Meet the fellows
Alex Langley (he/him)
Alex is a third-year Doctor of Medicine student whose clinical placement at Western Health showed him how much waste and emissions healthcare creates. He is researching sustainability in the operating theatre and wants to change everyday clinical practice for patients and the planet.
Andia Latifi Meybodi (she/her)
Andia is a Master of Environment student who works across finance and innovation. She is interested in what climate change means for communities, industries and economies, and in ideas that challenge how we think about growth, value and progress.
Annie Zeleznikow (she/her)
Annie is a youth worker at a homeless youth refuge and a PhD candidate at Victoria University, researching cultural connection in out-of-home care. In the Fellowship, she wants to bring sustainability into how young people find stable, lasting housing.
Bella Sargeant (she/her)
Bella is a Biological Sciences student at La Trobe University who believes access to nature shouldn't depend on postcode or income. She is building a native biodiversity program for renters and young people, with Indigenous plant starter packs and propagation resources.
Bethany Kiss (she/her)
Bethany is a PhD researcher with a background in architecture, using a decade of Wildlife Victoria rescue records to map how animals use our buildings. She wants to turn that research into a public tool for anyone renovating, building or choosing what to plant.
Camille Mendoza (she/her)
Camille is a PhD candidate in education, researching how youth-led groups shape climate education policy. She brings young people, researchers, educators and artists together, and wants more room for young people to lead the decisions that affect them.
Charlie Connell-Tobin (he/him)
Charlie is an architecture student specialising in working with First Nations knowledges, who grew up with a family farm on the Murray River. He wants to design spaces that reconnect people to Country, starting with movable pollinator pods.
Cori Rushdi (she/her)
Cori is a philosophy honours student whose thesis asks how Buddhist principles might reshape sustainability. She sees fast fashion as a justice problem as much as an environmental one, and wants to use inclusive design to open up education.
Daniel Amenuvor (he/him)
Daniel is a doctoral researcher in urban planning at the Melbourne School of Design, studying how industrial parks shape communities in Ghana. He favours participatory approaches and wants a project that is genuinely useful to the communities it serves.
Eija Aeonn (she/her)
Eija is an emergency nurse and former Sea Shepherd campaigner who sees health and climate as the same problem from two angles. She wants to make healthcare more sustainable, from cutting single-use waste to plant-based hospital menus.
Fatima Zahra Bassim (she/her)
Fatima Zahra is an Australia Awards scholar, proudly Amazigh from Morocco, studying a Master of Development Studies with a focus on gender. Her work for women's empowerment has earned a gender and intersectional justice award, and she wants to build community leadership that outlasts the Fellowship.
Guruji Wagner (he/him)
Guruji is a proud Yidinji man from Far North Queensland, studying mechanical engineering systems and working as an undergraduate engineer at Worley. He started BinThereDoneTHAT to repair broken recycling pathways on Country, and wants to carry ideas from concept to something working in community.
Hannah Vrijenhoek (she/they)
Hannah is a theatre maker from the Netherlands, now studying a Master of Theatre Directing at the Victorian College of the Arts. She makes embodied, interactive work for the youngest audiences, including Land of the Lost, a Melbourne Fringe nominee about climate change.
Hardik Maheshwari (he/him)
Hardik is a Master of Management student who helped found a digital services company and prototyped a carbon credits startup that won national competitions. He grew up in an agricultural family in Rajasthan and wants to work out how technology and business can genuinely serve sustainability.
Imogen Kerr (she/her)
Imogen is a Master of Social Work student and artist who paints with watercolours she makes herself, and the founder of The Granny Square Project. She wants to explore how the arts can help people engage with the emotional and social side of the climate crisis.
Isaac Morris (he/him)
Isaac is a Master of Information Technology student specialising in cybersecurity. He works where digital ethics meets sustainability and a cyber security student partnering with the people safeguarding our environment.
Jackson Streader (he/him)
Jackson is a Master of Mechanical Engineering student who has cut defect rates on Boeing 787 production lines and diagnosed failures in solar infrastructure. He wants to prove technical skill is one of the most powerful tools we have for the energy transition.
