FROM PHD TO INDUSTRY SUCCESS

Faced with increasingly frequent and severe natural hazards, fire, emergency and land management agencies rely upon new knowledge, information, and tools to make critical decisions now more than ever.

At the forefront of meeting these challenges are PhD candidates and graduates, who drive decision-making, pose difficult questions, and identify solutions.

After completing her CRC PhD in 2011 with La Trobe University, Dr Cooper worked at the Country Fire Authority as an Operational Doctrine Adviser, looking at building human factors into training, and writing procedures and policies. She then moved to Emergency Management Victoria, working as a director on multi-agency projects and state-based reform initiatives.

Dr Cooper’s PhD research looked at the human factors in firefighting and developed a greater understanding of how worst cases can improve decisionmaking by bushfire fighters. She has tailored training recommendations for fire agencies that complement their existing structures, greatly improving safety in decision-making.

“One of the incredible benefits from my connection to the Bushfire CRC was having links across Victoria and nationally. It was great having that connection to end users and fire agencies, and access to people at things like the AFAC conferences and

The natural hazards postgraduate program began with the Bushfire CRC in 2003, continued with the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC in 2013, and is now in place at Natural Hazards Research Australia. This program has greatly contributed to current research and to the capability of the emergency management and resilience sector.

It was a central pillar of the Bushfire CRC’s work to improve Australia’s ageing emergency management research sector, and since its inception has supported 230 postgraduates: 80 with the Bushfire CRC and a further other research events. It gave me a much better understanding of what’s going on across different jurisdictions. As most of the work I do is multiagency complex projects, having those skills on how to bring people together and knowing who to tap into has been really important and a key part of what I learnt through the CRC,” Dr Cooper said.

150 with the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC.

These former students are providing lasting research capability for the industry, with many now filling senior roles in fire and land management agencies and academia. They are regular attendees and presenters at industry conferences, sharing the latest natural hazards science and innovation. Below is a snapshot of a few of these former students and the industry-wide impact they have had since completing their research.

Before completing her CRC PhD with RMIT University in 2009, Dr Wright had already developed a satellite model to assess grassland curing and feed the data she collected into agency readiness and fire behaviour modelling and calculations. Her model was adopted and put into practice by the NSW Rural Fire Service.

Upon her graduation, Dr Wright was offered a position with the Country Fire Authority, where she has worked for more than ten years in the Research and Development team. There, she has been the lead end user of two Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC projects – Fire Surveillance and Hazard Mapping, and Creation of a Grassland Curing Dataset.

Dr Wright’s main work at the Country Fire Authority has been to develop the MapVictoria satellite curing model and the Victorian Improved Satellite Curing Algorithm. These have been used by agencies in Victoria, NSW, Queensland, the ACT, SA, and Tasmania, and the data they have collected have been fed into the Australian Fire Danger Rating System for curing assessment.

“It has been a journey for grassland curing development, but I would never have got where I am now without the Bushfire CRC. In the last few months, I have been contacted by New Zealand as they now want to adopt my approach and test my satellite curing model. I’m very grateful for the CRC to have had this opportunity. Before I started my PhD, I didn’t know anything about curing or satellite remote sensing; it has become my expertise and I’m very happy with where I am,” she said.

Dr Aires has been the lead end user on three research projects with the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC— Mapping Bushfire Hazard and Impacts, Optimisation of Fuel Reduction Burning Regimes, and From Hectares to Tailor Made Solutions for Risk Mitigation— guiding researchers on practitioners’ needs and working with fire and land management agencies to embed research findings into practice.

Dr Aires’ PhD investigated the leaf traits and combustion features of invasive woody plants in forests of eastern Australia, focusing particularly on olives. After completing his CRC PhD in wildland firefighting and investigation with the University of Sydney in 2014, he continued at the university as an academic tutor and then as a teaching and research assistant, collecting, processing, and analysing soil and vegetation samples. His research is helping decisionmakers take the right course of action when fighting fires in invaded areas.

Dr Morris worked as a NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service ranger in the Illawarra before becoming an advisory member on the Service’s South Coast Regional Advisory Committee. A stint lecturing at the Australian Catholic University led to a Senior Honorary Fellowship at the University of Wollongong, followed by work as a NSW Department of Planning and Environment ranger in the Five Islands.

Through her CRC PhD, completed in 2013 at the University of Adelaide, Dr Morris looked at the effect of prescribed burning on sediment movement in the Mount Lofty Ranges. She assessed and applied existing erosion models to identify areas of high erosion potential following fire. Through this research, a network of erosion pins and sediment plots was installed to monitor sediment movement before, after, within, and adjoining proposed prescribed burns.

Dr Edwards has been involved in vegetation sampling, burnt area mapping, data collation, and analysis of a long-term monitoring program in three of the large national parks in northern Australia, including the World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park. His regional geographic information system, including high-resolution fire history and habitat mapping over the 28,000 sq km West Arnhem Land region, became part of the savanna burning methodology for greenhouse gas emissions abatement accepted by the Australian Government's Carbon Farming Initiative. His research continues to improve savanna health and carbon abatement programs.

