Study our undergraduate and postgraduate programs in the world’s first entity that offers a full suite of research and educational offerings on projects by our internationally renowned scholars.
Our graduates are working across a range of sectors as leaders, executives, and managers driving transformations through different types of project organising. These include climate adaptation, sustainable development, construction and infrastructure, manufacturing, agriculture, education, digital innovation, health, events, art, and consulting.
With a unique collective of leading multi-disciplinary scholars, our researchers draw on a range of theories and methods to provide new insights for practice and policy within project ecologies.
Our scholarship produces foundational knowledge about projects, programs and portfolios as interventions for innovative, human-centred, sustainable, resilient and just transitions in societies.
Associate Professor Nader Naderpajouh, Head of the School of Project Management, shares his current research focus and how project management can be reimagined to address global grand challenges.
As the Head of School of Project Management, I enjoy being a part of the educational journey and career development of our students and early career academics. I'm continually inspired by our PhD candidates and early career academic colleagues who are shaping the future of Project Studies, as well as by our coursework students who will become the next generation of project practitioners across diverse project-based industries and sectors.
It's incredibly rewarding to hear their stories a few years later and reflect on their growth and achievements since their time at the University of Sydney.
My research focuses on understanding the role of projects in the face of grand challenges, such as climate change, inequality, or biodiversity loss. This includes examining how project-based interventions contribute to sustainable, resilient and just future.
Examples include housing projects to address homelessness and affordability, urban heat resilience projects, organising for more than human justice to address biodiversity and conservation projects, climate innovation projects, and community resilience building projects.
It's important to me because throughout history, projects, as temporary forms of organising, have played a significant role in shaping our societies and getting us to where we are now. They have been remarkably effective in building civilisations. But the same project-based organising that helped us progress have also resulted in many of the complex challenges we now face, from inequality, to climate crisis, and biodiversity loss.
My team's research seeks to understand both sides of this story, how projects have historically created and amplified these challenges, and how they can now be reimagined as powerful mechanisms for addressing these global grand challenges.
The School of Project Management team excels at multi-disciplinary research with meaningful, real-world impact on societies. Within the Faculty of Engineering, my academic and professional colleagues are not only educating and supporting the engineers of the future, but are also an exceptional diverse collective to advance research into the human and social dimensions of engineering. We're proud to bring top global scholars to campus to run research methodology workshops for our PhD students, postdocs and early career researchers.
My own research group at the Organising Risk and Resilience lab is a uniquely interdisciplinary collective. Together, we critically discuss research paradigms that rarely engage with one another in academia, drawing on their combined strengths to understand how societies organise when confronted with disruptions, including disasters.
Ross Street Building University of Sydney,
Camperdown, NSW, 2050
