Research Fellows
Dr Edith Arndt
Edith is an alpine ecologist and research fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her past research focused on investigating soil nitrogen pools and transformations in alpine ecosystems, as well as root nitrogen uptake, in relation to temperature and fire. Working in the Victorian government in the areas of environmental monitoring, evaluation and outcome reporting, remote sensing, and data management have equipped her with an understanding of government processes and land management. Her current work includes improving the effectiveness of engaging the community about general surveillance.
Dr Chris Baker
Chris is an applied mathematician with an interest in invasive species. He has worked across government and academia on a variety of topics. This includes researching models for managing antimicrobial resistance, invasive species management and COVID preparedness. He has a particular interest in the overlap between ecology and epidemiology and how decision science can be better used to inform epidemic management.
Dr John Baumgartner
John is a computational ecologist with a research background exploring the potential impacts of climate change on biodiversity. His research involves developing software tools and applying quantitative methods to support conservation and biosecurity decision-making. John has a keen interest in data analysis, and enjoys nice maps and code golf.
Nathaniel Bloomfield
Nathaniel holds a Bachelor of Philosophy from the Australian National University, majoring in theoretical chemistry. He has two and a half years experience working in the plant health monitoring team and completed the graduate program at the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES).
Dr Richard Bradhurst
Richard specialises in the fusion of multiple modelling approaches (mathematical, agent-based and cellular automata), to simulate the spread and control of emergency animal disease, plant and environmental pests, and human disease. He is the co-creator and principal developer of the AADIS (Australian Animal Disease Spread) model, the EuFMDiS (European Transboundary Animal Disease) model, and the APPDIS (Australian Priority Pest and Disease) model. He collaborates with the Australian Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, Biosecurity Queensland, WA DPIRD, VIC DEDJTR, NSW DPI, the New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the Center for Epidemiology and Animal Health within the United States Department of Agriculture, the European Food Safety Authority, MCRI, CFIA, CSIRO, and the state veterinary services of many European countries.
Dr Anca Hanea
Anca is an applied mathematician and a research fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests and experience lie in high dimensional dependence modelling, risk analysis, decision theory, probabilistic graphical models, and structured expert judgement. Her current research is focused on structured expert judgement elicitation and aggregation methods for Bernoulli distributed random variables.
Dr Sean Haythorne
Sean is a multidisciplinary researcher and educator with a background in computer science and ecological modelling. As well as having experience as an IT teaching academic, he has been collaboratively developing computational solutions for biological science for several years. In his role as a research software engineer at CEBRA he is helping develop cloud-based software tools for the biosecurity research and operational science community.
Martina Hoffmann
Martina is a statistical research assistant, communications officer and tutor at the University of Melbourne. She holds a double degree in actuarial studies and science (mathematics and statistics). After completing the graduate program at the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES), Martina worked in Border Compliance at the then Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. As well as conducting statistical research, she also manages the communications at CEBRA. She is interested in science communication and data visualisation.
Les Kneebone
Les holds a Masters in Arts, majoring in History and Philosophy of Science, and Graduate Diploma in Information Management. He has held information management roles in public, research and non-profit organisations since 2004. His research interests include semantic web solutions for improving research platforms, and metadata for research, policy and education collections.
Christine Li
Christine is an environmental economist and holds an honours degree in economics from the University of Melbourne. She has experience in policy and analysis from working at Deloitte Access Economics, the Department of Treasury and Finance and Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning. Her current work involves creating tools for biosecurity decision-making and estimating global crop yield damage functions for climate impact modelling.
Dr David Rolls
David is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. With a focus on “randomness” and applied research, his work spans mathematics and statistics. His early research included statistical network modelling and network epidemiology, particularly on the transmission and treatment of hepatitis C. More recently, David was a Senior Health Statistician in CSIRO’s digital health research programme, working with stakeholders across government, industry, and the public health sector. Some key contributions from that research were the development of decision support tools using advanced analytics to improve health system efficiency, and the evaluation of health care products and programmes. His current research at CEBRA includes the use of statistical approaches for biosecurity risk analysis.
Dr Raphael Trouvé
Raphael is a forest modeller and research fellow at the University of Melbourne. His past research focussed on developing methods to quantify the interactive effect of management and climate change on forest dynamics. His current work includes developing robust forest dynamic models to forecast stand trajectories under future conditions, exploring alternative statistical inference frameworks for biosecurity border inspection, and using statistical and machine learning methods to gather intelligence about the biosecurity risk associated with different plant import pathways.