Meet the team

Dr Barbara Doran specialises in creative intelligence and transdisciplinary practice and is the course director for the UTS Creative Intelligence and Strategic Innovation program. Barbara specialises in identifying creative opportunities that respond to complex challenges and developing innovative strategies that can be put into action. She is an experienced speaker, mentor, educator, project innovator and artist who directs her energies to building our collective capacities to improve how we live. Her skills are drawn from working across the arts, the tertiary sector and from project experience in the private, public and community sectors, which bring together practical, scholarly, imaginative, playful and collaborative outcomes. She has twice won the United Nations Bioethics and Art Award for Photography and displayed her work nationally and internationally. Barbara’s research expands understandings of creativity and its application to health and planetary wellbeing challenges. She is the lead curator of the SPHERE Knowledge Translation Platform (a leading national healthcare partnership) and advises on numerous innovation projects. Her post at TD School comes after working as a senior lecturer for the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), Australia’s leading performing arts conservatoire, with prior positions at the University of New South Wales and Western Sydney University. Her book ‘Creative Reboot: Catalysing Creative Intelligence’ is out now.

Find out more about Barbara Doran

Kees Dorst is Professor of Transdisciplinary Innovation and is considered one of the lead thinkers developing the field of design, valued for his ability to connect a philosophical understanding of the logic of design with hands-on practice. As a bridge-builder between these two worlds, he is widely read by both practitioners and academics. He is one of the most quoted authors in design research, and written several bestselling books in the professional press.

Over time his focus has developed to the use of transdisciplinary thinking outside the traditional domains – in particular, as applied to the hyper-complex problems of the networked society. He has developed a set of methodologies to support these processes, experimenting with them in practice through the research centres and degree programs he founded. Kees is a member of the Advisory Group for the UN Development Program, overseeing the creation of 170 platforms worldwide to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Find out more about Kees Dorst

Rodger is an innovator for public good who has worked in and with the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors on the development of products, programs, strategy and government policy. He led the development of the designing for the common good approach at the UTS Designing Out Crime Research Centre (DOC). DOC was recognised by the Australian Research Council as highly impactful in the 2018-19 Engagement and Impact Assessment. He was the founding Course Director of the UTS Graduate Certificate of Public Sector Innovation and is a co-author of ‘Designing for the common good’ (2016) and a number of articles and book contributions. His work has received multiple awards across a number of sectors, including design, crime prevention and academia.

Find out more about Rodger Watson

Dr Nicole Vincent has had an international academic career taking her to leading universities in New Zealand, the Netherlands and the United States before returning to Australia in 2017. Between 2007 and 2016, while working at Technische Universiteit Delft in The Netherlands, she developed an enduring passion for the ethics of emerging technologies. She has published 40 peer-reviewed articles, delivered 90 academic talks, and organised 19 conferences.

Find out more about Nicole Vincent

Giedre is a Lecturer within the TD School. She brings her Design background and 12 years of expertise working in academic, educational and teaching in higher education contexts to the unique challenge of educating students for the future. Giedre brings an education perspective to transdisciplinary teams designing novel learning experiences within the transdisciplinary degrees.

She believes that universities require creative, participatory and transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum design and teaching in order to develop graduates who are able to address the ill-defined, situated and inherently social problems in the complex world today.

Find out more about Giedre Kligyte

As a transdisciplinary researcher, educator, artist and techno-scientific muser, Dr Susanne Pratt explores how creative practice can foster social and environmental responsibility, with an emphasis on futures-oriented research to improve collective flourishing and responsible innovation. Susanne has award-winning teaching and practical experience in futures studies, transdisciplinary innovation, social research methods, art, public engagement, environmental humanities, feminist politics of care, transdisciplinary pedagogy and science & technology studies (STS). Her creative work has been exhibited internationally in various forms, including digital storytelling, convergent media installations, site-specific sound works, urban design proposals and participatory events.

Find out more about Susanne Pratt

Daniel Ramp is a conservation biologist with an interest in landscape ecology, behavioural ecology, road ecology, and wildlife-human interactions. At the core of his research lies an adoption of the principles of compassionate conservation, an expanding international discipline that promotes the wellbeing of individuals in environmental decision-making. He is active in creating science that assists in policy change and his primary goal is to incentivise coexistence with wildlife in agricultural landscapes. Daniel is the Director of the UTS Centre for Compassionate Conservation, and the Director of Higher Degree Research in the TD School.

Find out more about Daniel Ramp

Sara is qualified in Science/Medical Science, Law and Education and brings unique experience from academia, hospital and lab environments, and working with industries and organisations. Sara engages in innovative, analytical and research-integrated teaching. Her research areas are highly transdisciplinary, incorporating future and smart technologies, human factors, performance and cognition and combines disciplines of health, engineering, data analytics, psychology, ethics, medical science and neurosciences, amongst others. Sara applies learning-focused educational models and harvests know-how from multiple disciplines to achieve individual/industry/organisation goals. Sara has knowledge and skills in communication, research and self-management in TD education to create ‘life-long learners’, futuristic thinkers and creative innovators in our ever-evolving complex world.

Find out more about Sara Lal

Dr Fanny Salignac is a social impact and business ethics specialist and the inaugural Director of CoLab, the pan-university industry research Lab. In her research, Fanny works towards understanding how to address complex social problems and the processes that create a better society (e.g. partnerships, collaboration and co-production). Her expertise spans areas of social change, impact and policy, as well as business ethics, sustainability and corporate social responsibility. Her work to date has focused primarily on financial resilience and wellbeing, gender equality, collaboration for social impact and outcomes evaluations. Before joining TD School, Fanny worked as a Senior Lecturer at Kedge Business School where she was the Director of the Centre of Excellence for Sustainability. Whilst Lecturer at the Centre for Social Impact (UNSW Sydney), she won the 2016 UNSW Business School UN’s Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) ‘Excellence in Teaching Award’.

Find out more about Fanny Salignac

Dr Scott Matter combines academic and industry experience to help partners anticipate and influence future change today. He is primarily interested in engaged teaching and research that contributes to societal transition toward sustainability, social and environmental justice, and more-than-human-centred community resilience. Scott was an early member of Shaping Futures, a strategic foresight unit in NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet. He helped to develop the team's foresight and futures capability and led work with partner agencies across NSW Government to integrate exploratory scenario planning and foresight methods into long-term strategy, service design, and policy processes.

Find out more about Scott Matter

Amanda is a strategic partnerships and MarCom executive in UTS TD School who works closely with TD School academics to imagine exciting partnerships with industry, community, and government for mutual learning and impact. Partners are central to transdisciplinary thinking – bringing the professional lens and practice to the complex challenges of our times.

Amanda and her team have built a partner network of two thousand individuals across eight hundred organisations. Since joining UTS, Amanda has been recognised for developing talent, building high-performing teams and forging innovative programs and sustainable partnerships between education and industry. Amanda manages partner development and management across undergraduate student programs, professional learning, post-graduate learning, short courses, enterprise learning and research portfolios for TD School.

The CISI concierge is managed by the TD School Academic Programs Office team, which can assist learners with any enrolment or subject-related questions.