People

Ben is a passionate teacher in environmental studies and sustainability, with a strong research focus on the social and political dimensions of nature conservation. Ben is an Associate Director of the Centre for Urban Research and theme leader of 'Geographies of Land, Home and Place'. Ben's research interests in nature conservation are driven by the idea that conservation is a fundamentally social and political process, where justice and equity for people and ecologies is not achieved by simply creating National Parks, for example. How we do conservation, who is involved and who is excluded are all fundamental questions that need to be addressed. Ben's teaching interests include environmental planning and management, applied socio-environmental research skills and the history of environmental ideas for sustainability and conservation. Ben particularly enjoys working with students in the Bachelor of Environment and Society as they develop their capstone projects, work on applied projects and build their critical knowledge of environmental studies. Industry experience: Ben has worked with a range of organisations in his teaching and research capacity at RMIT, including The Department of Environment, Energy and Climate Action (DEECA), The Stockholm Resilience Centre, The Australian Land Conservation Alliance (ALCA), Friends of the Earth (FoE), Land for Wildlife (LfW), Traditional Owner Corporations in Victoria and a host of local government and community organisations. Awards: RMIT Award for Excellence - Early Career Teaching category (2017) Early Career Research Achievement Award - School of Global, Urban and Social Studies (2018)

Dr Thami Croeser is an urban planner with a focus on bringing nature back into cities in practical ways, at large scale. Thami actively advocates for cities to convert heavily asphalted streetscapes into tree-lined green corridors, to give us a chance of handling future heatwaves and floods, and reconnect urban residents with native flora and fauna. Thami’s highly applied research approach blends urban design, urban greening and geospatial analysis to show how cities can accelerate policy implementation in urban forestry, climate adaptation and urban ecology.

Dr Alexandre Faustino (he/him) is a Vice-Chancellor Postdoctoral Research Fellow investigating how waterscapes - the ways humans and more-than-humans relate with water - can be re-imagined, lived and governed with socio-ecological justice.   Coming from Brazil, Alex is based at RMIT University Centre for Urban Research (CUR) in Naarm (Melbourne), having completed a Ph.D. in Urban Geography at the School of Global, Urban, and Social Studies. Alex has experience teaching within the school’s portfolio of Sustainability and Urban Planning, and he currently co-convenes Praxis Lab RMIT, CUR Early Career Academics Network, and is a Deputy Associate Director for CUR’s theme of Geographies of Land, Home and Place. In 2024 he collaborated with Professor Chris Speed in the conceptualisation and development RMIT Regenerative Futures Institute. He is also a founding member of the Alliance for Praxis Research (APR), a scholar and creative activist collective based in Melbourne dedicated to cultivating radical pedagogies and nurture transdisciplinary grassroots networks through practices of university extension.

Chris De Gruyter is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainability and Urban Planning in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies. He undertakes teaching and research in the area of transport and land use planning, with a focus on understanding the impacts of new residential development on the transport system. Chris was previously an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow in the Centre for Urban Research where he investigated the impacts of the apartment boom on public transport in Australian cities. Prior to joining RMIT University, Chris was a Research Fellow and Deputy Director in the Public Transport Research Group at Monash University. He also worked in transport planning for 12 years, both with the Victorian government and in consulting. Chris' wider research interests span the areas of public transport, land use planning, travel demand management, and parking policy.

Sarah is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Associate Director of the Centre for Urban Research 'Planning & Transport for Healthy Cities' theme. She leads a program of applied research designed to influence policy and practice to create healthier built environments. This includes ‘The High Life Study’ which examines the interplay between apartment design policy standards, the design of contemporary apartment buildings, and residents’ health and well-being, and an ARC Discovery Project on apartment residents' use of public open space. She is a member of the West Australian State Design Review Panel and Senior Assistant Editor with the journal ‘Environment and Behavior’.

Dr Afshin Jafari is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban Research. His work focuses on using computational methods to explore pathways to promote active and sustainable transport, including cycling, walking, public transport, and electric mobility. Dr Jafari is one of the lead developers of the Activity-based and agent-based Transport model of Melbourne, known as AToM, a large-scale and open-source simulation model for Greater Melbourne. He is also leading the development of the Victoria Bicycle Simulation and Prioritisation Modelling tool.

