The Emerging Scholar Research Fellows have been awarded to 19 early career researchers with high potential for enduring research excellence.
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ESRF awards publicly recognise promising scholars and contribute to their career development by supporting them to carry out compelling research programs that align with the Business School’s purpose and strategy. Our research across topics central to innovative organization and technology, responsible management, and sustainable business makes a disproportionate positive difference.
Deputy Dean (Research), University of Sydney Business School
Increasingly machines using self-learning algorithms are instructing and monitoring workers’ performance, including determining which employees are let go, says Dr Alex Veen, a senior lecturer in the Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies.
Dr Veen’s project is evaluating what should be the regulatory and policy safeguards around the management of labour by AI?
The project will explore the attitudes and policy positions of business groups, trade unions and other relevant parties concerning the regulation of algorithmic management in different countries.
His project’s outcomes will be policy-focused and contribute to scholarly and social debates around the use and uptake of AI in the workplace.
Sudden CEO departures can trigger shocks for corporations with ricocheting impacts on stock price, further staff disruption and brand reputation.
By combining insights from data bases capturing different aspects of corporate behaviour, Dr Anish Purkayastha is researching how company boards can better anticipate blowback from different categories of shareholder activists when a CEO unexpectedly leaves.
His project is developing a mathematical model for the different responses generated across the range of reasons for CEO exits, with the aim of helping organisations develop strategies to counter shareholder discontent before it impacts the company.
Dr Purkayastha is collaborating with international colleagues including experts at University of Houston, Arizona State University and Erasmus University.
In the realm of human-AI collaboration Dr Brad Rava believes the most difficult decisions should remain with human experts.
Modern AI algorithms are black boxes meaning it is not possible to know how the system arrived at its decision. Modern systems do not rigorously flag ambiguous cases, so we cannot know the AI’s level of confidence regarding its decisions. In high-risk settings – medical diagnosis, autonomous vehicles making driving choices, detecting financial fraud - the accuracy of automated decisions is critical.
Dr Rava’s project will achieve a new branch of selective learning (a general class of machine learning frameworks) capable of working with any algorithm to flag cases that would most benefit from human expertise. Ensuring the AI system will only make decisions when it can do so with high confidence. If uncertain, the system will defer the decision to a human, achieving the highest level of accuracy in collaborations between experts and the AI.
Constraints limiting the movement of skilled workers between businesses supress research, innovation and ultimately productivity. In Australia about 50% of workers are impacted by various legal restrictions such as non-compete clauses.
Dr Duckki Cho’s research project asks – what if instead of competing for talent, organisations form R&D alliances to enhance innovation and productivity? His research will compare the performance of firms experiencing restricted access to skilled workers that undertake R&D collaborations with those that do not.
Engaging with international partners Dr Cho aims to show how research collaborations can overcome skill shortages, including those arising from visa restrictions, delivering improved productivity and economic growth.
Dr Evelyn Ng’s project examines how, in just 20 years, a village-based animal feed supplier scaled into one of the largest vertically integrated agricultural businesses in China.
While digitisation was key to this transformation, Dr Ng is applying Technology Affordances and Constraints Theory to unpack what happened after technology adoption.
“Getting technology is the first step. The real challenge is converting it into organisational capabilities. How is the technology incorporated into business processes? How do people interact with it, interpret the data it generates, and act on those insights?”
Demand for food is increasing. By learning best practices from this company, Australian agriculture can lift productivity and strengthen food security, which is a national scientific priority.
Combining her research into critical accounting, gender and social justice Dr Farzana Tanima is examining how accountants can use their skills to help identify economic abuse in intimate relationships.
“As a socially constructed practice, accounting can impact the conditions that enable violence. It can inadvertently normalise economic abuse by framing financial hardship as a matter of poor budgeting or financial mismanagement rather than recognising the controlling behaviours that limit a survivor’s access to financial resources.”
Identifying ways accounts can hide or expose systemic patterns of economic abuse will make it easier to develop policies to deal with the problem.
Dr Tanima’s project will also map women’s first-hand accounts of economic abuse so their experiences can directly inform accounting practices. She is applying an intersectional lens mapping how economic abuse intersects with other complex social issues such as race, patriarchy, class and religion.
Dr Guanglian Hu is developing a forward-looking interest rate measure.
Dr Hu’s background is in finance, and particularly the options market, as distinct from the spot market. His project is to develop a forward-looking interest rate risk measure from the derivative markets on treasuries, the long-term debt issued by governments.
“There is a clear public good in providing reliable indicators for how interest rates will move across the future,’ Dr Hu says.
“The interest rate predictions we currently rely on are built using historical data, making them inherently backward looking. My method is to extract information embedded in options contracts on government notes and bonds. This approach allows us to construct the entire distribution of the market expectations about future interest rates over different horizons.”
Dr Hu is collaborating with leading researchers in the US and the UK.
