School of Project Management

PhD (Sydney), B.Sc (Hons I), B.Com

Ken is an Associate Professor and former Associate Head of Education at the School of Project Management. He serves as the Faculty of Engineering Academic Director (External Engagement) for education. Ken's research expertise lies in stakeholder engagement; and social network theory and analysis for exploring outcomes such as stakeholder assessment, prioritisation, learning, motivation, performance at the individual, team, project and organisational levels. He has won several research grants at the university, national (ARC DP) and international levels. Most recently, he was awarded the Project Management Institute (PMI) grant for exploring stakeholder engagement through the use of social media in public infrastructure projects. In education, Ken cares deeply about student engagement, transformative learning and teaching that inspires. In 2021, he was awarded the Faculty of Engineering's Dean's award for excellence in outstanding teaching. He has provided consultancy services and worked closely with schools, community & industry partners, including NSW Department of Planning, Industry & Environment, Western Sydney Airport, Google, Atlassian, PwC, ANZ, Australian National Preventative Health Agency, to name a few.

Prior to Sydney, Ken held tenured lectureship at the University of Wollongong in the former School of Information Systems and Technology and his Ph.D (awarded in 2009 from the School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney) research won the RailCorp Prize for "Addressing Society's Needs in Research Project Work" at the 2005 Research Conversaziones. His doctoral research focused on the development of a social networks based model for understanding individual performance and technology use in knowledge-intensive work. Ken also has extensive industry experience in the Information Technology and Telecommunications space. This includes his role as Systems Integrator at Protocom Technologies and the Telstra Messaging (Text & SMS) Group, where he was involved in several multi-million dollar IT projects relating to development and implementation of short-message-service (SMS) software on Telstra's Messaging Access Intelligent Network System. Prior, he led online advertisement campaign coordination for DoubleClick Australia (now acquired by Google) and PostClick.

Stewart Clegg was Distinguished Professor of Management and Organization Studies at the University of Technology Sydney before joining the Department of Project Management in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney in 2021. He is a Virtual Visiting Professor at University of Stavanger, Norway and at Nova School of Business and Economics, Portugal. In the past he has held Chair appointments at the University of New England, University of St. Andrews, University of Western Sydney as well as many Visiting Appointments, including at the Universities of Cambridge, Stanford, Newcastle (UK) and Aston and Copenhagen Business School. He is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential contributors to organization studies and project management, recognized as such by numerous Fellowships, as well as being one of the most significant contemporary theorists of power relations.

He has held several ARC Linkage Grants investigating phenomena such as alliancing, as well as program delivery, in Sydney Water. Currently he is involved in empirical teamwork for the Asia Pacific Organization, investigating member nation governmental digital strategies, as well as an upcoming ASSA (Academy of the Social Sciences) workshop on Public Private Partnerships.

He is an EGOS (European Group for Organization Studies) Honorary Member, a lifetime achievement award; he is a Fellow of EURAM (European Academy of Management); Fellow of the AOM (Academy of Management) Distinguished Fellow of ANZAM (Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management); Fellow of BASS (British Academy of the Social Sciences); an Aston Fellow and a Fellow of ASSA (Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia). He is a prolific contributor to scientific journals as well as the author and editor of over 50 books.

Peyman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on housing studies, climate change, resilience, future studies, and extreme contexts. Peyman’s research explores issues such as housing affordability, homelessness, informal housing in the context of climate change, and the potential of policy and projects to mitigate adverse social outcomes.

His work has contributed to several research projects. He has been involved in two projects under the AHURI Inquiry 2025 as a research assistant, contributing to analysis for “Measuring Climate Change Vulnerability in Australia’s Housing System” and “Insurance, Finance and the Cost of Housing Resilience: Who Pays?” He has also been involved in assessing the impact and equity of governance mechanisms for enhancing seismic resilience in the housing market. More recently, he has conducted simulation-based studies on the future of the Australian housing market under climate change scenarios. Peyman serves as a reviewer for leading journals, including the Journal of Management in Engineering, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, International Journal of Project Management, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. He received the Outstanding Reviewer Award from the Journal of Management in Engineering in both 2025 and 2026.

When I ask a room of executives how their last transformation project went, the answers are mixed. Why some projects deliver and others don't is the question I've spent 30 years on: from running them, to researching them, and now teaching the people who lead them.

