UNSW Canberra student recognised for her research with Women in Defence Award

Image credit: Australian Defence Magazine

Chief of Defence Force Fellow and UNSW Canberra PhD student Lieutenant Commander Victoria Jnitova has received a Women in Defence Award for Research and Development.

The Women in Defence Awards celebrate exceptional women who have made a positive impact across the Australian Defence Force, Australian Public Service, or defence industries.

LCDR Jnitova was recently recognised as the defence community’s most outstanding researcher working on defence-related matters at the awards night held in Canberra.

Acknowledged for her perseverance and leadership, LCDR Jnitova’s research focuses on the measurement of resilience attributes within training systems as a complex function of six resilience attributes. Since commencing her research in 2017, LCDR Jnitova has successfully developed, piloted, verified, and validated a survey that has been utilised in more than 20 training establishments at different levels of aggregation. Many of the participating organisations reported benefits and expressed their interest in using the survey as an ongoing training management tool in the future.

“We have conducted the survey four times in different military training system contexts and for a variety of organisational purposes; from establishing a system resilience performance baseline, improvement of the organisational resilience monitoring and governance, and informing of the training system reforms,” LCDR Jnitova said.

Her research has since informed major reforms across the Royal Australian Navy and Air Force, with the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence responses from the four participating units are currently being analysed.

“I firmly believe that system engineering methodologies are instrumental in improving organisational design, performance measurement and resilience,” she said.

LCDR Jnitova continues to have her eyes set on the future, aiming to expand the resilience framework to implement into other system types such as commercial and government enterprises, safety systems and supply chains.

“I hope that this win will propel our project to the new development and implementation heights not anticipated earlier.”

Victoria Jnitova was one of many women in the Royal Australian Navy being recognised at the Women in Defence Awards. From left to right: POETSM Sara Clarke, LCDR Victoria Jnitova, LCDR Cerys Joyce, RADM Wendy Malcolm and CMDR Penelope Twemlow.

LCDR Jnitova was one of many women in the Royal Australian Navy and UNSW Canberra alumna recognised at the awards night. LCDR Jnitova, along with many others, are an example of the incredible and exemplar work occurring across defence industries.

“I am humbled by this recognition and want to congratulate an awesome team effort. With so many people contributing to this worthy project, it would not have evolved to its current level of maturity without the support of the Royal Australian Air Force, Royal Australian Navy, United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, UNSW Canberra, University of Adelaide and Cranfield University,” she said.

When asked for advice for others who may follow her footsteps, LCDR Jnitova said “be brave, speak out, actively seek champions if you have ideas, believe in yourself, your team and your organisation.”