CERC Fellows Mentoring program
CSIRO Early Research Career (CERC) Fellows work alongside leading researchers on projects of national and global significance. They undertake independent research and are mentored by senior scientists, while being given access to generous personal development and learning opportunities.
In the section below, we have listed the profiles of our CERC Fellows who are looking for external mentors. If you are interested in volunteering as a mentor, please use the following steps to help set up your partnership.
- Read the profiles below to learn about their research and their career aspirations.
- Select who you would be interested in mentoring, based on similar interests, experience and relevant skills.
- Contact alumni@csiro.au and let us know a bit more about yourself and why you are keen for this mentoring partnership
- We will facilitate an introduction, ask you to sign the CERC Fellows mentoring agreement and help get you started.
We recommend that both mentor and mentee use the CSIRO Mentoring guide. There is no long term commitment, we appreciate any help and advice that you can give, but you have the option of extending and continuing your mentoring partnership if it suits you both.
CERC Fellows profiles
Dr. Md. Monirul Islam
Area of research: Agricultural Economics
Research project details: My project is looking at developing new impactful data-driven predictive capability, capitalising on our collective research in crop-weed systems, socioeconomics, and digital agriculture, along with new large national databases and analytics.
Trang Tran
Area of research: CGE (Computable General Equilibrium) modelling, such as GTEM modelling and GTAP modelling.
Research project details: My postdoctoral fellowship focus on developing the GTEM model with incorporating land and water resources for agricultural and food system study. We are also planning to link the GTEM model with a partial equilibrium model such as the GLOBIOM model that already has the land and water resources database.
Océane Richet
Area of research: I am a physical oceanographer / modeller interested in understanding processes and the circulation in the ocean. In the future I would be interested to work more across fields, bringing my expertise in physical oceanography / models to interdisciplinary projects.
Research project details: During my PhD, with a numerical 2D model, I studied the generation and dissipation of internal tides at/near rough topography in deep ocean. Currently, my main work in my postdoc is to understand what control the partitioning of the Indonesian Throughflow and the Indonesian seawater properties.
Jared Fernando
Area of research: Chemistry – organic catalysis and methodology
Research project details: My post doctoral fellowship centres around developing new organic reactions that involve utilising waste gases such as CO2 and CO as one carbon building blocks. The processes we are developing involve photo- and electro-catalysis in both batch and flow reactors.
Mustafa Abeer
Area of research: Gastrointestinal digestion of proteins, plant-based proteins, bioprocessing, nanotechnology, intestinal permeability, peptides, formulation development, therapeutic proteins
Research project details: My current postdoctoral project aims at assessing the effects of bioprocessing on the digestibility of plant-based proteins. It also includes investigation of the digestion products to ascertain health effects due to constituent peptides.
Roshan Regmi
Area of research: Functional Soil Biology
Research project details: My project is looking at how microbiome assemble and function in different types of soils in response to host plants. I am applying different omics techniques such as metagenomics, transcriptomics including sRNA omics, and metabolomics to answer some of burning questions in rhizosphere biology.
Santana Royan
Area of research: Biochemistry, Protein Engineering, Structural Biology (Crystallography and SAXS), Synthetic Biology
Research project details: Engineering plastic degrading enzymes for improved activity and thermostability. Currently working on enzymes to degrade polyurethane, looking in the future at enzymes for more difficult to degrade plastics.
Sandra Villacorta
Area of research: Computational Geosciences
Research project details: My project looks at using knowledge graphs for improving geoscience knowledge management in a machine learning approach.
Anna Roesler
Area of research: Health and wellbeing behaviour change, nutrition and exercise, wellbeing, pregnancy and diabetes, precision health, system changes for health, Mobile health, eHealth
Research project details: My post doctoral fellowship aims to test the uptake of a digital platform to support women with GDM and post partum mothers at increased risk of cardiometabolic disorders. I will also look into the presentation of health and wellbeing information for improved uptake and behaviour change via mHealth.
Tracey Steinrucken
Area of research: Biocontrol of invasive plants using plant pathogens, Plant Pathology, Microbial ecology, Mycology, Biosecurity
Research project details: We are aiming to create a bioherbicide for the management of giant rat’s tail grass (“GRT” an important weed across Australia) and four close relatives (Sporobolus) using one or more fungal pathogens. GRT causes an economic loss of $60 million/year in Northern Australia alone.
Josh Pinskier
Area of research: Soft Robotics
Research project details: Computational Design of Soft robotics – By replacing rigid components and joints with soft and flexible materials, the robot’s body implicitly performs complex control operations through morphological computation.
Kathy Gunn
Area of research: Observing and quantifying water mass variability using physical and acoustic oceanography. Currently focussed on what drives Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) variability.
Research project details: I am currently trying to untangle the drivers of water mass variability in AABW. We want to find out how much variability is associated with property changes, and/or changes in volume transport of the dense shelf water. At the moment, I am using historical observations, and will soon bring in some model output.