I started with delivery. As Business Development Director at Capita Plc, I led the shaping and winning of transformation partnerships with government. The largest was a £1.7 billion education support partnership across 400 schools in Staffordshire, which created 500 jobs and produced the fastest improvement in educational outcomes in England at the time. As a Partner at Stroud International, I led organisational improvement projects for blue-chip manufacturers. One German car component business went from 2% to 25% profit on €300 million of revenue, in an environment where everyone said improvement was impossible because they were already world class. Another lifted productivity by 20%, which removed the need for a €35 million investment. Earlier, at Hagen & Co, I led consulting teams into problems that had been written off as unsolvable: 25% more productivity at Ford's engine plant, 20% lower labour unit cost at the Email refrigerator factory, and 30% more output across Uncle Tobys' Australian manufacturing sites.

After 20 years of more international flights than I'd like, I took a career break to go around the world a different way – on the Clipper yacht race. I didn't know how to sail but figured that twenty crew facing mother nature was a fair place to observe how leadership emerges under pressure. It was crossing the North Pacific, after our fourth storm system, that I made the decision to take my question back to academia – and shift my focus from doing, to decoding and teaching.

My research asks what carries an organisation from intent to result – the mindsets and processes behind successful change projects – and it is published in Journal of Management Inquiry, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Australian Journal of Management, and Journal of Change Management.

My research purpose is to change practice, rather than furnish the shelves of the library. With the Queensland Public Sector Commission, I built an evidence-based leadership framework now shaping how 320,000 public servants are selected, assessed and developed. With NSW Health, my work moved state policy guidance on transformation towards dialogic practice, an approach associated with a higher probability of success. With TeamInvest Private, I put the collapse of residential home builders on the public agenda and developed a funding model that lowers the risk carried by homeowners and industry.

Nothing brings research to practice more acutely than executive education. Today, I design and deliver transformative programs at the John Grill Institute for Project Leadership, including the Executive Leadership in Major Projects program and the Catalyst Program. My participants lead major projects across the Australian public, private and not-for-profit sectors and internationally, and we help them shift the dial on their leadership, as well as the project ecosystems they work within.

I still sail. On weekends, I'm usually found on a boat somewhere on Sydney Harbour.

Marloes Korendijk is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Project Management. She is part of the research team of Nader Naderpajouh. The research team researches topics related to organizing for resilience in the face of disasters and climate change. Within the team, she is especially focusing on strategy, management and governance in relation to climate change. Before commencing this role, she completed her cotutelle PhD in International Business and Sustainability at Macquarie University (Australia) and University of Groningen (The Netherlands).

PhD Dissertation

During her PhD, she conducted extensive research on strategy implementation within MNEs, producing three papers that each focus on different levels of analysis: country-level, organization-level, and individual-level. The first paper, published in theJournal of International Management, explores how subsidiaries underperform in terms of CSR because of conflicting signals arising from institutional multiplicity in both the home and host countries. The second paper adopts an institutional logics perspective to investigate how organizational-level factors, particularly subsidiary managers' identification, drive variance in CSR performance. The third paper is a qualitative study applying identification theory to uncover individual-level patterns of identification that influence distinct approaches to subsidiary-level strategy implementation. Collectively, her dissertation advances our understanding of the antecedents of effective and consistent strategy implementation within MNEs. 

Current and Future Research

In addition to existing and follow-up projects related to her dissertation, she is involved in multiple projects, especially related to Corporate Purpose, Climate Change, and Diversity and Inclusion. First, her ongoing work on corporate purpose seeks to explain how corporate purpose is embedded within MNEs and the factors that influence its alignment with CSR goals. Second, she is interested in researching how firms engage in different activities related to climate change. Given her strong interest in microfoundations of strategy, she aims to further investigate the underlying processes and mechanisms that drive strategic effectiveness related to environmental engagement within global firms. Third, she is starting multiple projects to investigate the social side of sustainability, especially focusing on the role of Diversity and Inclusion within organizations. Due to the multitude of questions, she employs a multitude of methodologies as well, ranging from panel data regressions to QCA and qualitative case studies.

Dr. Hoonyog Lee is a lecturer in the School of Project Management, Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on building a sustainable and resilient future, emphasising safety-first and health-centric environments.

Dr. Lee's work explores how safety and health risks influence human behaviour, leading to abnormal physical and physiological responses. He aims to design adaptive interventions that promote proactive risk management and foster safer and healthier environments.

Key areas of his expertise include:

• Human Sensing Technologies: Utilising wearable motion and biosensors to monitor individuals' physical and physiological responses.
• Data Analytics and Machine Learning Models: Extracting hidden information from sensor data to assess safety and health risks.
• Behavioural Analysis and Social Science: Developing adaptive interventions to guide individuals towards proactive risk management.

