Pathways to employment in academia

Join our panel of academics working on climate and environment issues to hear how they got started in academia and progressed in their careers. They will share their tips for those wanting to make a difference in the realm of research. 

During this interactive workshop on career pathways in academia, presenters will provide reflections on their career journeys and share their insights on how to be successful researchers.

The session will also provide advice from senior academics who have been part of the hiring process and the provision of academic development across all levels, from higher degree researcher to mid-career researcher and beyond. 

The aim is to provide attendees with steps they can take to position themselves competitively when applying for roles such as research assistant, postdoctoral, or lecturer positions.

This workshop is for University of Sydney students or staff only. It was held online on Thursday 19 October 2023.

Thom van Dooren (Chair), Sydney Environment Institute

Associate Professor Thom van Dooren is from the School of Humanities (Discipline of Gender and Cultural Studies) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and Deputy Director – Membership Engagement at the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on some of the many philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political issues that arise in the context of species extinction and human entanglements with threatened species and places. These themes are explored in depth in his books: Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia UP, 2014), The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia UP, 2019), and A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (MIT Press, 2022).

Anik Waldow, Philosophy Department

Professor Anik Waldow is Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney. She mainly works in early modern philosophy and has published articles on the moral and cognitive function of sympathy, theories of personal identity, the role of affect in the formation of the self, scepticism and associationist theories of thought and language. She received a Leverhulm research grant (2014-2016) for the interdisciplinary project “Sympathy and its Reflections in History”, and has an ARC Discovery Project on the Experimental Self (2017-19) which focuses on the role of experience, sensibility and embodiment in the construction of selves and their place in social, political and natural spheres.

Aaron Opdyke, Faculty of Engineering

Dr Aaron Opdyke's research seeks to improve global disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation efforts with a focus on safe and equitable housing. His research has three themes include sheltering and housing in crises, participatory methods of understanding and managing risk, and system approaches for sustainable development. Dr Opdyke takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of infrastructure in resource-constrained communities, at the nexus of engineering and social inquiry.

Rachel Killean, Faculty of Law

Dr Rachel Killean is a Senior Lecturer at Sydney Law School and a member of the Sydney Institute of Criminology, the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sydney Environment Institute. Prior to joining Sydney Law School, she was a Senior Lecturer at the Queen’s University Belfast School of Law. Dr Killean’s research centres responses to violence, with a focus on transitional justice, victims’ rights, sexual and gender-based violence, and harms perpetrated against the natural world.