World-leading research powering tomorrow’s big ideas

Professor

Prof Xiaojing Hao obtained her PhD in the School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering of UNSW in 2010, and currently the full Professor (tenured), ARC future Fellow at UNSW. Prof Hao has focused her research on low-cost, high-efficiency thin film solar cells and tandem solar cells for more than ten years, researching on various energy materials, initially using Si, and then earth-abundant compound semiconductor materials such as chalcogenides for both solar photovoltaic and solar fuel applications. Prof Hao now leads a strong group in the above areas, achieving a number of efficiency records on emerging thin film solar cells. Prof Hao has published 166 peer-reviewed journal papers, including publications in Nature Energy, Energy and Environmental Science, with several awards for her research excellence. She was the recipient of Inaugural Australian Renewable Energy Agency Postdoc Fellow, previous ARC DECRA, inaugural Sciential Fellow at UNSW. She was awarded a number of prestigious national prizes, including 2020 Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science: Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year, 2021 Australian Academy of Science Pawsey Medal.

Professor

Richard Holden is Professor of Economics at UNSW Business School, Director of the Economics of Education Knowledge Hub @UNSWBusiness, co-director of the New Economic Policy Initiative, and President of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Prior to that he was on the faculty at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

He received an AM and a PhD in economics from Harvard University. His research focuses on contract theory, organizational economics, law and economics, and political economy. He has written on topics including: network capital, political districting, the boundary of the firm, incentives in organizations, mechanism design, voting rules, and blockchain. 

Professor Holden has published in top general interest journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, and Nature. He is currently editor of the Journal of Law and Economics. 

He has been a Visiting Professor of Economics at  the MIT Department of Economics and the MIT Sloan School of Management,  Visiting Professor of Economics at the Harvard Economics Department, and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School and Columbia Law School.

He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, a Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW, a Distinguished Fellow of the Luohan Academy, and a Senior Academic Fellow at the e61 Institute.

His research has been featured in press articles in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Economist, and The New Republic. Professor Holden appears regularly as a media commentator, and has published opinion pieces in outlets including the Australian Financial Review, the Australian, the New York Times, The New Republic, Times Higher Education, and the Sydney Morning Herald. He is a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review.

Scientia Professor

Professor Jane McAdam AO BA (Hons) LLB (Hons) (Sydney) DPhil (Oxford) is Scientia Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Sydney, where she leads the Evacuations Research Hub. She is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, and a Fellow of both the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of Law. She is an Honorary Associate of the Refugee Studies Centre in Oxford and a Senior Associate of the Refugee Law Initiative in London. She has held visiting appointments at Oxford and Harvard, and was previously a non-resident Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at The Brookings Institution in Washington DC.

Professor McAdam publishes widely in international refugee law and forced migration, with a particular focus on mobility in the context of climate change and disasters. Her prestigious Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship examines the legal underpinnings and practical challenges of evacuations across a range of contexts, including conflict, disasters and other humanitarian crises. Her legal analysis of both refugee law and climate-related displacement has been adopted by courts, governments and UN bodies, and her work has been highly influential in the development of international, regional and national policy frameworks. She was instrumental in drafting the International Law Association’s Sydney Declaration of Principles on the Protection of Persons Displaced in the context of Sea Level Rise in 2018, for instance, and was appointed in 2022 to lead the drafting of the Pacific Regional Framework on Climate Mobility.

Professor McAdam serves on multiple international committees, including the International Law Association’s Committee on International Law and Sea-Level Rise (as Co-Rapporteur until 2018); the Advisory Committee of the Platform on Disaster Displacement; the Climate Migration Council; the Advisory Board of the Yearbook of International Disaster Law; the Academic Advisory Board of the Center on Forced Displacement, Boston University; and the Advisory Council of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion. She is joint Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Refugee Law, the leading journal in the field. She has been an expert advisor to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration and the World Bank, and she is a member of the Technical Working Group on Climate Mobility for the Pacific Resilience Partnership. In 2024, she was appointed by the Australian Immigration Minister to the Ministerial Advisory Council on Skilled Migration Expert Sub-Committee.

