CALIBER Summit Presenter Bios
Muhammad Adil
Dr Muhammad Adil is a Lecturer at Polytechnic Institute Australia, with research expertise in electric vehicles, smart grids, energy trading, game theory, optimisation, and artificial intelligence. His work focuses on developing intelligent and game-theoretic frameworks for electric vehicle charging, vehicle-to-grid energy management, charging-station planning, and dynamic energy markets. He has published research in leading international journals and conferences, including IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications and Energy. His recent research integrates deep reinforcement learning with Stackelberg game models to support adaptive, secure, and economically efficient energy decision-making. He is also actively involved in teaching, research supervision, and academic collaboration in Australia
Anya Bedi
Anya Bedi is a Research Officer at the Australian Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusion at Work at the University of Sydney Business School. Her research focuses on gender equality, job quality and labour market inequalities, with particular attention to how technological change affects different groups of workers. Her current work examines gender differences across multiple dimensions of decent work and the implications of generative artificial intelligence for Australia’s ageing and gender-segregated workforce. She also teaches in the School of Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney.
Assaf Dekel
Assaf Dekel is an Education Focused Specialist in the Department of Finance at the University of Melbourne. He has over 11 years of tertiary teaching experience and 7 years of industry experience spanning computer science, accounting, finance, and analytics. Assaf holds qualifications in Computer Science, Accounting, Business Analytics and Quantitative Finance, and is passionate about leveraging educational technologies to improve student learning in quantitative disciplines. His current work focuses on AI-assisted learning innovations, simulation-based learning, and scalable formative feedback. He co-leads a university-funded project developing interactive financial simulators that bridge theory, practice, and employability.
Simon Franklin
Simon Franklin is an Associate Professor at Queen Mary University of London and is visiting the University of Melbourne in 2026. He is an urban and development economist whose research examines labour markets, housing, neighbourhoods and social protection in low-income cities worldwide. His work combines field experiments, survey data and spatial economic models to study how urban policies affect employment and welfare. He is Lead Academic for Ethiopia at the International Growth Centre and an affiliate of J-PAL and CEPR.
Christopher Hoy
Christopher Hoy is an applied microeconomist working on development economics, political economy, and public finance, and the founder and director of the Policy Preferences Lab (policypreferenceslab.org). His research has been published in leading journals, including the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of Development Economics, and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, featured in top media outlets such as the New York Times, the Economist, and the BBC, and cited around 2,500 times. He received the 2026 Paul Bourke Award for Outstanding Early Career Research by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. He is currently a McKenzie Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, based in the Melbourne Institute.
Patrick Healey
Patrick Healy is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Economics and SoDa Labs at Monash University. His research spans political economy, digital economics, and applied econometrics, with a focus on digital state capacity, government information practices, and the use of large language models in economic research. He completed his PhD in Economics at Monash in 2025, supervised by Paul Raschky and Simon Angus. His work combines large-scale administrative, spatial, and text data with modern causal inference and machine-learning methods. He also teaches economics and data analysis and develops research tools supporting academic research, training, decision-making, and workflows.
Neal Hughes
Neal Hughes has 20 years of experience as a research economist at ABARES, with a focus on water policy in the Murray-Darling Basin and the effects of and drought climate change on Australian farms. Neal’s research combines traditional economic methods with modern computational techniques particularly machine learning and AI. At ABARES Neal has led the development of the farmpredict model and the related Australian Agricultural Drought Indicators: a Drought Early Warning System for the Australian Government developed in partnership with the CSIRO. Neal is a former Sir Roland Wilson Scholar with a Phd in Economics from the Australian National University.
Dominic Zaun Eu Jones
Dominic is a Principal Data Scientist in the Economic Research department at the Reserve Bank of Australia. His research and professional interests include trustworthy and explainable AI systems for policy, high-dimensional forecasting, and measurement of complex sentiments with NLP. He holds a research Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an Honours degree in Economics, and has worked across the economic analysis and financial markets functions at the Reserve Bank of Australia.
Natalie Le
Dr Natalie Le is an Education Focused staff in the Department of Finance at the University of Melbourne. Her teaching and scholarship focus on innovative approaches to finance education, student engagement and employability, and the use of technology to support learning. Her current work explores human–AI collaboration in developing interactive finance learning tools, including AI-assisted financial simulators and challenge-based learning environments. She teaches across undergraduate finance subjects and is particularly interested in connecting financial theory with practical application through experiential and technology-enhanced learning.
Yufan Lu
Yufan Lu is a PhD student in Actuarial Science at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on climate risk, insurance, catastrophe risk, and the application of textual analysis and machine learning methods in actuarial and financial research. Her current work examines how climate-related information disclosed by insurers and other firms can be used to measure climate risk exposures and understand their implications for financial markets and firm outcomes.
Igor Poluboiartsev
Igor Poluboiartsev is an interdisciplinary researcher, professional interpreter, and translator bridging biomedical science and artificial intelligence. Leveraging a robust background in clinical research and evidence-based medicine, Igor currently pursues an MS in AI focused on information integrity. His research rigorously evaluates AI content detection algorithms to prevent the spread of malicious, machine-generated fraud across scientific and corporate environments. Dedicated to preserving the authenticity of human knowledge, he engineers frameworks combating academic and business misconduct. At the CALIBER Summit, Igor applies this technical expertise to advance solutions for safeguarding digital knowledge integrity in modern research ecosystems.
Yong Song
Yong Song is an Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Toronto. His research interests lie broadly across Bayesian econometrics, financial econometrics, and empirical macroeconomics. His research focuses on Bayesian nonparametric modeling, regime-switching dynamics, heterogeneous consumer demand estimation, and macroeconomic forecasting. His work has been supported by competitive research grants from the Australian Research Council.
Sarun Srikhom
Sarun Srikhom is a Research Assistant at the Centre for Health Policy, The University of Melbourne. He holds a Master of Data Science from the University of Adelaide and a Bachelor of Economics from Thammasat University. His research focuses on the application of advanced quantitative methods, including statistical modelling, machine learning, and simulation, to support economic evaluation and health policy decision-making, particularly in the context of chronic diseases. He has experience working with large-scale health datasets and developing transparent, reproducible analytical workflows. His research interests lie at the intersection of health economics, statistical modelling, and data science.
Hamish Thomas
Hamish Thomas is a Pre-doctorate Economist at the e61 Institute, with a research interest in artificial intelligence, household finance and labour markets. Hamish holds a Bachelor of Economics from Macquarie University and First Class Honours from the University of New South Wales.
Nicole Watson
Nicole Watson is Co-Director of the HILDA Survey. She is a survey methodologist and has worked on the HILDA project since the beginning. Her research interests include sampling, weighting, imputation, and data quality.
Kenton White
Dr. Kenton White is Scientific Advisor and co-founder of Advanced Symbolics, where askpolly's AI-powered platform delivers public-opinion research to organizations across government and industry. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics and Applied Mathematics from the University of Arizona and has focused on social-data analytics, forecasting, and explainable AI since 2006, informing work in election forecasting, public-health surveillance, and public-opinion research. He teaches digital analytics at Algonquin College and serves on the University of Ottawa's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Advisory Board.