Strategic Research Professors
The University has recognised 15 Designated Strategic Research Professors. These high calibre researchers have been employed by the University to enhance our research capacity. The majority of these Professors were appointed following consideration of applications made by Research Centre and Schools. In a few cases direct appointment of outstanding researchers has been undertaken. The current cohort is listed below together with their Research Centre/Affiliation. All Strategic Research Professors report to the DVC (Research).
- Professor John Kleinig: CAPPE (Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics) Professor Kleinig research interests are in ethics and social philosophy, where he is currently focusing on a variety of issues in professional and criminal justice ethics (including police and correctional ethics, and the philosophy of law). He is writing a book to be titled Loyalty and Loyalties that ranges from issues of friendship and familial bonds to broader concerns about organizational and patriotic loyalties. He also has an ongoing interest in medical ethics and the philosophy of education.
- Professor Larry May: CAPPE (Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics)
Professor May has published five single-authored books: The Morality of Groups (Notre Dame, 1987), Sharing Responsibility ( Chicago , 1992), The Socially Responsive Self ( Chicago , 1996), Masculinity and Morality (Cornell, 1998), and Crimes Against Humanity ( Cambridge , 2005). This last book, which won honourable mention from the American Society of International Law, and best book award from the North American Society for Social Philosophy, is the first volume of a trilogy on the normative foundations of international criminal law. The second volume, War Crimes and Just Wars ( Cambridge , forthcoming in 2007) won the Frank Chapman Sharp prize for the best book on the Philosophy of War and Peace from the American Philosophical Association. The third volume is titled “Aggression and Crimes Against Peace.” He has also co-authored, or co-edited, 12 other books, most recently a large anthology/textbook, The Morality of War (Prentice-Hall, 2006). - Professor Marilyn Friedman: CAPPE (Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics) Professor Marilyn Friedman's scholarship has explored the nature of close interpersonal relationships, women in poverty, care and justice, partiality and impartiality, autonomy, gender identity, and multicultural education. She has defended a moral framework that treats concerns of care and justice as being mutually relevant and interdependent. She has argued that women on welfare with young dependent children should have the option of receiving social support without having to work outside the home. She has defended the early second-wave distinction between sex and gender against recent feminist critics who argue that sex is as much a social construct as gender.
- Professor Kit Wellman : CAPPE (Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics) Professor Wellman works in ethics, specializing in political and legal philosophy. He is the author of A Theory of Secession and (with A. John Simmons) Is There A Duty To Obey The Law? The two topics on which he has written most extensively are our rights to political self-determination (including secession) and our political obligations (especially the duty to obey the law). He is currently working on a variety of practical and theoretical issues related to international law.
- Professor Allan Curtis: ILWS (Institute for Land, Water and Society)
Professor Curtis has an international reputation for research examining watershed organisations, the policy and institutional arrangements supporting catchment management, understanding rural landholder adoption, and in the evaluation of natural resource management programs. Allan’s research draws on theory across the fields of program evaluation, community engagement, capacity building, communications, volunteer management, extension and community education, and rural development. Recent experience has also included work exploring adaptive management, triple bottom line reporting, public perceptions of risk in quarantine and aquaculture, preparing socio-economic profiles of catchment communities, and assessments of the socio-economic impact of changes in land use (forestry) and resource access (fishing, irrigation water). - Professor Max Finlayson: ILWS (Institute for Land, Water and Society)
Professor Finlayson is a wetland ecologist with a strong interest in wetland management and communication. He has been a long time proponent of interdisciplinary approaches to wetland research and management. HE has worked extensively on the inventory assessment and monitoring of wetlands in wet-tropical and wet-dry tropical and sub-tropical climatic regimes and covering pollution, invasive species and climate change. He was employed by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) based in Sri Lanka where his work covered water management in agriculture and wetlands . - Professor Kevin Parton: ILWS (Institute for Land, Water and Society)
Professor Kevin Parton describes himself as "an economist interested in evaluating the environmental consequences" and his range of research interests "eclectic." His area of research interests include risk management, decision analysis, research management, economic evaluation, climate and the economic value of forecasting, strategic management and leadership. Kevin is a member of a number of national and international associations relevant to his knowledge in agricultural economics, agribusiness management, modelling and simulation, and the effect of climate change. - Professor Jim Pratley: EH Graham Centre
Professor Pratley began his career as a lecturer in Plant Science at the then Wagga Wagga Agricultural College in 1972 and later became lecturer in Agronomy at the former Riverina Murray Institute of Higher Education in 1976. He was appointed CSU’s inaugural Dean of the Faculty of Science and Agriculture in 1990. In recognition of Professor Pratley’s outstanding service to CSU and his commitment to agricultural research, he has been awarded the title Emeritus Professor, only the fifth such appointment in CSU’s history. His research interests include tillage systems, herbicide resistance and allelopathy of weeds and crops. His resistance work identified the first worldwide incidence of evolved resistance to the herbicide Roundup. - Professor Len Wade: EH Graham Centre
Professor Len Wade is an Agronomist/Crop Physiologist who has spent his career interested in rain fed crops and cropping systems, especially in how to get plants and systems better able to cope with drought. His research interests include the ability of plants to access water from depth and use it wisely. He has expertise in water use efficiency and water productivity, crop management and crop improvement. - Professor Terry Spithill: EH Graham Centre for Agricultural Innovation and School of Animal and Veterinary Sciences.
