Migration, Diversity and Care

Professor Loretta Baldassar

Professor Loretta Baldassar is Vice Chancellor Professorial Research Fellow in the School of Arts and Humanities at ECU. She is Professor of Anthropology and Sociology and Director of the ECU SAGE Futures Lab. Her work is widely acknowledged as foundational to the field of Transnational Family Studies. Her career has been devoted to better understanding the impact of migration on families and communities, with a focus on the role of social support networks, intergenerational relations, and the social uses of new technologies.

Dr Gillian Abel

Dr Gillian Abel is a Research Officer in the SAGE Futures Lab and provides administrative support to Prof Loretta Baldassar and the wider SAGE team.

Dr Manonita Ghosh

Dr Manonita Ghosh is a Research Fellow in the ECU SAGE Futures Lab. With a background in anthropology and public health, her research explores cross-cultural influences on health behaviour, aging and social care, health service evaluation, and music and migrant health.

Bronte Jones

Bronte is a Research Fellow within the Migration, Diversity and Care Research Program, working closely with the Social Ageing (SAGE) Futures Lab and the Rainbow Migrants Living Lab. Bronte is an emerging scholar with expertise in medical anthropology and sociology. She is a former Gates Cambridge Scholar and holds an interdisciplinary MPhil in Health, Medicine and Society from the University of Cambridge.

Dr Lukasz Krzyzowski

Dr Lukasz Krzyzowski (he/him), Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellow in the ECU SAGE Futures Lab and founder of the Rainbow Migrants Observatory. Dr Krzyzowski specialises in applied sociology and intersectionality, focusing on migration, care, sexual and gender diversity, and social justice. He advances policy and co-designed community interventions.

Dr Simone Marino

Dr Simone Marino is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ECU SAGE Futures Lab. He combines his academic role with consultancy at WA InCasa Aged Care. His interdisciplinary expertise focuses on ethnic identity, dementia and music engagement, and migrant well-being, employing ethnographic and health sciences methods.

Dr Hien Thi Nguyen

Dr Hien Thi Nguyen is a Research Fellow in the ECU SAGE Futures Lab with expertise in ageing and wellbeing, diversity, migration, gender, and development. She is also the project manager for the international Decentering Migration Knowledge (DemiKnow) project.

Dr Catriona Stevens

Dr Catriona Stevens is a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the ECU SAGE Futures Lab. She is an early career sociologist and anthropologist with expertise in migration, ageing, care workforce, transnational caregiving, and the abuse of older people (elder abuse).

Farzaneh Ghaznavi

Farzaneh Ghaznavi is a PhD candidate in the SAGE Futures Lab. Her research explores successful ageing and healthy ageing in migrant populations, with a focus on the lived experiences of Iranian older adults in new cultural contexts. Her doctoral project, Aging in a New Land, examines how Iranian migrants define and pursue successful ageing, navigate intergenerational relationships and caregiving responsibilities, and sustain transnational ties that shape their wellbeing. She holds a Master of Health Economics from Sapienza University of Rome and a Bachelor of Public Health from Iran.

Yu (Yvonne) Huang

Yu (Yvonne) Huang is a PhD candidate in the SAGE Futures Lab. Her research delves into Chinese migrant families in Australia and Canada. She also serves as research administrator for the ECU TRACS Migration Research Network.

Chenchen Li

Chenchen Li is a PhD candidate in the SAGE Futures Lab. Her research focuses on aged care facilities in China, care workers, changes in the practice of filial piety, and the quality of care services. Her doctoral project, Filial Care Proxy and Filial Responsibility: A Study on the Role Identity and Influencing Factors of Aged-Care Workers in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China, examines how professional caregivers are positioned as “filial proxies” within China’s shifting eldercare landscape. Drawing on surveys, interviews, and participant observation, she explores how caregivers’ backgrounds, motivations, and experiences intersect with institutional structures, training systems, and national eldercare policies to shape service quality. She holds a Bachelor in Broadcasting and Television Journalism from Harbin Normal University and a Master in Digital Communication and Culture from the University of Sydney.

Ruiyao Luo

Ruiyao Luo is a PhD student in the Social Ageing (SAGE) Futures Lab. Her research explores the intersections of gender, labour, and mobility, with a particular focus on Asian migrant experiences in Australia. She brings a decade of experience as a media professional and holds interdisciplinary academic training across gender studies, journalism and communication, and law.

Kidus Yenealem Mefteh

Tshering Phuntsho

Tshering Phuntsho is a PhD student in the Social Ageing (SAGE) Futures Lab. His current research, which is a part of the YFAM project, explores the impact of mobility on transition to adulthood among the young Bhutanese migrants in Australia. He has more than 12 years of experience working in the hydropower sector as a social and environmental management professional in Bhutan.

Nelgyn Tennyson

Nelgyn Tennyson, a PhD Candidate and Research Officer, specializes in economics and demography. His research interests include transnational care, neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders, health policy, life course demography, social epidemiology, and gerontology. He contributes to designing data collection tools, quality checks, and analysis.

Amanda Wornum

Amanda Wornum is a postgraduate research student within the School of Arts and Humanities.

Dr Raisa Akifeva

Dr Raisa Akifeva is an Adjunct Research Fellow with the ECU SAGE Futures Lab. She completed her PhD in Anthropology and Sociology at The University of Western Australia with a thesis titled Cultural continuity and discontinuity in a Russian-speaking migrant context: Cultural dilemmas, national habitus and unbelonging (2022). Her research focuses on migration studies, particularly migrant parenting, Othering and belonging, and state–diaspora relations. She has published regularly in these fields, contributing to such journals as Sociology, Ethnicities, and the Journal of Intercultural Studies. In 2024, she received the TASA Early Career Researcher Best Paper Prize for her publication on cultural continuity.