Drawing on his expertise, Dr. Lee has successfully developed risk management frameworks, including:

• Construction Safety Management: Identifying high-risk workers using wearable sensors.
• Smart Home Healthcare: Recognising abnormal patterns of occupant activities in daily living through Wi-Fi signal variation.
• Fall Risk Assessment: Assessing individual fall risks and geolocating environmental fall hazards using collective sensing technologies.
• Household Energy Conservation: Promoting energy-saving behaviours through social normative messaging interventions.

Currently, Dr. Lee's research centres on enhancing team cohesion in project management. He investigates the continuous assessment of team dynamics and designs adaptive interventions to foster cohesive team environments. This work ultimately aims to advance project efficiency and optimise outcomes.

Dr. Lee leads Team L in the School of Project Management. He received his Ph.D. in Construction Science from Texas A&M University and previously served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Dr Liu is a Senior Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow at the Faculty of Engineering. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Australian National University (ANU) in 2017.

Please refer to her personal website for updated information here: https://sites.google.com/site/wanchunliu0205/

Dr Carolina M. Zani is an award-winning researcher in organisational design and megaprojects. In 2025, she received the Paper of the Year award from the Association for Project Management, and her research ranks among the top 10% at the Academy of Management. Carolina has an industry-engaged research portfolio including some of the most prominent megaprojects worldwide, such as High Speed Rail Two (UK) and Société des Grands Projets (France). She has contributed to diverse international research groups, including the Megaproject Delivery Centre at UCL, the Building Innovation Unit at NORIE (Brazil), and the Project Production Systems Laboratory at UC Berkeley. Her research spans several interconnected domains, with a primary focus on complexity theory, temporary organisations, and operations management.

Dr Naderpajouh is Head of School of Project Management, where he also leads the "Organising Risk and Resilience" research lab. His main area of research focuses on collective action and organising across social, technical and ecological systems. He serves as an Associate Editor for journals including the Journal of Management in Engineering by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and as a member of the Editorial Board of journals including the International Journal of Project Management (IJPM), while he serves as a referee for over 30 academic journals. Dr Naderpajouh is the founder and co-lead of the research pillar on "projects in the face of climate change" at the Net Zero Initiative (NZI), is a member of the Sydney Environment Institute, and the founding member of the research stream on "projects for sustainable, resilient and just future" at the John Grill Institute for Project Leadership.

His portfolio of research grants, totaling over A$17.3M, includes projects funded by the European Commission through Horizon 2020 program, Australian Research Council (ARC), Future Fuels Cooperative Research Centre (FFCRC), Arup, Natural Hazard Research Australia (NHRA), CSIRO, and Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Research Trust. His works have also received several recognitions, among them the 2019 RMIT Europe Fellowship, the 2019 Malcom Moore Industry Research Award, the 2016 and 2020 best paper honourable mention from the Journal of Management in Engineering (ASCE), the 2018 Emerald Literati Award Highly Commended Paper, and the Bronze medal in the Third Mondialogo Engineering Award by UNESCO and DaimlerAG (2009). In addition, his contributions as a referee have been recognised by the 2016 and 2017 outstanding reviewer award from the Journal of Management in Engineering (ASCE), and the 2018 outstanding reviewer award from the Reliability Engineering and Systems Safety (RESS). He has also initiated and served as a guest editor for four special issues on different aspects of resilience in the Journal of Management in Engineering (ASCE), the International Journal of Project Management (IJPM), and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management.

Dr Naderpajouh is actively engaged with research communities, industry partners and government agencies across Australia, New Zealand, Europe, USA, UK, Middle East and Asia through educating practitioners, advising and mentoring future scholars, assisting communities, and consulting industry partners and government agencies. Prior to joining the University of Sydney, he has worked as a Senior Lecturer (and before that as a Lecturer) at RMIT University (2016-2021), RMIT Europe Fellow (2019), Adjunct Professor at the University of Tehran (2017), Visiting Assistant Professor (2014-2016) and Post-Doctoral Scholar (2013-2014) both at Purdue University. His professional experience includes working for a multi-national joint venture in underground construction with Jäger Bau GmbH of Austria, as well as working as a member of a structural design team in mid/high-rise buildings. He holds a PhD from Purdue University, a MSc from Iran University of Science and Technology, and a BSc from Isfahan University of Technology, all in Civil Engineering. He is passionate about the discourse of social justice and equity, in addition to the climate crisis, and these values are foundational in his active research on the topics of resilience, collective action, innovation and infrastructure management.

