Background
Lauren is Director of the La Trobe Climate Change Adaptation Lab. With colleagues within and affiliated with the Lab, she is using innovative social research to examine: the impacts of climate change on the sectors of society that sustain us (including environmental sustainability, government, agriculture, water, education, health and emergency management); the far-reaching implications of these impacts for our collective wellbeing; and the deep, multi-level adaptation required. As part of this, the Lab is complementing conventional approaches to adaptation by exploring the adaptation of work itself (formal and informal, paid and unpaid) including the escalating work of trying to adapt to and mitigate climate change. Intersecting with her work on climate change, Lauren’s research examines approaches to research impact and the UN SDGs, the changing role of universities, ideas about innovation, and the interconnected systemic changes referred to as the Anthropocene.
Primarily a geographer by training, Lauren was a Lead Author with the Australasia chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. She has a MSc in Environmental Change and Management and a DPhil in Human Geography from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and a BSc (Hons) in Ecology from the University of Melbourne. Prior to joining La Trobe, Lauren was Director of the university-wide Urban Futures Enabling Impact Platform at RMIT University, Research Fellow in the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, Associate Partner at RM Consulting Group, and Vice-Principal at Janet Clarke Hall (University of Melbourne). Lauren grew up in Bendigo and when she is not working or watching kids’ sport can often be found running in the bush.