The result will be an index much like a ‘ticker’ on trading screens that will also offer valuable information for central banks as it will help them to assess if the market’s expectations align with the policy outcomes the banks want to achieve.
Dr Hanzhao Wang is building an autonomous operations management agent capable of solving sequential business decisions using multi-step reasoning.
The agentic AI will be open source and will operate locally on an organisation’s computers, keeping the company’s data private. The agent will move beyond the simple predictive functions exhibited by LLMs to engage in accountable, multi-stage decision reasoning, capable of trustworthy specific decision making.
The project will offer organisations enhanced operational efficiency bolstering business decision-making in a transparent and auditable way.
Non-authoritarian leadership - Dr James Donald is testing if it can work in large organisations.
The University of Sydney’s motto is ‘leadership for good’. Which raises the question: what is good leadership?
Dr Donald is investigating how mangers can encourage autonomy and creative risk-taking behaviour.
Evidence from smaller agile organisations shows this management style produces vibrant, high performing workplaces.
“My research question is can an empowering leadership style succeed in large complex workplaces that typically operate with a ‘command and control’ model where there is a much lower tolerance for questioning the boss,” says Dr Donald.
Dr Donald will study three critical sectors: government, finance and healthcare. How do the organisational structures in these sectors enable or inhibit managers capacity to exercise this type of leadership? Dr Donald will also evaluate any negative impacts of this leadership style.
This project will provide a valuable evidence-base for managers in large bureaucratic organisations for what is best practice in building a flourishing workplace.
Can Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) disrupt the closed business models of big tech giants enabling next generation entrepreneurs and facilitating essential community services?
These are the research questions behind Dr Jarrod Vassallo’s investigation of the India Stack, a set of open, digital “building blocks” that is sparking an entrepreneurial revolution, allowing new ventures to compete directly with Silicon Valley behemoths and enabling governments to serve poor and marginalised populations at scale. From auto-rickshaw drivers launching ride-sharing services rivalling Uber to governments extending healthcare to millions who were previously excluded, the India Stack treats core digital capabilities as public infrastructure—much like roads or water utilities.
“I am focusing on ways DPI can encourage entrepreneurs to bring products and services to people who otherwise could not afford that access.”
Operations researcher Dr Li Chen is developing a model to optimise inventory and pricing decisions in complex systems.
In his research project, Dr Chen is extending the mathematical optimisation model by incorporating forecasting uncertainty.
“The key challenge I address is how to effectively model uncertainty and make robust decisions in uncertain environments,” says Dr Chen.
“I am applying my model to the online and offline retail sectors working with both real and synthetic data. Apparel retailers, for instance, offer a wide array of clothing choices, each with unique demand patterns affected by factors (contextual information) such as weather, temperature, and consumer trends.
“My project will develop a novel framework for optimising pricing and inventory decisions for multiple products under demand uncertainty, leveraging contextual robust optimisation.”
Many sectors – supermarkets, restaurants, transport - need to set prices for multiple products while simultaneously maintaining an inventory. Dr Chen’s optimisation framework will determine the price and inventory for all products simultaneously.
Building a digital human to help improve the lives of young people with acquired brain injury is the latest quest for Dr Mike Seymour.
Perinatal strokes effect up to 5,000 newborns and around 300 children in Australia every year, many of whom will suffer some form of brain damage.
Dr Seymour is developing emotionally responsive photorealistic digital assistants to support young people with acquired brain injury (ABI), who often require interaction at a different pace to their peers.
“The focus is on personalisation and ethical facilitation to improve their engagement with everyday life,” Dr Seymour says.
“For example, some people with ABI find high frequency, noisy communications overwhelming. Providing information more patiently via a digital agent could be a way for them to stay better connected with world events.”
Dr Seymour’s research will be conducted with young people with ABI using a co-design process. This project is also supported by PhD student Bey Alivand and the AI processing power is housed in the Motus Lab, one of the most advanced high-tech centres in the Business School, which Dr Seymour co-founded.
“I am optimistic and appreciate having the opportunity to work with these exceptional partners to make a real difference for young adults with ABI using cutting edge, AI driven, digital humans.”
Digital technologies that monitor women’s health are tools that can be placed into many hands to amplify impact.
Dr Na Liu embraces femtech’s possibilities however her focus is on wholistic female wellbeing not just developing technological medical ‘solutions’.
“Too often I see a big divide between what digital designers offer - complex, high-tech, expensive - and the practical outcomes users really want,” Dr Liu says.
“People should have access to digital health services regardless of their IT or health literacy.”
Dr Liu is investigating how digital resources can be used to improve the mental health of women living in remote areas in Bali, who themselves are not digitally connected. To report medical symptoms the women will only need to send a numeric text message, for example texting ‘1’ if they are experiencing persistent headaches.