Associate Professor Julien Pollack started working in project management in the Australian public sector delivering organizational change projects, where he completed an Action Research Ph.D. This research won national and international awards. Following this, he managed telecommunications and heavy engineering projects, before taking an academic position in 2011 to teach project management. He joined the University of Sydney in 2016. His research has focused on two broad themes: trends in project management research; and developing project management practice to meet the needs of projects that cannot be pre-defined in simple and stable terms. He has successively drawn on systems thinking, complexity theory, and change management to address this latter area of research, particularly focusing on the delivery of organisational change projects. His research in these areas has been frequently published in the leading project management journals and research conferences.

Soniya Rijal is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sydney. She did her PhD in Organisation and Management at UNSW Business School. Her work sits at the center of organization theory, and there is a consistent thread running through it. She is interested in how taken-for-granted global models of organization and organizing (e.g., microfinance, social enterprising, disaster management, or conservation markets) spread across nation-states and how such models shape the organizing processes and practices on the ground. In her work, she draws on and contributes to different theories, such as sensemaking, paradox, temporality, and the world-society perspective. 

Her research uses multimodal qualitative methods that combine interviews, observations, documents, images, audio, and videos. She has conducted research in Australia and Nepal, including studies of community responses to bushfires and floods, entrepreneurial support systems in low-income settings, and conservation governance in human–tiger conflict zones.

Her research appears in leading management outlets and informs policy discussions on resilience, community capability, and cross-sector collaboration. She collaborates with academic, government, and community partners to translate research into practice.

John Sebastián Salazar Flórez is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Project Management at the University of Sydney. He holds a PhD in Engineering from the University of Sydney, a master's degree in Civil Engineering from Universidad de los Andes, and a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. His research examines how interorganisational networks, governance arrangements, and institutional conditions shape the delivery and outcomes of infrastructure projects.

John’s research investigates the governance of infrastructure markets, with a particular focus on collaboration, power, illicit practices, and institutional development within networks of public agencies, private firms, and other stakeholders. He uses network analysis to examine organisational and policy problems. His research has been published in journals including Public Management Review, Construction Management and Economics, the Journal of Management in Engineering, and the Journal of Construction Engineering and Management.

Dr Jeffrey Scales is a Lecturer in the University of Sydney's School of Project Management, part of the Faculty of Engineering. He is one of the University of Sydney's 2025 intake of Horizon Educators with a primary focus on teaching whilst maintaining active research interests. His research interests include resource constrained project scheduling, systems thinking and design science research.

Dr Scales completed his PhD in 2022 at the University of Technology Sydney after a long career as an engineer and project manager in the fields of digital communications, finance and news media. He has worked in project environments in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, the Philippines, China and Japan and enjoys bringing his personal experience to classroom discussions of the gap that often exists between espoused and performed project management practice.

Dr Scales has been teaching systems thinking for more than a decade and project management topics since starting his PhD in 2016. He spent two years as a Lecturer at the University of Sydney's School of Project Management and then several months as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney's Robotics Institute prior to taking up his current position.

Dr Scales' PhD thesis was included in the University of Technology Sydney's Chancellor's List of outstanding theses for 2022, one of his student papers won the 2019 Anatol Rapoport Memorial Award and he won the Grosvenor Award for his Master's studies.

Professor Jennifer Whyte is a Professor in the School of Project Management, in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney. She leads research on the leadership of major projects, and on project leadership in a changing world.

She is interested in improving project organising practices. Her research has practical importance for transforming construction through digitalisation and offsite approaches. It involves studies in the field, conceptual work and lab-based research. A current field study is on the Sydney infrastructure megaproject ecology, and how innovation can be fostered across projects in this context. Conceptual research is on future making, i.e. the pluralistic organisational practices through which desirable futures are imagined and brought into being, and the participation in those practices. Lab-based research is focused on developing tools to support managers and engineers address the issues they face with systems integration and managing change in major projects,

Professor Whyte is a Fellow and Policy Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers. She was previously Head of School of Project Management at the University of Sydney (2021-23) and has held Professorships at Imperial College London and University of Reading, UK, and a Shimizu Visiting Professorship at Stanford University. She retains a Professorship in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London.

Her research has has significant impact on transforming industry and policy, through participation in Advisory Boards, notably the main board of the UK Construction Leadership Council (2019-2021) and theBuilding Safely Committee (2018-2019), set up after the Grenfell Disaster. She is currently a member of the Global Infrastructure Hub Academic Advisory Committee.

In 2024 she has given invited talks, including at the Stanford Industrialized Construction Forum, National University of Singapore and an ACOLA/Parliamentary Library talk on n Building Australian Mega Engineering (to the Canberra Parliamentary Community).

BEng, MEng, PhD

Zhangkai Wu is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the School of Project Management at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on agentic AI and probabilistic generative models. 