In 2017, Professor McAdam received the Calouste Gulbenkian Prize for Human Rights for her work on refugees and forced migration. She was honoured as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum; named among Australia’s top ten Women of Influence, winning the ‘global’ category of the Australian Financial Review/Westpac’s 100 Women of Influence awards in 2015; and in 2017, she was one of four finalists for the NSW Premier’s Award for Woman of the Year. In 2021, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) ‘for distinguished service to international refugee law, particularly to climate change and the displacement of people’. In 2022, she received the Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2022 Law Award.

Scientia Professor

Vlado Perkovic is the Provost at UNSW Sydney, and previously the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health and Scientia Professor at UNSW, a Professorial Fellow at The George Institute, Australia, and was a Staff Specialist in Nephrology at the Royal North Shore Hospital. His research focus is clinical trials and epidemiology, in particular, in preventing the progression of kidney disease and its complications. He leads several major international clinical trials and serves on the Steering Committees of several others. He has been involved in developing Australian and global guidelines in kidney disease, cardiovascular risk assessment and blood pressure management.

Vlado holds a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Melbourne and completed his undergraduate training at The Royal Melbourne Hospital. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and of the American Society of Nephrology.

Scientia Professor

Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Professor Veena Sahajwalla is an internationally recognised materials scientist, engineer and inventor revolutionising recycling science. She is renowned for pioneering the high temperature transformation of waste in the production of a new generation of ‘green materials.’  In 2018 Veena launched the world's first e-waste microfactory and in 2019 she launched her plastics microfactory, a recycling technology breakthrough. As the founding Director of the Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, she is producing a new generation of green materials and products made entirely, or primarily, from waste. Veena also heads the ARC Industrial Transformation Research Hub for ‘green manufacturing’, a leading national research centre that works in collaboration with industry to ensure new recycling science is translated into real world environmental and economic benefits. In 2019 she was appointed inaugural Director of the Circular Economy Innovation Network by the NSW Government through its Office of Chief Scientist and Engineer. In 2019, she was honoured by Engineers Australia as a Centenary Hero for her work. In 2018 she was elected as Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. In 2016, Veena was named one of Australia’s Most Innovative Engineers and in 2015, Veena named Australia’s 100 Most Influential Engineers, both by Engineers Australia. In 2013, Veena received the ‘Howe Memorial Lecture Award’, Pittsburgh, USA in appreciation for her lecture on ‘The Power of Steelmaking – harnessing high temperature reactions to transform waste into raw material resources’.

Scientia Professor

Professor Simmons is the Founder and CEO of Silicon Quantum Computing and the Director of the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology. As an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, she has pioneered unique technologies internationally to build electronic devices in silicon at the atomic scale, including the world's smallest transistor, the narrowest conducting wires, 3D atomic electronics and the first two qubit gate using atom-based qubits in silicon. Her team is at the forefront of the global race to develop a quantum computer in silicon. Michelle is one of a handful of researchers in Australia to have twice received an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship and now a Laureate Fellowship. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the American Association of the Advancement of Science, the UK Institute of Physics, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering and the Australian Academy of Science.

In 2018 Professor Simmons was named Australian of the Year, one of the nation’s pre-eminent awards.

Scientia Professor

Toby Walsh is Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales, research group leader at Data61, adjunct professor at QUT, external Professor of the Department of Information Science at Uppsala University, an honorary fellow of the School of Informatics at Edinburgh University and an Associate Member of the Australian Human Rights Institute at UNSW.

He was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and of AI Communications. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of the ACM, Journal of Automated Reasoning and the Constraints journal. He has been elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and the European Coordinating Committee for AI in recognition of his reseach in artificial intelligence and service to the community. He has won the NSW Premier's Prize for Excellende in Engineering and ICT, the Humbolt Award, the Research Excellence Award of the Association for Constraint Programming and the .IJCAI Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award. He has been Secretary of the Associtation for Constraint Programming (ACP) and is Editor of CP News, the newsletter of the ACP. He is one of the Editors of the Handbook for Constraint Programming, and the Handbook for Satisfiability.

He has been Program and Conference Chair of the main conferences in Constraint Programming, Automated Reasoning and Artificial Intelligence.