Meet our climate impact pioneers

Celina Agaton is the Filipino-Canadian Co-Founder of Open Knowledge Kit and regenerates supply chains in Indigenous and remote communities and creative industries to support governance, gender, and micro to medium enterprise. She develops programs to create local data employment and accelerate verifiable research methods with free and open source geospatial tools, open data, and cross-sector coordination to address knowledge stewardship, heritage preservation, and climate change. She leads initiatives for World Bank and APEC-Canada Growing Business Partnership. She was raised in Jakarta, Manila, and Toronto.

Stuart Brown is a post-doctoral ecologist with a joint position between the University of Adelaide and the University of Copenhagen. His research focused on the ecological impacts of rapid climate change, and the drivers of extinction and biodiversity loss across large spatiotemporal scales. I have a wealth of knowledge and expertise in processing large spatiotemporal datasets for a range of ecological, environmental, and climatological analyses. Broadly, his geospatial knowledge and skillset have provided key inputs for the development of ecological models, through modelling of both climate and environmental change, and biodiversity modelling.

Andrew Thornhill is a research botanist in a joint position between The University of Adelaide and The State Herbarium of South Australia. His research covers various aspects of plant evolution with an emphasis on Australian plants and large phylogenetic studies. Andrew's main research focus is large-scale molecular phylogenetic analyses of plants, across a broad botanical and geographical range. In partnership with collaborators from around the world he has pioneered spatial phylogenetics – a "big data" field that combines large-scale molecular phylogenetics, geospatial information obtained from collection data.

Dominic is a marine ecologist working to restore forgotten, lost marine ecosystems. His research seeks to understand and leverage the ecological and social complexities of marine socio-ecological systems - the many ways people and nature interact - so we can develop solutions that ensure marine habitat restoration is both a social and environmental success. He utilises ecological relationships and marine soundscapes to try to enhance restoration outcomes and use surveys and interviews to understand perceptions people have of marine conservation work, so conservation can better engage society.

Kathryn Davidson is an expert in the field of climate and resilient governance. Her project focused on harnessing the capacity of large-scale policy text data to provide evidence on the landscape of climate actors’ policies and whether they are converging or diverging in Australia. This project will have an impact directly on policy considering the urgency to deliver net-zero carbon by 2050.

Joel is an eighth-generation wine producer in the Chambers family from Rutherglen in North-east Victoria. Joel manages his family's 16-ha vineyard estate and frequently experiments with different sustainable and eco-friendly farming techniques. His research involves conducting soil tests to cut emissions and capture as much carbon into the soil as possible.