He received his PhD from the University of Technology Sydney in 2024, his MEng from Nanjing University, and his BEng from Guangxi University. His research has been published in leading machine learning conferences and journals, including KDD, NeurIPS, TNNLS, Machine Learning, PR, AAAI and Information Fusion. 

Dr. Xue is a lecturer in the School of Project Management at the University of Sydney. He joined the school in early September 2023. His research focus is on stakeholder management in the dynamic and complex environment of megaprojects with the data-driven methods of natural language processing approach, network analysis, and organizational simulation. He has a good knowledge background in project management, information technology, and mathematical modeling. He has a list of publications in the leading journals in the field of construction project management. He has published the relevant research outcomes in the International Journal of Project Management, Journal of Management in Engineering, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, and Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management. Furthermore, he won the best paper award at the Construction Research Congress 2020, a top academic conference in the field. He is also a key member of Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Best Research Team of the Year Award (2022).

Dr Oliver Young serves as a Lecturer and Associate Head of School (Education) in the School of Project Management at the University of Sydney and is recognized as a University of Sydney Horizon Educator. His teaching and research encompass project management, higher education, behavioural science, and human centred design, with a specific focus on understanding human interaction with and experience of complex environments.

Dr Young’s work integrates educational leadership with interdisciplinary research, synthesising psychophysiology, behavioural analysis, and qualitative inquiry to advance understanding of authentic human experience. His expertise includes mobile eye tracking, embodied cognition, spatial behaviour, and the design of authentic learning environments.

In addition to his research, Dr Young leads curriculum innovation and educational enhancement, with interests in authentic assessment, experiential learning, systems thinking, and evidence informed approaches to teaching and learning. He collaborates across disciplines to examine how behavioural evidence can inform the design of environments, technologies, and educational practices.

BSc, MSc, PhD

Dr. Sujuan Zhang joined the School of Project Management as a Lecturer of Project Organising in 2024.

She served as the Director of Master of Project and Program Management, which is an 100% online master program designed for experienced professionals with after-hours study.

Before joining USyd in 2024, she was an assistant professor of construction project management at Department of Civil Engineering, Xiamen University, China (during 2021-2024). Dr. Zhang earned her PhD in Construction Project Management from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and holds both her master's and bachelor's degrees from Tianjin University, China.

Her research focuses on owner domain of project organising, with a particular emphasis on how owner organisations lead and navigate complex, dynamic, and evolving environments. These include responding to the emerging ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) requirements driven by sustainable development goals and adapting to the transformative impacts of digital technologies on organisational practices. This line of research on owner project capabilities has been recognised internationally through the PMI Young Researcher Award 2025 2025 PMI Young Researcher Award Winner.

More recently, her research has extended to mission-oriented project organising, exploring how owners and public sector organisations mobilise projects and programs and shape capabilities to address grand challenges such as climate change and net-zero transitions.

Dr Xinyue Zhang joined the School of Project Management at the University of Sydney as a Lecturer in 2024. She currently serves as Associate Head of School (Research) and External Engagement Director. Her research focuses on major infrastructure management, project organising and governance.

Dr Xiaoshan Zhou is a newly appointed Lecturer in the School of Project Management. She is passionate about developing intelligent robots and machines that help relieve the burden of human workers in occupational environments and infrastructure systems. These robots are empowered with a "mind" (intelligence) that goes beyond mechanical assembly to become living entities that learn from, adapt to, and collaborate with people in real-world environments. Dr Zhou has so far published in leading journals across construction engineering and management, including Automation in Construction, Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, Sustainable Cities and Society, Journal of Management in Engineering, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, Human Factors, to name a few. She has served as a reviewer for 20 academic journals and conferences. Before joining the University of Sydney, she received her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2026. She received her master's degree in Civil Engineering from Tsinghua University and was nominated as an Academic Rising Star there in 2023.

Dr Zhou's research advances embodied AI and physics AI for robotic platforms and human–robot interaction (HRI) through a highly multidisciplinary approach, with a particular focus on human–automation complementarity. Her work gets inspiration from many neuroscientific principles of human motor control and vision and investigates how AI (including neural networks and VLMs) and robotic control embody similar principles to navigate unstructured environments. Dr Zhou's research group offers students opportunities to explore new research frontiers while expanding their impact by developing and contributing their own passions, expertise, and research innovations to collaborative and multidisciplinary projects. Students have opportunities to work closely with industry partners and contribute to research ranging from proof-of-concept studies to potential commercialisation. The group is committed to helping students develop the knowledge, skills, and values gained through their HDR experience to support their future careers. Scholarship opportunities are subject to the availability of funding and suitable research projects. Prospective students are welcome to email Dr Zhou with their CV, research interests, and relevant research experience for enquiries.