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 is an Associate Professor in Social Policy at the University of New South Wales and a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She specialises in the study of welfare states, especially their delivery of employment services and ‘mission drift’. Her recent research focuses on the delivery of contracted employment services. She also has an interest in animal welfare legislation, ethics and environmental matters.

Dr Michael McGann

Dr Michael McGann is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute (MUSSI). He 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. His current research involves a study of the governance of activation in Ireland, looking at the impact of recent marketisation reforms on how public employment services are delivered.

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 Postdoctoral Research Fellow working on ARC Linkage Project titled ‘The new digital governance of welfare-to-work’. 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. Prior this she worked for 5 years in the Australian Public Service, where she developed a deep interest in public administration, knowledge sharing and evidence-based policy.