Our Staff

Karen is the Director at Deakin CREATE. She has worked, volunteered, researched and advocated in the refugee sector in Australia for the past 10 years and her research interests include progressing the field of refugee resettlement, principally focussing on career development and the impact access to tertiary education and training may have on the lives on refugees and people seeking asylum. Similarly, Karen’s research interests extend to investigating why some employers may or may not be actively including people with a refugee background, as part of their employment diversity and inclusion strategies.

Prior to her commencement with CREATE, Karen spent twenty years working in the tertiary education and corporate sectors, as well as running her own learning and development consultancy.  In addition to her day job, Karen consults and volunteers at several refugee and asylum seeker agencies in Melbourne, where among other things, she co-ordinates and provides food and material aid as well as supporting clients wishing to apply for tertiary education courses and scholarships.

Lucy Taksa is Professor of Management at Deakin Business School and Deputy Director of Deakin CREATE. She has undertaken research and published on various dimension of work, employment relations, employability and management of education, equity and diversity management, migrant employment and multiculturalism, labour and management history and tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Prior to her employment at Deakin, she fulfilled numerous leadership roles at UNSW and Macquarie University, including as Head of Department and Associate Dean Research.

Lucy was Director of the UNSW Industrial Relations Research Centre and the Centre for Workforce Futures at Macquarie University 1990-2009 and 2018-2021 respectively. Lucy was a part-time non-judicial member of the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal Equal Opportunity Division. She was a member of the NSW Ministerial Roundtable on Cultural Diversity in the Workplace and of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts. From 2015 until November 2021, she was a Non-Executive Board Member of Settlement Services International (SSI), a leading not-for-profit organisation providing a range of services for migrants and refugees in NSW, QLD and Victoria.

Professor Taksa has been the recipient of 7 Australian Research Council (ARC) grants and numerous industry funded grants. She is currently leading an ARC project on migrant ageing and wellbeing in Australia, and she is a chief investigator on two other ARC funded projects addressing various dimensions of industrial and environmental transformations in the Blue Mountains and Port Kembla in NSW. Her recent publications have focused on migrant workers, humanitarian migrants and migrant businesses, and gender.

Anna Xavier is an Associate Research Fellow at Deakin CREATE. Anna’s PhD research explored the role of education in integration for refugee-background students in regional Australia. Anna has a number of years’ experience working alongside and researching with refugee communities from Sri Lanka and Rohingya in Malaysia, particularly in the area of education.

Anna’s broader research interests include socially just education, researching in fragile contexts and refugee integration. As an interdisciplinary researcher, Anna has worked and published in several areas, including; inclusive, culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) and higher education.

Luke is a research fellow at Tampere University, Finland. Luke’s PhD research explored the experiences and perspectives of Australian Sudanese and South Sudanese youths in Melbourne, regarding the transition to adulthood. Luke has a number of years’ experience working with and advocating alongside African Australian communities from refugee backgrounds, particularly in the areas of youth employment and education.

Luke’s broader research interests include cultural experiences of becoming an adult, social and political belonging, and critical social theories. As an interdisciplinary researcher, Luke has worked and published in a number of areas including: refugee and migration studies, cultural studies, inclusive education, educational leadership, and higher education.

Jo Ingold is a Professor at Peter Faber Business School, Australian Catholic University. Jo has spent over two decades working in and around employability support services, in the third sector and in policy, research and people development in UK central government departments. Jo’s research, teaching and knowledge mobilisation activities fuse human resource management and public policy. She has published on: the employability and skills sector (programme design, delivery and workforce issues); business engagement in labour market policy; and the workplace inclusion of disadvantaged labour market groups, including refugees.

Jo is currently researching digital employment service delivery and the digital support needs of newly-unemployed job candidates during and post-Covid19. She is a regular advisor to the employability sector in the UK and Australia and is recognised for her expertise on improving employer engagement in employability and skills programmes. She has published articles on employment and labour market disadvantage in a range of top-ranked academic journals. She is a member of the Employment Related Services Association, a Fellow of the Institute of Employability Professionals, a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Work, Employment and Society, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, an Academic Member of the CIPD.