Through his CRC research, spanning both the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC and Bushfire CRC, Dr Edwards helped to develop the Savanna Monitoring and Evaluation Reporting Framework. The Framework provides agencies with the ability to monitor their fire management activities and evaluate their effects, providing a single point to assess and compare the outcomes across 70% of the continent. Displayed on the Northern Australia Fire Information website, this is being used for operations, planning, and suppression, and is analysed to describe past and present fire regimes.

Dr Edwards graduated with a CRC PhD from Charles Darwin University in 2009, where he developed an algorithm for mapping fire impact on fire-prone tropical savannah vegetation through satellite sensing. This mapping has become part of the Darwin Centre for Bushfire Research’s North Australia Fire Information website, providing land managers of the nearly 2 million sq km of tropical savannah landscape in north Australia with additional information to better manage fire in the region. The mapping can also be included in future savannah-burning methodologies.

Dr Hayes co-led the Improving Decision Making in Complex Multi-team Environments Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC project, which developed simple, practical tools to manage teamwork, improve decision-making, and develop more creative solutions. It considered how organisations use the outcomes of research and developed a guide to help agencies do so more effectively. A guide to non-technical skills in emergency management is a first of its kind, helping practitioners to deepen their understanding and use of non-technical skills. It introduces and highlights the importance of these skills, identifies some of the issues that can occur from having inadequate skills, and describes tools that can help practitioners better use these skills in emergency situations.

Dr Hayes’ CRC PhD research, conducted at La Trobe University, investigated decision-making in incident management teams and explored the differences between pre-formed teams and those pulled together at short notice. After completing his PhD, Dr Hayes joined the Kaplan Business School, overseeing the development and delivery of undergraduate and postgraduate business statistics and business information systems subjects as the Academic Head of Quantitative Analysis, Methods, and Business Information Systems. He was also part of a Bushfire CRC research team that interviewed bushfire-affected residents around Yass, Shoalhaven, and Coonabarabran, NSW, in January 2013 at the request of the NSW Rural Fire Service.

Dr de Sisto has developed a national grid for evaluating bushfire educational and informational messages. He focused his PhD research, which he completed in 2017, on how fire and land management agencies in Australia and Italy collaborated on intelligence from bushfire investigations. The findings of his research have provided agencies with a better understanding of knowledge sharing.

Dr Parackal has been involved with wind tunnel testing, strength testing of building products, collecting wind speed data during cyclones, and post-event damage investigations. He is also a researcher on Natural Hazards Research Australia’s new project, Streamlining SWIRLnet Data Acquisition, Analysis, Storage and Dissemination Procedures.

After completing his CRC PhD in structural engineering in 2018, Dr Parackal joined the Improving the Resilience of Existing Housing to Severe wind Events CRC project. He also led the development of a new website called Weather the Storm, (www.weatherthestorm.com.au), which informs homeowners about how to improve their home’s key structural connections against extreme wind. The website is packed with helpful information about how to improve the strength and safety of a house, guiding users through three levels of protection: general maintenance, window and door protection, and, for maximum protection, roof tie-down retrofitting.

Dr Parackal’s PhD examined the dangers of losing fasteners on the roof of a home during a cyclone. To do this, he used a wind tunnel to test the connections and surveyed past cyclone damage, then created a model that demonstrates progressive and cascading failures within a simulation. His research has led to the design and construction of more resilient structural systems and the development of techniques for retrofitting existing structures.

Since 2012, Dr Pooley has worked as a Senior Firefighter with Fire and Rescue NSW, first in the Community Engagement Unit and now in the Fire Investigation and Research Unit.

Most recently, Dr Pooley and her colleague Mark Owens from the Country Fire Authority took out the inaugural 2022 Disaster Challenge Final with their innovative idea to use wi-fi to inform tourists about preparing for disasters at their holiday destination.

Dr Pooley completed her PhD in 2018 with the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Her research was an evaluation of Youth Justice Conferencing that was convened to address youth misuse of fire in NSW. The same year she was awarded an Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award for her research and in 2022 received the Australian Fire Service Medal as part of the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in recognition of her contributions to prevention programs and community fire safety.

Since then, Dr Pooley has worked as a research assistant with the School of Justice at QUT, a senior research analyst with the Australian Institute of Criminology and a freelance research consultant for the Department of Fire and Emergency Services.

“I feel very fortunate to have been supported by the CRC during my PhD candidature. I attended and presented at research forums and conferences around Australia, met some incredible people, accessed some very useful contacts, and made lifelong friends,” she said.

In a world where natural hazards continue to increase in frequency and severity, it is more important than ever to provide decision-makers with the skills and capabilities they need to make critical decisions to keep our communities safe. The CRC’s postgraduate research program is one important contribution to providing that capacity. As the varied experiences and achievements of the nine graduates described here show, postgraduate and early career researchers are valued within government, academia, and the emergency service agencies for their skills in applying critical thinking to Australia’s natural hazards.

Natural Hazards Research Australia’s education program is supporting the future research capability of the emergency management sector, with 20 students already on board as either a scholar, early career research fellow, or associate student. This number is rapidly increasing as more PhD and Master’s students are applying to engage with industry leaders and gain an understanding of the emergency management sector, its opportunities, and challenges.

Explore the natural hazards education programs and projects at: www.naturalhazards.com.au/ education-programs www.bnhcrc.com.au/education www.bushfirecrc.com/education.