Dr Rita Asfar

With a background in policy and research, Dr Rita Afsar, recently retired from the Office of Multicultural Interests (OMI), where she was engaged, since 2011, as a Senior Strategy, Planning and Research Officer. Rita led OMI’s work on ageing in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse communities in Western Australia and has produced several reports identifying issues impacting on CALD seniors.

She has expertise in policy and action research in the areas of ageing, migration, gender, social development, poverty, inequality and multiculturalism.

Professor Colleen Doyle

Professor Colleen Doyle is an adjunct professor at Edith Cowan University. She is an Honorary Fellow at the National Ageing Research Institute and Honorary Professor in Psychological Science at Swinburne University. Colleen has received a career total of 37 grants to support her research in the aged care field and published over 120 academic and technical reports on her findings. Colleen is a CI on the ECU-led MRFF project Befriending with GENIE.

Associate Professor Anita Goh

Associate Professor Anita Goh is a clinical neuropsychologist and a principal research fellow at the National Ageing Research Institute, with expertise in mental health, cognition, ageing, and dementia. Dr Goh is on the Advisory Council of the Alzheimer's Association International Society to Advance Alzheimer's Research and Treatment, Board Director of the Australian Association of Gerontology, and Councillor on the Royal Society of Victoria. Anita is a CI on the ECU-led MRFF project Befriending with GENIE.

Dr Giulia Marchetti

Giulia Marchetti is an Adjunct Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University (ECU). In 2023, she completed her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Western Australia, with a study on the new mobilities of young Italians in Australia, as part of the YMAP (Youth Mobilities, Aspirations and Pathways) research project. She currently lives in Prato, Italy, and from 2024 to 2025 she worked as a research fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Florence, contributing to the PRIN 2022 project “Covid-19 as Cultural Trauma.” Her research interests include transnational mobility, youth cultures, transition to adulthood, and visual methods.

Professor Maria Marchetti-Mercer

Prof Maria Marchetti-Mercer is a Professor of Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and currently serving as Assistant Dean: Research for the Faculty of Humanities. She served as the Head of the School of Human and Community Development at Wits from 2012-2016. Prior to that, she was the head of the Psychology Department at the University of Pretoria from 2001-2011. She has been involved in the training of professional psychologists especially with regard to family therapy for nearly 30 years and her doctoral thesis was on the Milan School of family therapy. She has also received advanced post-graduate family therapy training in Italy. Her current area of research focuses on the impact of migration on South African families and most recently the use of ICTs in African migrant families. Her new co-edited book, “Transnational Families in Africa: Migrants and the Role of Information Communication Technologies” has just been published. She recently also co-authored a book, “The Italian Diaspora in South Africa: Nostalgia, Identity, and Belonging in the Second and Third Generations( Routledge) with A. Virga. She is a C1 NRF-rated researcher and has published widely both nationally and internationally in the field of migration and families, the training of professional psychologists, and family murder. She is presently completing a project exploring the mental health impact of loadshedding on the South African population, where she headed an intradisciplinary team of researchers. In 2008 she received an award from the Institute for School-Based Family Counseling and the University of San Francisco Center for Child and Family Development for outstanding international contributions to School-Based Family Counseling presented at Brasenose College, Oxford University. She was awarded the Order of the Star of Italy in 2022 for her professional contributions from the President of Italy.

Dr Jane Mulcock

Dr Jane Mulcock is an anthropologist with interests encompassing community arts engagement, arts participation & health outcomes, arts-based research methods, identity & belonging, Indigenous Cultural & Intellectual Property rights, cultural borrowing & appropriation, and environmental beliefs values & practices. Mulcock lives in regional WA on Wudjari Boodja (Kepa Kurl /Esperance). She has worked since 2012 as Executive Officer for Esperance Community Arts and since 2019 with Esperance Tjaltjraak Native Title Aboriginal Corporation's community engagement team.

Adjunct Professor Nonja Peters

Nonja Peters, PhD (Anthropology UWA), is a Western Australian historian, anthropologist and museum curator whose expertise is in transnational migration (forced and voluntary), immigrant entrepreneurship, ethnicity, sense of place, identity and belonging and the sustainable digital preservation of immigrants’ cultural heritage. She has a special interest in Dutch maritime, military, migration and mercantile connections with Australia and the South-East Asian Region from 1602. Currently, she is involved in academic, community-based, visual and bilateral research and events in all these areas in Australia, Netherlands, Indonesia and internationally. She is the author of many publications, sole-authored books, book chapters, academic articles and documentaries and curator of a plethora of permanent and travelling museum exhibitions.

Cristina Thompson

Cristina Thompson is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow with Edith Cowan University and an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Wollongong. As a former Senior Research Fellow with the Australian Health Services Research Institute, she undertook evaluations of complex health programs in diverse fields including aged care, dementia, mental health and health workforce redesign. Her current interest is primary care interventions to improve health outcomes for older Australians. Cristina is an AI on the ECU-led MRFF project Befriending with GENIE.

Dr Keiu Telve

Dr Keiu Telve obtained her Cultural Studies PhD from the University of Tartu (2019), collaborating with Eastern Finland University. Currently a postdoctoral researcher at ECU, she delves into digital social inclusion, focusing on Estonians in Australia and their virtual ties to their homeland. With a decade of research spanning cross-border commuting, Estonian work culture, and technology's impact on society, she co-founded Estonia's Applied Anthropology Centre, applying human-centered solutions to societal challenges.