Claire is a proud Torres Strait woman who grew up on Badu Island. She joined the Australian Public Service in 2007 and has undertaken various leadership, policy, coordination and program management roles, predominantly in the Indigenous affairs portfolio. 

Education has been an area of significant focus throughout Claire’s career. Most recently she was responsible for the development of policy and strategies to contribute to improve educational outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander school students, which included national leadership and management of a number of flagship government initiatives.

Bec is a proud Wiradjuri woman born and raised In Wagga Wagga NSW. Bec commenced her public service career in 2014, in service delivery at Services Australia. She joined the Department of Environment and Energy as a graduate in 2017 after completing a Bachelor of Environmental Science. She has also worked for the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, with a focus on improving Indigenous Engagement and Partnerships in the Murray-Darling Basin. 

Bec aims to use the Master of Arts to gain a better understanding of Indigenous Engagement and Policy development in different contexts across Australia, and use these learnings to support the Australian Public Service to enhance Indigenous engagement practices.

Carrie has worked at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) since 2010. Most recently, she was a Director in the Data Integration Services Branch, leading a team of data engineers to build, maintain and enhance the Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA, formerly known as MADIP). In this role, Carrie oversaw significant expansion and enhancement of PLIDA to increase the frequency and timeliness of data updates and improve the usability of the data for researchers.

Through her work at the ABS, Carrie developed an appreciation of some common challenges experienced by government and academic researchers working with data from PLIDA. This inspired the topic of Carrie’s PhD research in the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at ANU, which aims to develop methods to identify cohorts of interest in integrated data assets such as PLIDA. Carrie hopes this work will assist government researchers to make better use of PLIDA for policy formulation and evaluation.