods to Support Healthy Ageing, and also works with the Australian Urban Observatory. He completed his PhD in 2020 as part of the NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence in Healthy, Liveable Communities. From 2020 to 2025, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Urban Transitions, Swinburne University of Technology. Since February 2025. 

Dr Thami Croeser is an urban planner with a focus on bringing nature back into cities in practical ways, at large scale.

Dr Alexandre Faustino (he/him) is a Vice-Chancellor Postdoctoral Research Fellow investigating how waterscapes - the ways humans and more-than-humans relate with water - can be re-imagined, lived and governed with socio-ecological justice.

Coming from Brazil, Alex is based at RMIT University Centre for Urban Research (CUR) in Naarm (Melbourne), having completed a Ph.D. in Urban Geography at the School of Global, Urban, and Social Studies. Alex has experience teaching within the school’s portfolio of Sustainability and Urban Planning, and he currently co-convenes Praxis Lab RMIT, CUR Early Career Academics Network, and is a Deputy Associate Director for CUR’s theme of Geographies of Land, Home and Place. In 2024 he collaborated with Professor Chris Speed in the conceptualisation and development RMIT Regenerative Futures Institute. He is also a founding member of the Alliance for Praxis Research (APR), a scholar and creative activist collective based in Melbourne dedicated to cultivating radical pedagogies and nurture transdisciplinary grassroots networks through practices of university extension.

Liam is a lecturer in Sustainability and Urban Planning within the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University.

He is a planner focusing on urban issues, particularly affordable housing and transport equity. His research has investigated ways in which governments seek to provide affordable housing and social housing in a modern context, and the effects of these growth models on tenants.

Chris De Gruyter is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainability and Urban Planning in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies. He undertakes teaching and research in the area of transport and land use planning, with a focus on understanding the impacts of new residential development on the transport system. Chris was previously an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow in the Centre for Urban Research where he investigated the impacts of the apartment boom on public transport in Australian cities.

Prior to joining RMIT University, Chris was a Research Fellow and Deputy Director in the Public Transport Research Group at Monash University. He also worked in transport planning for 12 years, both with the Victorian government and in consulting. Chris' wider research interests span the areas of public transport, land use planning, travel demand management, and parking policy.

Professor Karien Dekker works at RMIT University in the school of Property, Construction and Project Management. She is currently a Chief Investigator on a project on housing solutions for temporary migrants in Australia. She writes about social infrastructure and affordable housing in diverse communities.

Karien's life revolves around a greater desire to create inclusive communities in which everyone feels welcome. She is also passionate about affordable housing for all. To inform policy and public opinion, she interprets large datasets, while making sense of the findings with interviews and observations.

Jago Dodson is Professor of Urban Policy at RMIT University and works as the Director of the Urban Futures Enabling Impact Platform in the Research and Innovation Portfolio. 

Jago has an extensive record of research into urban problems addressing a wide array of housing, transport, urban planning, urban policy, governance, infrastructure, energy, and spatial labour market questions, often with a suburban dimension. Jago's research record includes more than 140 publications including two authored books, two edited collections, conference papers, journal articles, working papers, opinion articles, and external reports. He has been awarded research funding from major scientific bodies including the Australian Research Council Discovery, Linkage and LIEF schemes, the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Natural Hazards Research Australia, the iMove Collaborative Research Centre, the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network, and the European Union Horizon 2020 scheme.

Jago has led major urban research concentrations in Australian universities, including Director of the Urban Research Program at Griffith University (2011-2014), and Director of the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University (2014-2023).

Among various external roles, Jago has served as convener of the Australasian Cities Research Network (2012-2016) and was coordinating editor for the Australian Academy of Science Decadal Plan for Urban Systems Transformation (2019-2024). He convened the 2017 Australasian Housing Researchers Conference and co-convened the 2021 National Conference on the State of Australian Cities.

Jago has served as an expert assessor to major scientific bodies, including the Australian Research Council, the New Zealand National Science Challenges and Endeavour programs, the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council, and the US National Science Foundation.

Jago has collaborated with international urban policy agencies including UN Habitat, the OECD, Cities Alliance and Vietnam Australia Centre on the development of national-level urban policies across the globe. He has contributed extensively to scholarly, policy and public debates on urban problems in Australia and internationally, with more than 300 instances of media reportage, including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the Australian and the ABC.

Jago welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD scholars on topics relevant to his expertise.

Louise is a human geographer specialising in urban housing, home and the everyday politics of construction. Her work examines how apartments, modular and off-site construction, and other building methodologies shape residents’ daily lives, and how residents reinterpret and adapt to these systems. She focuses on what these lived experiences mean for future housing models and urban governance in Australia and Europe.

A Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University, Louise holds an ARC DECRA Fellowship (2024-2028) supporting her research on the lived experience of innovative housing. Her aim is to bring grounded evidence to debates on housing quality, sustainability and the long-term implications of construction innovation.

Louise collaborates with builders, manufacturers, developers, state and local governments, industry associations and policy-makers to understand how construction approaches and regulatory frameworks shape everyday life in apartments. She is particularly interested in the gaps between the promises of innovation and the realities experienced by households.

Her work is relevant to organisations exploring modular, off-site and mass-timber delivery; housing quality and resident wellbeing; medium- and high-density living; and the material politics of sustainability.