Our Staff

Alex Newman is Professor of Management and Associate Dean (International) for the Faculty of Business and Law at Deakin University as well as the Director of Deakin CREATE. He has published widely in the areas of leadership, business ethics and corporate social responsibility, refugee and migration studies, organizational and occupational psychology, positive psychology and human resource management.

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.

Alex is presently conducting research with non-governmental organizations and social enterprises examining the effectiveness of training programmes and internships in supporting refugees to re-establish their careers, and the policies adopted by organizations towards employing people from a refugee background.

Karen is the Deputy 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.

Luke Macaulay is a Research Fellow and the coordinator of the careers clinic for people from a refugee background at Deakin CREATE. 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.

Dr Jo Ingold is an Associate Professor of Human Resource Management at Deakin Business School. 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 Deputy 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 an Associate 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 Center on International Security and cooperation (CISAC). Her research focuses on international law and politics, humanitarian law, and the impact of legal labels on social attitudes, including attitudes and beliefs about refugees.

Dr Krebs’ scholarship has been published at leading international law journals (such as the Harvard National Security Journal) and has been supported by a number of research grants, including, most recently, from the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre. Her publications granted her several awards, including the David D. Caron Prize (American Society of International Law, 2021), the Vice-Chancellor’s Early Career Researcher Award for Career Excellence (Deakin University, 2019), the Lucinda Jordan Research Award (Deakin University, 2018), and the American Society of International Law ‘New Voices’ recognition (2016).

Krebs earned her Doctorate and Master Degrees from Stanford Law School, 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 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.

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 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.

Lucy Taksa is Professor Management in the Deakin Business School. 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.

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.

Dr 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.

Bis Hakimi is currently working as a part-time research assistant at Deakin CREATE. He came to Australia in 2013 as unaccompanied minor when he was 17 years old and successfully completed his VCE in 2016. Bis holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting and financial planning from Swinburne University of Technology and Bis is currently studying Master of Business Analytics at Deakin University Burwood Campus.

Besides to his full-time study and role at Deakin CREATE, he also works casually for Business and Society Journal and Journal of Industrial Relations for Deakin university. In addition to his casual, part-time works and full time study, he has also volunteered for Red Cross at one of its op shop as a sale assistant, and City of Greater Dandenong Council, delivering books to elderly in the community and he was selected as one of three CPA brand ambassador for Swinburne university to promote CPA brand to accounting and finance students in the campus.

Bis has a great passion for self-learning, leadership and communication skills. In 2019 he received an Emerging Leadership Award and Golden key International Honour Society Award from Swinburne University of Technology and Bis was the president for 2020-2021 Dandenong_Mulgrave Toastmaster.

Nwe Nwe Lwin is the Project Manager at Deakin CREATE as well as a Research Fellow casually working for Dr Shiri Krebs on the Law and Policy Theme of Australian Government Cybersecurity Cooperative Research Centre and the Refugee Legal Label projects at Deakin Law School. At the weekends, she also serves as the Executive Director for the Spring University Myanmar’s Institute of Human Rights and Democratic Governance contributing to the interim education needs for Myanmar during the current political crisis.

She is a lawyer by training with an LL.M. from the University of Notre Dame and an LL.B. from the City University of Hong Kong. Before she commences her current roles, she worked for the National Unity Government of Myanmar as a Legal Advisor.

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.