Professor Marilyn McMahon is Dean at Deakin Law School. She is also a registered psychologist. Her scholarship and publications are primarily in the areas of criminal law and procedure. She has presented papers at international and national conferences and seminars and in 2018 was awarded a Victorian Parliamentary Library Fellowship.

In addition to her academic work, Marilyn has been appointed to several independent statutory bodies including the Mental Health Tribunal, the Forensic Leave Panel and the Intellectual Disability Review Panel. She is also a member of the Australian Forensic Reference Group, a diverse group of scientists from various disciplines who provide independent advice to Victoria Police.

Marilyn earned her Doctorate (PhD) from La Trobe University, a Master of Forensic Psychology (M.Psych) and Graduate Diploma in Legal Studies (GDLP) from Monash University and a B.A.(Hons) in Psychology and LL.B (Law) from the University of Melbourne.

Shiri Krebs is a Professor of Law at Deakin University and Co-lead of the Law and Policy Theme at the Australian Government Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC). She is also an affiliated scholar at the Stanford University Center on International Security and cooperation (CISAC) and the Chair of the international Lieber Society on the Law of Armed Conflict. She is currently an Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA fellow (Government of Germany), conducting a research project on the regulation of predictive technologies in preventive counterterrorism legal process.

Her research focuses on behavioural approaches to international law, including the effects of predictive and visual technologies on military decision-making processes, at the intersection of law, science and technology. 

Her scholarship has been published at leading law journals and has been supported by a number of research grants (including, most recently, from the ARC, the CSCRC and the Humboldt Foundation). Her recent international and national research awards include the David D. Caron Prize (American Society of International Law, 2021), the ‘Academic/Researcher of the Year’ Award (Australian Women in Law Awards, 2022), the Australian Legal Research Awards, Article/Chapter (ECR) Category (finalist, 2022), Vice-Chancellor’s Mid-Career Researcher Award for Career Excellence (Deakin University, 2022), the ‘New Voices in international Law’ recognition (American Society of International Law, 2016; 2022), and the Franklin Award in International Law (Stanford University, 2015). Dr Krebs has taught in a number of law schools, including at Stanford University, University of Santa Clara, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she won the Dean’s award recognizing exceptional junior faculty members.

Krebs earned her Doctorate and Master Degrees from Stanford Law School with Honours, as well as LL.B. and M.A., both magna cum laude, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Dr Yuen Lam (Fannie) Bavik is a Lecturer at Deakin Business School. Prior to joining the academia, Fannie worked as a management associate in the Development Bank of Singapore in Hong Kong. Fannie studies the role of emotions in explaining individuals’ behaviours and social relationships in response to interpersonal, intergroup, and AI-human interaction processes (such as leader-member interactions, social comparison, social support provision, intergroup contact, and AI adoption at work) in the employment and organizational contexts.

Her recent projects investigate factors that influence social integration, attitude, and employment prospect of migrant workers and refugees. Her work has appeared in top management journals including Academy of Management Annals and The Leadership Quarterly.

Dr Tebeje Molla is a Discovery Early Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow in the School of Education at Deakin University, Australia. His research focuses on educational inequality and policy responses at systemic and institutional levels. Tebeje is currently leading a nationally funded project that explores higher education participation among African Australian youth from refugee backgrounds.

He has widely published on educational attainment and integration outcomes of refugee-background Africana youth. Theoretically, his work is informed by critical sociology and the capability approach to social justice and human development.

Dr Amy Nethery is a senior lecturer in politics and policy at Deakin University. She researches the development and impact of asylum policies in Australia and Asia. An important theme of her work is the analysis of asylum policy according to liberal and democratic norms of policymaking. She has a particular interest in immigration detention. Its history, diffusion, and human impact.

Dr Nethery’s scholarship has been published in leading international journals, including International of Human Rights and Political Geography. She is a partner in the Comparative Network on Refugee Externalisation Policies, funded by the European Commission. Dr Nethery teaches the subject ‘Politics of Asylum in Australia and Asia’, and supervises research students in this topic.

