Margaret is the Executive Director, AIDR, and leads the work of AIDR to enhance community resilience to natural hazards, across Australia and beyond. She is committed to enhancing diversity and inclusion of all voices to inform disaster risk reduction and resilience research, policy, and practice.
Margaret’s first career was with the federal government, working in a range of social policy and program areas and preparing advice for successive governments for more than 33 years. Motivated by her own experiences during the 2003 Canberra fires, and the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria, Margaret undertook original community-based research focussed on the key factors that contribute to disaster recovery and resilience. She gathered and compared the views of national leaders of recovery, and community leaders who had been directly affected by emergency events across Eastern Australia.
Since then, Margaret has worked to build strong relationships and partnerships with researchers, community leaders, NGOs, all levels of government, emergency services and the business and philanthropy sectors. She looks forward to continuing that work and building a collaborative approach to building resilience to disasters, an approach she firmly believes will equip us to effectively face the disasters of the future.
