Sir Roland Wilson Foundation

Matt is a Director at the Treasury and has been a member of the public service since 2009. His work has primarily focused on policy analysis on Australia’s tax and transfer system including revenue forecasting and costing and distributional analysis of tax and transfer policies using microsimulation modelling. Matt’s analysis has contributed to Budget updates and the 2021 Intergenerational Report. He has also been involved in major model development work on Treasury’s CAPITA and MARIA microsimulation models.

Matt’s research aims to use administrative data to build a dynamic microsimulation model of Australia’s tax and transfer system. This would deliver a durable tool for policy analysis that provides important insights on the sustainability and equity, both within and between generations, of personal tax and transfer policy settings. In doing so, it would build on the existing Australian toolkit of representative agent and cohort analysis to allow for the kinds of more granular and detailed distributional analysis to improve the debate around, and implementation of, public policy.

Andrew Perusco is a tobacco control policy and program specialist with over 20 years’ experience in the Commonwealth and NSW public services. Andrew has made significant contributions to tobacco control policy and program implementation, including leading: policy development and program implementation for the Tackling Indigenous Smoking program from 2016 to 2020; development of the National Tobacco Strategy 2012-2018; national policy approaches for electronic cigarettes; and planning, implementation and evaluation of the seminal Arabic-speakers tobacco control project in southwest Sydney.

Andrew is placed at the National Centre for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing Research, Australian National University and his research is affiliated with the National Health and Medical Research Council, Centre for Research Excellence in Achieving the Tobacco Endgame. Andrew’s research explores why tobacco endgame measures have not been incorporated into Australia’s tobacco control policies, and what might precipitate adoption.

Cecilia joined the public service in 2011 and is a Director at the Treasury. She has worked across a range of areas, including economic forecasting, health and disability policy, and tax and transfer microsimulation modelling. Most recently, she led the team developing Treasury’s macroeconometric model of the Australian economy and the National Economy and Forecasting Unit. She assesses and advises on the economic challenges facing the Australian Government, including the economic impact of COVID-19 and its implications for the Australian economy.

Through her PhD research, Cecilia will examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on immigration flows and what this means for emerging skills shortages in Australia. Cecilia aims to characterise the likely skill shortages in sectors heavily reliant on migrant labour. This will inform policy by assessing the extent to which labour markets will adjust themselves or whether government intervention may be necessary.

Cecilia holds a Master’s Degree in Economics of Public Policy from Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, and a First Class Honours degree in Economics and a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish from The University of Adelaide.

Nikolai has been in the Australian Public Service since 2012, where he has led specialist research and analysis at the Climate Change Authority and the Office of the Chief Economist within the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources.

Nikolai’s research examines a key climate policy challenge – reducing methane emissions from energy and agriculture – and how support for important climate policy reforms can build across industry, finance and civil society.

Kate is an epidemiologist and has been working at the Department of Health and Aged Care since 2008. Between 2020 and 2021, she worked in the National Incident Centre leading a team of epidemiologists and data analysts to provide evidence-based advice and to support public health response policies to the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to this, she worked on several other communicable diseases, including influenza, to support the formulation of responsive and effective public health policies and programs across government.

Through her PhD research Kate will examine the applicability of previous pandemic planning assumptions to the epidemiology and public health response for COVID-19. She will also evaluate the role of surveillance and modelling during the COVID-19 response, particularly in Australia, and identify key evidence requirements to enhance public health decision making during future pandemics.

View Lyndon's scholarship summary poster.

Lyndon has nearly 20 years’ experience as an applied survey statistician at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and has an excellent sense of the needs and pressures facing a statistical organisation. In recent years, he has driven initiatives at the ABS to develop new methods for using administrative data to produce more efficient statistics.

The increasing availability of large datasets promises to provide significant benefits for policy and decision making, however large datasets can contain inherent flaws. Through his PhD research, Lyndon aims to improve the way we harness and use externally sourced datasets alongside sample surveys to produce statistics that provide reliable conclusions.

Helen is an economist and former diplomat, currently one of a cadre of senior experts providing strategic advice to the Prime Minister and rest of government. She is also the inaugural Non-Resident Fellow for Economic Security at the United States Studies Centre. Helen previously worked at Treasury and served Australia in New York, South Africa and Mexico with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. She is trained in analytical tradecraft and speaks Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. 

Helen’s research draws on her expertise fusing economics, geopolitics and security for government. Today, economic security issues involve supply chains, growth and innovation as much as deterrence, commitment and pressure. This leads to tensions between the aims of economic security and statecraft policies. Helen has developed a rigorous framework to guide policymakers through these issues to find policies that can drive prosperity and add to regional deterrence and influence that will help Australia manage threats and develop new energy and technology systems. Helen's framework helps policymakers to identify and calibrate policies that move Australia towards desired economic security outcomes and find off-ramps away from unintended consequences or dangerous outcomes.