Alex Newman is Professor of Management and Associate Dean Faculty at Melbourne Business School. He is one of Australia’s leading researchers in the field of management. In the past two years he has been recognised by the Australian Research Magazine as Australia’s leading researcher across two sub-disciplines: human resources and organizations, and ethics. In 2022 he was also recognized by Clarivate as a highly cited researcher and in the same year was awarded the Mid-Career Award from the Careers Division of the Academy of Management.

Alex has published in leading journals including the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Human Resource Management, the Leadership Quarterly and the Journal of International Business Studies. Alex has also obtained multiple awards for research impact for the work he has done to support the career reestablishment of people from a refugee background including a Green Gown Award, an Australian Business Dean’s Council Award, an Emerald Real Impact Award, and Australian Financial Review Higher Education Award.

In recent years he has developed a programme of research that examines how can we support the integration of refugees and asylum seekers into the Australian workforce. From 2014-2017 he led an Australian Research Council funded research project examining the factors that underlie successful refugee integration in the Australian workplace. This project examined how organizations can support refugee integration into the Australian workplace and developed a training programme that focused on developing resilience and other psychological resources of refugees. He was also editor of the first special issue on the vocational behaviour of refugees in the Journal of Vocational Behavior. The special issue containing 12 articles focused on how refugees seek employment, overcome work-related challenges and navigate their careers after leaving their home country.

Dr Kim Robinson is a leading social work researcher with three decades of national and international expertise in working with asylum seekers and refugees. She works in collaboration with colleagues at both national and international levels that informs policy and practice in this field. Her publications and presentations at conferences advocate for ethical work with refugees and asylum seekers in health and social work settings.

Her research interests are human rights, strategies for community development and empowerment of CALD communities. She has published in the areas of asylum and refugee mental health, family violence, social justice issues with young unaccompanied minors facing deportation, refugee settlement, and refugee experiences of home and homemaking. Her publications are in Q1 journals in social work with a focus on practice and theory and ensure a wide readership.

Underpinning her work is a strong commitment to social justice, human rights, policy advocacy and practice leadership. Her research includes service users and services established to support new arrivals and people from refugee backgrounds, including mutual aid organisations.

Tana Penovic is an Associate Professor at Deakin University’s Law School. Her qualifications include a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws (Hons) from the University of Melbourne, a Master of Studies in International Human Rights Law with Distinction from the University of Oxford and a PhD from Monash University on Australian refugee law.

Tania served for a decade as a deputy director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law and has worked as a volunteer lawyer in the refugee sector in Australia and the United Kingdom. She has provided numerous submissions and invited expert testimony to federal government inquiries concerning refugee law and policy. Her research is published in leading Australian and international journals, including the UNSW Law Review, Federal Law Review and Cambridge International Law Journal and focuses on advancing access to justice, rights and remedies for vulnerable individuals, exploring the extent to which common law principles and civil proceedings can vindicate human rights arguments.

Professor Sue Webb is a Professor of Education at Monash University, Australia (now adjunct) and was previously Professor and Director of Continuing Education at the University of Sheffield, UK. She has researched the policy effects and practices related to access and participation of students from under-represented groups in the field of further and higher education, including the experiences of migrants and refugees.

Currently, she is leading a project funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP170101885 entitled – Vocational institutions, undergraduate degrees: distinction or inequality? Additionally, she has been collaborating with others in Monash University and Deakin University on a longitudinal qualitative study of the higher education experiences of people from asylum seeking backgrounds. She is also Co-Editor of the International Journal of Lifelong Education.

Dr. Katja Wehrle is a Research Fellow at the department of Work and Organizational Psychology at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen in Germany. In her work, she focuses on the intersection of career, migration, and identity research and particularly seeks to understand how people manage to adapt to challenging and/or involuntary career transitions. In doing so, she places a special emphasis on refugees’ vocational behavior, career re-establishment, and labour market integration.

