I am in the process of wrapping up my year as the inaugural Early Career Research Fellow for Natural Hazards Research Australia. This has been a busy but productive year and, thanks to the Centre’s support, I’ve taken a few really big steps forwards in my research on laws about bushfire in Australia.
My fellowship application focused on four main research goals:
- expanding my national and international network
- putting my research in front of key experts and stakeholders at fire-related conferences
- publishing high-impact research about law and bushfires that contribute to the Centre’s priority research areas
- creating a solid foundation for my next research step (a major grant application).
My proposal was ambitious, but with support from the lovely folks at the Centre and my expanding network of wonderful colleagues, I am arriving at the end of the year with some fantastic research ‘wins’ under my belt.
(1) Building networks
A core component of my research plan for the Fellowship was to reach out to Dr Rebecca Miller, an emerging expert on prescribed burning policy in California, and start to build a collaborative relationship with her. Rebecca was extremely generous, entertaining my ‘cold-call’ email and agreeing to work with me on a paper for the International Association of Wildland Fire (IAWF) conference in Pasadena in May 2022. We had an opportunity to meet in person when I visited California in May (see below), have met online many times since, and co-authored a research paper based on our IAWF presentation. Through Rebecca, and attending the IAWF conferences in California and Melbourne, I have met and started to work with a host of new collaborators on fire and law-related projects.
(2) Presenting at IAWF conferences
The second focus of my Fellowship application was to attend and present at the IAWF Fire & Climate conferences in Pasadena, California (May 2022) and Melbourne (June 2022). Very few people in the wildfire/bushfire space knew about my research before 2022 so I saw the opportunity to present at these conferences (and particularly to be there in person), as a really valuable chance to put my research in front of international experts and the agencies and policymakers whose research needs I want to be able to respond to. I presented with Rebecca in Pasadena, and we had some fantastic feedback about the value of our comparative approach to legal and policy reform for supporting adaptation to future fire regimes. In Melbourne, I spoke about the intersection between legal research on climate adaptation and my specific focus on adaptation in laws about bushfire. This second presentation was also well-received, perhaps in part because I was warmly introduced to the audience as the Centre’s new ECR Fellow – which was a starting point for my conversations with many people afterwards!
(3) Research outputs
After the IAWF conferences, I ‘wrote up’ my presentations as conference papers and academic journal articles, with Fellowship funds helping to cover the costs of submitting those papers to academic journals. These outputs are a really important academic measurement of research success, but they are also helping me to share my work more broadly, demonstrate my expertise in this space and make the case for the next steps in my research career.
(4) The next steps
One of the things that I found particularly valuable about the ECR fellowship program was that it invited me to think about how my research might contribute to the work of the Centre, but also about how the Centre could help to boost my career in the coming years. As I was drafting my application to the Centre, I identified a big grant opportunity and I mapped out the kinds of evidence that I would need to show to be competitive. I then built activities into my Fellowship application that would give me that evidence. Having made progress in 2022 against all each of my first three goals, I have been able to provide some neat and compelling examples against key grant criteria in the application that I am about to submit (December 2022).
Writing my Fellowship application at the end of 2021 gave me a really clear sense of direction in my research this year, and the research itself has had a far greater impact because of this Fellowship than I could ever have achieved alone. I am enormously grateful to the Centre for propelling my career forwards and I am looking forward to continuing to feed back into the Centre’s priorities, and to supporting adaptation-oriented law reform in Australia over the coming years!