Ms Anna Littleboy has led CSIRO's research into the impacts of sustainable development on the resources industry for more than four years.
With a background in earth sciences, Ms Littleboy has 20 years research and research management experience in the fields of environmental impact assessment and sustainability for minerals, water and energy resources.
Since joining CSIRO, Ms Littleboy has built a substantive research team exploring the social issues affecting the uptake of new energy and minerals technology, and was a member of the team that established the Energy Futures Forum, a 'unique' exercise that brought together Australia's energy and environment stakeholders to identify plausible scenarios and their implications for the nation's energy future.
Ms Littleboy's research focuses on issues that affect industry's social license to operate. She was also formative in the successful commercialisation of CSIRO's underground coal gasification technology. