President - Alex Millmow

Dr. Alex Millmow was an associate professor in economics at the School of Business at Federation University Australia over the period 2010 until 2019. He is now an honorary research fellow at Federation University. Alex's research interests include the making of the Australian economic profession and the role of economic ideas in steering public policy. In 2004 he completed his doctorate at the Australian National University on 'The Power of Economic Ideas: The Rise of Macroeconomic Management in Australia’ which was subsequently published. Alex has also published over 50 journal articles Including the Economic Record, Economic Papers, Economic Analysis and Policy and the History of Economics Review. He is the current President of the History of Economic Thought Society of Australia (HETSA). In 2017 he published A History of Australasian Economic Thought (Routledge: London). He had just published an intellectual biography of the Anglo Australian economist Colin Clark entitled The Gypsy Economist.

Treasurer - Aneeq Sarwar

Dr. Khan is the Lead Economist at Australian Industry Group (Ai Group), specialising in Productivity, Innovation, Climate Change, Big Data, and Machine Learning. He has worked across industry and academia practicing and teaching development, econometrics, and innovation. As Treasurer he is committed to helping build and foster professional development opportunities and networks for early career economists.

Secretary - Saeideh Khosroshahi

Dr Saeideh Khosroshahi is a Regulatory Economist at Essential Services Commission. She has supported the delivery of various water and transport price review projects since 2019. Saeideh is also an experienced university educator and researcher. Her research on conservation tariffs and customers’ preferences have been published in leading international journals. Prior to joining the Commission in 2019, Saeideh was a lecturer at the La Trobe University and University of South Australia. She holds a PhD in water economics from La Trobe University and she is passionate about supporting young female economists and promoting their voices.

Office Bearer - Nicolas Alexiou

Nicolas Alexiou is an Investigator in Financial Services Enforcement at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), assisting investigations and proceedings relating to breaches of Commonwealth and state financial services and credit laws, including corporate misconduct and complex fraud. Prior to this, Nicolas gained experience in the Data Analytics and Research, Market Supervision and Financial Services and Credit Licensing teams of ASIC, and also interned in the Legal and Economic Division of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC). Nicolas holds Bachelor of Economics and Bachelor of Commerce degrees from Monash University and during his studies served as President of the Economics Student Society of Australia at Monash University’s Clayton campus.

Office Bearer - Buly Cardak

Buly Cardak is an Associate Professor of Economics at the La Trobe Business School. His research areas include the study of household attitudes to financial risk taking and the economics of education, focusing on equity considerations of the university participation decisions of students. He adopts a range of empirical techniques to work with large longitudinal household survey data. In recent work he has applied his expertise in household risk attitudes to the analysis of the attitudes and choices of sports fans with respect to sports betting and in understanding the impacts of financial market fluctuations on household risk tolerance. In 2015 Buly co-founded of the ESA’s National Economic Panel with Tom Chan. He previously served on the Victorian Council of the ESA from 2015-2019.

Office Bearer - Benedict Davies

Benedict Davies is currently a Ministerial adviser on superannuation policy. He has experience in technical, product and policy roles for a diverse group of employers and he has degrees in economics, philosophy, tax law and policy as well qualifications in applied finance and health economics.

Office Bearer - Ashton de Silva

Dr de Silva is an Associate Professor in Economics at RMIT University. He is an applied econometrician with several areas of interest including financial well-being, household/individual decision-making and local economies/communities. These interests have recently been augmented with web3 perspectives. He has a strong track record of working with various government and private sector organisations.

Office Bearer - Brendan Coates

Brendan Coates is the Economic Policy Program Director at Grattan Institute, where he leads Grattan’s work on tax and transfer system reform, retirement incomes and superannuation, housing, macroeconomics, and migration.
He is a former macro-financial economist with the World Bank in Indonesia and consulted to the Bank in Latin America. Prior to that, he worked in the Treasury in areas such as tax-transfer system reform and macro-economic forecasting,with a strong focus on the Chinese economy.
Brendan holds a Masters of International Development Economics from the Australian National University and Bachelors of Commerce and Arts from the University of Melbourne. He sits on the Victorian State Council for the Economic Society of Australia.

