Research team

Professor Mark Considine

Professor Mark Considine is Professor of Political Science at the University of Melbourne. He is one of Australia’s most respected political scientists, with a career spanning both academic research and applied policy work for government and civil society organisations. He and his collaborators have won numerous major international research prizes, including the Marshall Dimmock Award (2000) and the Jan Kooiman Award (2013), for their comparative work on the contracting of employment services and the governance of welfare-to-work program delivery.

Mark has been an advisor to the OECD Local Economic and Employment Development Program, and has worked with state and federal governments in the design of social services and strategies for place-based innovation. He assisted the Brumby Government with its review of employment programs and was seconded by the Gillard Government to the departmental Working Group to review the jobactive Star Ratings system. He was later appointed to chair the federal Working Groups charged with developing a quality measure for rating job agencies.

Professor Jenny M. Lewis

Professor Jenny Lewis is Professor of Public Policy at the University of Melbourne, and was the Founding Director of the Policy Lab at the University of Melbourne. Jenny is the Associate Dean of Research for the Faculty of Arts, and is currently President of the International Research Society for Public Management.

The author of six books and more than 70 journal articles and book chapters, Jenny is one of Australia’s most respected experts on public policy, with a career spanning policy roles in state treasury departments, academic research, and applied policy work for government organisations. This has included consulting for the Department for Victorian Communities on approaches to evaluating community development partnerships, and assisting the National Public Health Partnership and VicHealth to develop strategic public health priorities.

Associate Professor Siobhan O’Sullivan

Associate Professor Siobhan O’Sullivan was an Associate Professor in Social Policy at the University of New South Wales and a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She specialised in the study of welfare states, especially their delivery of employment services and ‘mission drift’. Her recent research focused on the delivery of contracted employment services.

Siobhan was a pivotal member of the Welfare to Work team from 2008 to 2023.

Dr Michael McGann

Dr Michael McGann specialises in the sociology of work and social policy on employment, with a particular focus on issues related to welfare-to-work and the marketisation of public employment services as well as ageing and employment.

From 2020 - 2022, he led the EU Horizon 2020 project, Governing Activation in Ireland. Prior to rejoining Melbourne, I was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Social Sciences Institute of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Previously, I was also an ARC Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne (2012-2019) and a researcher for the Parliament of Victoria's Family and Community Development Committee and the Brotherhood of St Laurence's Research and Policy Centre.

Dr Phuc Nguyen

Dr Phuc Nguyen is a Senior Lecturer at La Trobe University, Australia. Before joining La Trobe University in 2018, Dr Phuc Nguyen was a lecturer at the Foreign Trade University in Vietnam, and a research fellow at the University of Melbourne (Australia). She also worked as an import-export specialist. Her current research interests include welfare state, especially the delivery of employment services; and service supply chain management. She has published three book chapters and nearly 20 journal articles in Public Management Review, Journal of Social Policy, Public Administration, Journal of Social Policy and Administration, Australian Journal of Political Science and Third Sector Review.

Dr Sarah Ball

Dr Sarah Ball is a lecturer in public policy. She is currently working on the ARC Linkage Project titled ‘The new digital governance of welfare-to-work’ and an ESRC project exploring 'Ethics and expertise in times of crisis: Learning from international varieties of ethics advice'.

Prior to this she completed her PhD at the Institute of Social Science Research at the University of Queensland. Her research explored the use of behavioural insights and experimental methods in the development of social policy in the Australian Federal Government. She has worked for both the Australian Public Service Commission and the Department of Social Services, where she developed a deep interest in public administration, knowledge sharing and evidence-based policy.

Dr Corey Carter

Dr Corey Carter is a postdoctoral researcher on the ARC Linkage Project titled ‘The new digital governance of welfare-to-work’. He holds a PhD in economics from Federation University and specialises in factors affecting labour force participation and employment in regional areas. Prior to his current role, he served as a research fellow studying labour force participation in the Latrobe-Gippsland region as part of a project commissioned by the Latrobe Valley Authority and the Victorian State Government.