Professor Spithill has a strong record of research into the molecular biology and protein biochemistry of eukaryote parasites. His interests have encompassed both human and veterinary parasites with a focus on the discovery of molecular knowledge of parasite functions in order to develop vaccines or drugs to control parasite infection and transmission. His research has a deliberate international outlook, with collaborations in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, USA, UK and Australia. He was appointed at McGill in October 2001 as Director of the Institute of Parasitology. In 2002, he received a Canada Research Chair in Immunoparasitology. - Professor Joy Higgs : RIPPLE (Research Institute for Professional Practice, Learning and Education)
Professor Higgs was appointed as the Strategic Research Professor in Professional Practice in Research Institute for Professional Practice, Learning & Education (RIPPLE) and the Director of The Education for Practice Institute at Charles Sturt University in 2007. Before joining CSU she worked for over 25 years as an educator, scholar, researcher and research supervisor at The University of New South Wales and The University of Sydney. In 2004 Joy received a Member of the Order of Australia award for service to health science education through course development, academic and administrative contributions and research into teaching methods. Her primary role at CSU is the advancement of practice-based education through collaborations in research, scholarship, student supervision and education. - Professor Bill Green: RIPPLE (Research Institute for Professional Practice, Learning and Education)
Professor Green has worked for over twenty years in teacher education and educational research, with a specific focus on English teaching, literacy education and curriculum studies. His principal research interests are in curriculum inquiry and literacy studies, curriculum history, particularly the history and politics of English teaching and the English subjects, doctoral research education, and education for rural-regional sustainability, and he has a wide range of publications across these areas. Along with 11 books and monographs and 5 major research reports, he has produced over 40 book chapters and in excess of 60 journal articles. He has been successful in winning a number of Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery and Linkage grants, among others, and is currently working on a large-scale project investigating the relationship between literacy education and environmental studies, with specific reference to the Murray-Darling Basin. Overall, he has been awarded over $2 million in competitive research funding over the past ten years. - TBA : NWGIC (National Wine and Grape Industry Centre)
Professor Hardie has 25 years' experience in the management of research and development in the viticultural industry, coupled with original research in a variety of viticultural topics, including nine years in the public sector with the Victorian Department of Agriculture and 10 years with one of Australia 's leading wine companies. Jim was awarded his Doctorate for studies on the development of the grape in relation to its biological function and secondary metabolism. He has published more than 30 papers in scientific and technical journals. He was the CEO of the CRC for Viticulture for over ten years. - Professor John Blackwell: IC WATER (International Centre for Water, Agriculture, Technology, Environmental Research. A Tier 2 UNECSO Centre)
An agricultural engineer, Professor John Blackwell says his forte is coming up with an agricultural engineering approach which may partially or completely solve a problem. John joined CSU and the Institute in 2007 after a 39 year career with CSIRO. He is based at the International Centre of Water for Food Security at Wagga and is a member of the Institute's Water Systems discipline group. He has been involved in the development of a number of new agriculture technologies. Together with Dr Keith Garzoli (now at ANU) he developed the first plastic green-house in Australia ; was in the vanguard of drip irrigation research in the late 60s and early 70s; and introduced a lateral move irrigator in an attempt to improve the irrigation efficiency of broad-acre agriculture. This led to the development of innovative Soil Slotting Technology, with colleague Dr Nihal Jayawardane to transform infertile sodic and acidic subsoils. His next work with inventor Jayawardane, was a Land Based Sewage Treatment system called ‘FILTER '(Filtration, Irrigated cropping, Land Treatment and Effluent Reuse). He then developed the system further as a means of managing salt in the landscape (Sequential Biological Concentration). - Professor Wayne Hudson: PACT (Public and Contextual Theology)
Professor Hudson studied history and law at the University of Sydney and then German Philosophy at Oxford University where he wrote his Doctor of Philosophy under the famous Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski. He is a world authority on the German Jewish philosopher of hope Ernst Bloch, and has written the standard book in English on his work. Professor Hudson worked in Europe for twelve years. He was a Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College , Oxford , and lectured in philosophy (in Dutch) at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands from 1979-1985. On his return to Australia , he became a Senior Lecturer at Griffith University , Brisbane. He later became Associate Professor, and then Professor at Griffith University before moving to CSU.