Katja has published refugee research in the Journal of Vocational Behavior and is a contributing author to the Academy of Management Careers Division’s Best Symposium Award 2017 for the symposium “Refugees in Europe: Careers and Labor Market Integration”. She is currently a guest editor for the Special Issue on “Effective strategies for humanitarian migrants’ employment, inclusion and integration” in the Journal of International Management. Katja has several years of experiences working in the care of unaccompanied refugee minors and in the areas of the education and employment of migrants.

Hanne Worsoe is a research fellow at Deakin CREATE, holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Queensland. Graduated in 2021, her thesis was an anthropology of Australian asylum seeker and refugee policy, with fieldwork undertaken as a volunteer paralegal accompanying people going through Australia’s new “fast track” refugee processing.

She holds a Master of Development Practice, and a Graduate Certificate of Mediation and Conflict Resolution, and is a former classroom teacher, having also worked in state government in home education registration for seventeen years. Passionate about creating pathways to tertiary education for people disengaged from conventional educational pathways, for the past six years she has worked to develop access and scholarships to tertiary studies for people of asylum seeker and refugee backgrounds.

Shea Fan, Associate Professor in Human Resource Management at Deakin Business School.

Shea investigates how global mobility and cultural or ethnic diversity affect individuals, their interactions with others, and how organizations and society can help globally mobile individuals thrive and achieve their potential in new environments. Her research covers areas of international business, human resource management and business education. In particular, she has research expertise in a number of topics, including cross-cultural management, multinational corporation management, migrants, workplace loneliness diversity, implicit bias, social identity, bicultural identity and IT identity.

Shea’s research has appeared in top-tier international management journals such as the Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of World Business, and Human Resource Management and has been featured in media outlets, such as the Conversation, Human Resource Director, HR Daily, Business News Australia and ABC radio.

She was the chief primary investigator of two competitive grants sponsored by Australia Department of Foreign Affairs investigating sister cities and international collaboration of local governments. She also received philanthropic grants from Telematics researching the work rights of international students.

Dr Zitong Sheng is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Management, Deakin Business School. Zitong’s research revolves around using advanced quantitative methods to better understand how people behave at work. Her research aims to uncover the dynamics behind employees’ prosocial and proactive actions within the organisational context, with a special focus on the role of proactivity in facilitating migrant workers’ and refugees’ effective transition into the workforce. Her research Her work has appeared in leading management journals, including Journal of Applied Psychology, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Vocational Behavior, among others. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Applied Psychology: An International Review and Management and Organization Review.

Fara Azmat is an Associate Professor and director of the Principle of Responsible Management Education (PRME) at Deakin Business School, Australia.

Her research focuses on social responsibility, particularly within the domains of UN SDGs, social inclusion, migrant/disadvantaged populations, and social entrepreneurship.

Fara leads research themes and contributes to the SDG Blueprint. She has published extensively in prestigious journals such as the Journal of Business Ethics, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Journal of Business Research, and Business & Society. Additionally, Fara has successfully secured approximately AU$300,000 in external funding from public sector and other organizations for sustainability-related projects.

Gabrielle’s recent research is predominantly in health law, sentencing law and legal history. Her research relevant to CREATE examines issues concerning the registration and regulation of doctors from a refugee or asylum seeker background in Australia in the past and present. Gabrielle has published two books, six chapters in edited books, and over 40 articles in leading Australian and international peer-reviewed journals, including the University of New South Wales Law Journal, Public Law Review, American Journal of Legal History and Sydney Law Review. Gabrielle regularly presents her work at academic conferences.

Gabrielle’s recent research awards include a grant from The Francis Forbes Society for Australian Legal History (2023), the Deakin University Faculty of Business and Law Award for Research and Innovation (2023), and the Deakin University Vice-Chancellor’s Mid-Career Researcher Award for Career Excellence (2019).

Prior to joining Deakin Law School, Gabrielle worked as a judge’s research associate and as a lawyer in private practice and in-house, including in the area of the regulation of health practitioners.

Gabrielle obtained degrees in Arts (with Honours), Law, and a PhD in History from the University of Melbourne, and a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education Learning and Teaching from Deakin University.