“Low levels of literacy should not be a barrier to communicating quality information that can trigger intervention,’ says Dr Liu.
Moreover, the women’s symptoms will contribute to a dashboard that will build evidence for the provision of community services.
Her second femtech project is an app to support nurses experiencing menopause, offering them bespoke ‘nudges’.
“Our wider ambition is to discover if this support contributes to higher retention rates in a sector suffering the loss of experienced staff. The project aims to scale the support professionals can offer women experiencing menopausal symptoms that can badly impact their quality of life which many women find uncomfortable to discuss in person.”
In work teams mental health is a shared experience. Dr Nate Zettna is investigating what intersecting actions by workers and leaders can help build psychologically robust workplaces.
Collaborating with frontline work teams in care and customer service who are currently experiencing unprecedented burnout rates, the project will use a codesign process to improve the psychological health of workers and the flow-on impact for customers.
In Australia 4-5 generations are now working side-by-side and the project will explore how the different age groups experience mental health and interact with each other.
Collecting data has never been so easy, consequently many organisations are awash with complex data sets that current models struggle to analyse.
Dr Qin Fang is a statistician who has pioneered developments in high-dimensional functional time series (HDFTS).
In her project Dr Fang will introduce the first functional tensor framework for analysing HDFTS, enabling a more accurate and insightful approach to these complex, high-frequency datasets.
“My analysis looks at indices in an untypical way,” Dr Fang says. “Rather than observations as discrete ‘dots’, I view them as continuous curves.”
“By incorporating all available information from the shape of these curves, I construct high-dimensional functional time series of high-frequency intraday data, spanning months or years. This allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the evolving patterns in data, leading to more robust forecasts compared to traditional time series models.”
Dr Fang is applying her method to three areas: the stock market, energy consumption data and mortality rates.
“I aim to provide new forecasting tools to enable better informed decision-making, such as determining the optimal times to buy and sell stocks based on high-frequency patterns, forecasting the future energy needs of households in different regions, or estimating the mortality rates across different age groups and geographic areas.”
Dr Fang is collaborating with researchers in London, Hong Kong and China. “I am confident our work will advance econometric modelling and also offer practical, data-driven solutions to real-world problems.”
With degrees in engineering and commerce, Dr Richard Philip researches at the intersection of machine learning, AI and financial markets.
Dr Philip’s project examines how AI influences trading and price formation in securities markets.
This includes assessing the risk that AI trading models increasingly trained on data shaped by the actions of other AIs will distort prices, causing them to diverge from fundamental values. Meaning markets would fail to reflect underlying economic conditions.
Using historical limit order book data from the ASX, Dr Philip is using reinforcement learning to model the optimal management of limit orders with the aim of improving order execution for traders and investors.
Dr Rongrong Zhang researches stigma: the emergence, transfer, maintenance, and removal of stigma within and across organizations.
Her project will explore how AI entrenches social stigmatisation and what can be altered in the technology that would interrupt the process.
AI is active in the social stigmatisation process: its use in hiring, lending and content moderation decisions embeds and scales social evaluations that mark certain groups as deviant, risky, or undesirable.
Dr Zhang’s project will use mixed-methods research to theorize and test when AI increases or reduces stigma in the workplace. The aim is to leverage AI that will promote more inclusive hiring systems and fairer workplace practices.
Dr Noman Shaheer wants to know if digitalisation can improve sustainability and profits.
Dr Shaheer explores the connection between digitalisation, corporate environmental sustainability and profitability, particularly through the lens of customer sensitivity to environmental issues.
“Digitalisation is a powerful tool enabling companies with very diverse supply chains, to track, measure and therefore control their pollution,” Dr Shaheer says.
Dr Shaheer’s project will use machine learning to see which digitalisation processes directly lead to improved environmental performance.
By improving our understanding of the connections between digitalisation, environmental performance, and firm profitability, his research will help develop better corporate strategies and government policies for a more sustainable planet.
A second project is the development of a consumer eco-consciousness index across 55 countries. Understanding the extent of consumers’ willingness to reduce their environmental impact will reveal their pivotal role in the success of environmental initiatives undertaken by organisations.
As of 2025, climate reporting is compulsory for most large businesses and financial institutions.
For her research project Dr Suwen Chen is focusing on how organisations can measure and nurture biodiversity.
‘Of the nine areas in the planetary boundary framework, biodiversity loss and species extinction is the highest risk of all the environmental categories,’ Dr Chen says.
“The imperative to integrate sustainable practices across business operations has never been more critical.
“My central research question is how can non-environmental sectors effectively integrate biodiversity considerations into their business models and impact measurement and reporting frameworks? I aim to develop a roadmap for industries to navigate the complexities of biodiversity integration while driving innovation and impact.
“I want to shift the conversation toward recognising the intrinsic value of biodiversity by prompting organisations to reappraise their role in preserving ecosystems and contributing to reversing species loss."