Office Bearer - Michael Coelli

Dr Mick Coelli is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne. Mick’s main research interests are in Labour Economics, the Economics of Education and Micro-empirical econometric techniques. He completed his PhD in Economics in 2005 at the University of British Columbia. He has published in several leading International and Australian Economics journals including the Journal of Public Economics, Labour Economics, Empirical Economics, Economic Record and the Australian Economic Review. He has written several book chapters, government reports and has conducted research for the Federal and Victorian State governments. Prior to working in academia, Mick worked for the Reserve Bank of Australia, Macquarie Group and KPMG Management Consulting.

Office Bearer - Anita Doraisami

Anita Doraisami has taught Economics at Monash and Federation University. She has also worked for the International Monetary Fund and was Macroeconomic Adviser to the Ministry of Finance, Timor Leste.

She has consulted widely for international organisations and held visiting positions at the Asian Development Bank Institute, Tokyo, the University of Malaya, the ANU and the University of Cambridge.

Anita holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge.

Office Bearer - James Maccarrone

James Maccarrone is a Consultant at BCG, where he has worked across the Public Sector and Private Equity practice areas. Prior to this, he was a Research Economist at the Productivity Commission, and worked as an intern at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, London. He has published research in labour economics, particularly at the intersection of international trade and labour markets. James has a Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) degree in economics from the University of Melbourne, and a Master of Philosophy in Economics from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Office Bearer - Munirul Nabin

Office Bearer - Dr George Rivers

Dr George Rivers is an economist specialising in cost benefit analysis; legislation assessment; project/program evaluation and pricing.  Dr Rivers is also currently an adjunct faculty member of the Australia New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) and an instructor in the Executive Masters of Public Administration–  for senior public sector officials. George has extensive experience in program evaluations, stakeholder consultation, cost-benefit analysis, productivity analysis, activity based costing and national competition policy assessments, consulting with various state and national government agencies.  Dr Rivers has been commissioned to deliver cost-benefit workshops on behalf of the Victorian Competition and Efficiency Commission (now Better Regulation Victoria), the Queensland Competition Authority and the New Zealand Treasury.  Dr Rivers was also involved in delivering innovation productivity workshops for the Department of Business and Innovation on ICT projects and brand value/productivity workshop for the Corporate Valuations Unit of the Australian Tax office. 

Office Bearer - Steven Stern

Steven Stern is University General Counsel and University Secretary at Victoria University, and an Adjunct Professor in the College of Law and Justice. He has a Bachelor of Economics and Bachelor of Law from Monash University, and a Master of Law and PhD from the University of Melbourne. His Master thesis was on the protection of computer software, and PhD on the extent to which monetary economics influences financial law. Steven is alos a member of the Victorian Technical Committee of the Taxation Institute of Australia. He has published in internationally refereed journals such as Lloyd’s Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly, The Journal of Business Law, and The Company Financial and Insolvency Law Review. 

Office Bearer - Rebecca Valenzuela

Dr Rebecca Valenzuela is a professional economist, an experienced university educator, a well-published research academic and a best-selling book author. Between 2000-2019, she taught economics at Monash University and the University of Melbourne, as well as in various universities in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Canada and the US. Rebecca is currently the Model Development and Research Manager at DTF, where she is also the managing editor of Victoria’s Economic Bulletin. Prior to this, she served as Principal Economist at the Productivity Commission (QLD), and as Senior Adviser at the DPC in NSW. Dr Valenzuela is the principal author of the popular book “The Economic Development in Asia” published in 2009. Between 2010 and 2017, she wrote regular Op-Ed articles on contemporary policy issues in The Age and in the Sydney Morning Herald. Rebecca obtained her PhD (Econometrics) from the University of New England, NSW.