The Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellowships are intended to build research and innovation capability and excellence and create impact in strategic priority research strengths at Deakin University.

The Fellowships support and develop early career researchers identified as potential rising stars, aiming to enhance the capacity and capability in key research areas and build the next generation of high achieving and internationally competitive researchers.

ADI Director Alfred Deakin Professor Fethi Mansouri said:

In ADI we place a particular importance on creating a collegial, inclusive and supportive environment for all our researchers to thrive in. But we place an even higher importance on ensuring that our early career researchers, in particular those who win the prestigious Alfred Deakin Post doctoral fellows, are mentored and supported to conduct high quality, impactful research that will not only produce benchmark outputs but also will launch and sustain their future academic careers well beyond the fellowship itself.

Dr Sophie Adams is a human geographer and Science and Technology Studies scholar, who has recently completed a PhD at the University of New South Wales. Her research examines approaches to human adaptation to environmental change, investigating their origins in evolutionary theory and systems ecology as well as their contemporary politics in the context of anthropogenic climate change.

Her project, “The pragmatic holism of models: Integrating climate science for adaptation in health and energy”, will investigate the role of modelling in integrating diverse data, disciplines, and actors within common frameworks for adaptation in the energy and health sectors in Australia.

By understanding the processes and practices by which models and modellers achieve this integration, this comparative study will generate insights into how models order new and existing commitments, considerations and concerns within these sectors and thereby shape the kinds of futures being pursued.

Dr Adams said:

ADI is a place where exciting research is happening, research that is grappling with some of the most important issues in our world.

Charishma Ratnam is a Human Geographer whose research spans a number of areas, primarily focusing on refugee and migrant experiences and resettlement, inclusion, and home-making practices.

Charishma is particularly interested in developing novel research approaches including digital, visual, ethnographic, and walking methods with participants to better understand their experiences of, in and with place(s).

Her project, “Sri Lankan forced migrants and the role of digital devices in the everyday dimensions of resettlement”, aims to examine the ways that Sri Lankan refugees’ and asylum seekers’ everyday dimensions of resettlement are (re)produced and (re)presented on digital devices and for social media.

Charishma’s research will adopt an innovative ‘social media scroll back’ method to focus on the use of the digital in everyday dimensions of resettlement.

Dr Ratnam said:

I was drawn to ADI because of its strong and diverse program of research that addresses complex problems related to migration, diversity, citizenship, and inclusion. Leading these areas of research subsequently creates a space for knowledge building and sharing by thoughts leaders and esteemed researchers, which I found particularly appealing. I know that I will learn from mentors whose research interests and expertise align with mine at ADI.