John Beder (he/him)
John is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker studying a Master of Film and Television, whose film How to Sue the Klan won an NAACP Image Award. He now wants to turn the power of story towards climate action.
Karla Heric (she/her)
Karla is a CSIRO industry PhD candidate at Victoria University, exploring how microbes could break down microplastics in wastewater. She also wants to help people notice their local environment, so sustainability becomes second nature.
Laura Schmid (she/her)
Laura is an early childhood education student at Victoria University and a volunteer CFA firefighter who earned an Emergency Service Medal. She wants to build a wildlife program that brings children and adults together, from kindergarten to high school.
Lucas Symes (he/him)
Lucas is a business management student at La Trobe University and a development coordinator at Development Victoria. He wants to know what it would take to let water flow through our cities as it did before colonisation, and to help build and care for Country differently.
Lulu Chen (she/her)
Lulu is a Master of Public Health student who recently led a community health promotion project in rural Cambodia. In the Fellowship, she is exploring food insecurity through culture and sustainability, and developing a project that celebrates culturally diverse approaches to nutritious, sustainable food.
Madeline Ballingall (she/her)
Madeline is a Master of Civil Engineering student and president of Students in Renewable Energy. Inspired by solarpunk, she wants to understand what stops sustainable infrastructure being built at scale, and how to speed it up.
Maggie Sand (she/her)
Maggie is a proud Pasifika-Australian, born in Papua New Guinea, studying law and psychology at Victoria University. She cares about how the Pasifika diaspora stays connected to ancestral homes under threat, and wants to support lasting projects across the South Pacific.
Makenzie White (she/her)
Makenzie is a law and arts student at La Trobe University who has been a climate activist since she was twelve. A textile artist herself, she wants to use textiles to shift how we value the work, and the people, behind our clothes.
Maya Farmer (she/her)
Maya is a psychology student from regional New South Wales who lived through the Black Summer bushfires and now advocates with Generation Justice. As a Wattle Fellow, she is bringing climate justice and women's health together in an action project.
Nadia Zermani (she/her)
Nadia is a PhD candidate in soil microbiology at La Trobe University, studying how soil microbes respond to the way we farm. She wants to make sustainability and science accessible in multiple languages and for different audiences, opening new pathways into these fields.
Nick Kluckow (he/him)
Nick is a Master of Mechatronics Engineering student who co-leads the offshore wind team at Students in Renewable Energy. He sees Australia's slow uptake of renewables as a policy problem as much as an engineering one, and wants to explain it clearly.
Noel Edillo (he/him)
Noel grew up in Cagayan Valley in the Philippines, where typhoons and floods were a constant. That sparked his interest in climate resilience. He studied a Bachelor of Science, majoring in meteorology, and worked as a weather forecaster. Now he is completing a Master of Climate Science.
Odi Evans (they/them)
Odi is a naturalist, climate activist and grassroots organiser on Djaara Country in Bendigo, studying outdoor and sustainability education at La Trobe University. They want to develop a youth climate justice advocacy and education program across the Loddon-Mallee.
Olive Mboya (she/her)
Olive is an architectural engineering student at Victoria University who came to Naarm from Kenya, and an Engineers Australia student ambassador. She sees sustainability as being about people and access to opportunity, and wants to create meaningful opportunities for others.
Pornpan (Bow) Tangmunchittham (she/her)
Pornpan (Bow) is an Australia Awards scholar from Thailand studying agricultural sciences, who founded Farm Forward to connect consumers with local producers. She wants to show how fermentation and native plants can reconnect communities with Indigenous knowledge and strengthen food security.
Scholastica (Rania) Allbright (she/her)
Rania is an Australia Awards scholar from Indonesia studying food science, who built an investment dashboard for sustainable small businesses at UNDP Indonesia. She is developing Fragaria, a circular economy project with women at its centre that turns food and botanical waste into new products.
Sunny Nguyen (he/him)
Sunny is a climate and health PhD researcher who helped organise Australia’s first-ever Youth Climate and Health Summit. He wants to show that climate action is relational, building wellbeing and connection across generations.
Tamara Ong (she/her)
Tamara is a final-year science student and climate transition analyst who grew up in Singapore. She wants to explore how food can connect people with culture, starting from her own Peranakan roots.