I am a sustainable consumption scholar and a social practice theorist. My research spans the sociology and geographies of consumption through topics such as food, plastics and packaging, energy, and waste. My work has explored and advanced the practice perspective in sustainable consumption by focusing on justice, equity and health aspects of sustainability transitions. A strong focus of my work has been on qualitative research methods, where digital ethnography has been an important aspect of my empirical work.   I am an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) recipient for 2024 and a Senior Research Fellow. Bhavna is based at the world-leading Centre for Urban Research in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, where I am the Deputy Associate Director of the Regenerative Environments and Climate Action Theme.   I am a recipient of the 2024 RMIT Vice-Chancellor's Award for Research Engagement and Impact (ECR) and the 2024 DSC Award for Research Excellence (ECR). I have also received the 2025 Europe Visiting Fellowship, under which I spent a 10-week secondment at RMIT Europe to advance international collaboration for RMIT. I co-lead the 'Social Practices and Sustainable Consumption' Enabling Impact Network at RMIT.   I also co-lead RMIT's interdisciplinary 'Food Cultures and Practices' Enabling Impact Network. My DECRA research titled “Tackling food-related single-use plastics in diverse consumption contexts” aims to investigate the uneven impacts of interventions that target consumers’ engagement with single-use food plastics by utilising critical social science approaches. This research aims to create new knowledge through an evidence base in sustainable consumption and waste studies using innovative qualitative techniques. Expected outcomes of this project include conceptual and methodological approaches that enhance societal capabilities for practicable waste management. This will provide significant benefits by improving Australia’s capacity to develop and integrate lived experiences of single-use food plastics into the current and future National Waste Policy and National Plastics Plan"   I am a CI on the $12 million ARC Industrial Transformation and Research Hub - Transformation of Reclaimed Waste Resources to Engineered Materials and Solutions for a Circular Economy (TREMS) (2021-2026). As part of the hub, I research the social and policy dimensions of waste production and consumption. My other ongoing research projects include CI: ARC Linkage project: TRASH: transforming refuse in apartments for sustainable housing CI: ARC Discovery Project: Empowering households in resource-efficient sustainability transitions  Lead CI: Examining the Container Deposit Scheme in Victoria as an equitable and sustainable waste management strategy Lead CI: Consumer fridge studies and meat waste project funded by End Food Waste Australia (previously Fight Food Waste CRC) and Meat and Livestock Australia     

Dr Rebecca Olive is a feminist cultural studies and ethnographic researcher working across areas of sport and leisure, human-environmental health and wellbeing, environmental humanities, and feminist theory. Her research explores how everyday, recreational sport and leisure activities are experienced through cultural politics, ecological encounters, relationships with humans and non-humans, as well as social media production and consumption. Her use of reflexive, participatory, ethnographic methods reflects her interest in everyday contexts and experiences as well as community-focused forms of engagement and research translation. At RMIT she is based in the Centre for Urban Research (CUR), where she is an Associate Director and leads the Regenerative Environments and Climate Action theme. She also co-convenes the RMIT Ocean Research and Climate Action (ORCA) network, and is a Regenerative Futures Institute Fellow. She began an RMIT Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellowship in July 2022, which examines recreational sport and leisure in urban bodies of water including oceans, estuaries, rivers, and outdoor pools, with a focus on urban swimming in terms of public safety, climate resilience, and urban regeneration. This work builds on an ARC DECRA (Australian Research Council - Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) (2019-2022), which was focused on the role of recreational ocean sports (swimming and surfing) in how participants develop relationships of care and responsibility with coastal and ocean ecologies. Along with  colleagues from RMIT and Deakin University, in 2026, she began work on a transdiscplinary ARC Discovery project, 'Creative Currents: art, marine science & narratives in ocean climate action', and was awarded an International Visiting Fellowship to Univeristy of British Columbia to work with the Centre for Sport & Sustainability. She has also recieved frunsing from Surfers Against Sewage to write the report, 'Taking care of the ocean that takes care of us: Activating ocean sports participants into ocean conservation'. Prior to joining RMIT, Rebecca was a Senior Lecturer in the School of Human Movement & Nutrition Studies at The University of Queensland (2016-2022) and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sport and Leisure Studies at Waikato University, Aotearoa New Zealand (2014-2016). Rebecca was the President of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) (2023-2026), is on the Strategy, Risk & Innovation Committee for Swiming Victoria, the advisory committee for Regen Melbourne's Swimmable Birrarung 'Earthshot' project, is on the Editorial Boards of Annals of Leisure Research and Sporting Traditions, and was Chair of the Victorian Chapter of the Australian Coastal Society (2023-2024).  Rebecca’s research profile and collaborative relationships have led to publications in leading journals and books, co-edited collections, invited seminars, international keynotes, and the organisation of scholarly and public events. As well as academic publications, Rebecca is active in community and public engagement, including community presentations at film nights and festivals, podcast and radio interviews, articles for publications including The Conversation, Surfing World, White Horses, and Surfline, and the production of a podcast series, Saltwater Library. You can learn more about this work at her website, Moving Oceans. She has also produced a StoryMap, Swim Melbourne, which maps places to swim across the city and shares stories of risk, safety, and community. 

Dr Jasmine Pearson is an environmental social scientist and postdoctoral research fellow. Drawing upon relational theories and concepts, her work seeks to examine human–nonhuman relationships. She is particularly interested in how people value and connect with nature in unique ways, and the implications this has for biodiversity conservation. Using qualitative social science methods, she has worked extensively with Indigenous and local communities across diverse social–ecological contexts. Dr Pearson is currently working on an ARC Linkage Project at RMIT titled "More than a reserve? Measuring the benefits of private protected areas" which seeks to develop a holistic approach for understanding the socio-cultural, economic and ecological benefits of privately protected areas.