The Business School Research Hubs are communities of researchers brought together around three inclusive themes aligned with the Business School’s strategy and critical for Australia’s future: innovation, responsibility, and sustainability.
Each Research Hub builds on Business School research strengths and showcases the wealth of our researchers’ expertise available for providing insights and solutions to partners outside the University to help them navigate urgent contemporary challenges.
Our Research Hubs are designed to enhance collaboration among disciplines inside the Business School and across the University, while fostering an entrepreneurial mindset to deliver upon clear value propositions for our partners. They serve as platforms for engaging and partnering with industry, government, civil society and community organisations to co-design research projects and programs in ways that deliver academic and societal impact.
In one generation, Vietnam has moved from one of the poorest countries to a middle income manufacturing and innovation economy of more than 100 million people.
The Business School’s three Research Hubs combined to host a forum exploring collaborations, ongoing and potential, between Vietnam and Australia.
Professor Thu-Anh Nguyen, Executive Director of the Sydney Vietnam Institute, told the event the Institute has collaborations with more than 300 institutions in Vietnam including high level collaborations with government ministries meaning “we can translate your research into policy, innovations and operational solutions.” Professor Nguyen told the forum.
Professor Minh Ngoc Tran told the forum that Vietnam is becoming a regional hub for data science and AI. Since 2023 Professor Ngoc has helped organise an annual Summer School on mathematical statistics which has become the largest annual conference in Vietnam.
Dr Nate Zettna spoke about the development of a Southeast Asian AI Barometer, a collaboration across five faculties at the University including the Business School. The project’s key question ‘Is AI good for public infrastructure?’ is exploring the public’s trust in AI across SE Asia including in Vietnam.
“Our goal is to develop an evidence-based tool that helps governments and organisations better understand public attitudes towards AI, to help them make more responsible and informed decisions about adoption,’ Dr Zettna said.
The nexus between climate change and modern slavery is a specific research concern for Dr Martijn Boersma who told the conference that 7% of farmland in Vietnam will be submerged by one meter of sea level rise in the near future, whilst almost 400,000 Vietnamese people are compelled into either forced labour or forced marriage.
“We need to make sure that the benefits of economic growth are shared fairly with the people that manufacture so many of the things that we use every day.”
Dr Rosea Taghikhah is part of an international collaboration that is developing a formula that will help determine if land should be allocated to food or energy production depending on the quality of the land and the need for food security.
Associate Professor Sandra Alday (Sydney Southeast Asia Centre) has been researching Vietnam for more than 12 years. She credits the country’s economic vitality to the dynamism of female-led social enterprises. She is currently exploring what builds resilience in female entrepreneurs in the Philippines and is keen to expand the project into Vietnam.
Kevin Hobgood Brown (SVI chair) said culture “is everything” when it comes to ensuring a successful project in Vietnam. “I've never worked on a project anywhere in Asia that has failed because they got the service wrong or the project wrong, or put it in the wrong place, or priced everything wrong. You've got so many experts working on all of those areas, they’re almost always right. But when projects have failed, it’s due to cultural reasons.”
Chris F Wright, Yi Li, Arunima Malik, Leisa Sargent, Kevin Hobgood-Brown, Thu-Anh Nguyen at the Future of Business Engagement Between Australia and Vietnam event, October 2026.
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LinkThis tight four-year timeline was the vision of the University of Sydney Business School’s Quantum Readiness Workshop, co-hosted by the Schools three Research Hubs. Identifying specific Business School expertise capable of driving Australia’s dynamic quantum ecosystem was the workshop’s focus.
Deputy Dean (Research) at the University of Sydney Business School, Professor Steven Maguire, and Director of Sydney Nano Institute, Professor Stephen Bartlett, outlined Australia’s national quantum strategy and the University’s quantum program. More than 30 University researchers participated along with representatives from Quantum Australia, Rigetti, Archerx, Diraq and Quantum Motion.
Two complementary research pathways were identified:
The next phase is underway consolidating workshop outputs by participants, and importantly, identifying researchers interested in leading emerging funding opportunities and develop selected ideas into multidisciplinary research and partner propositions.
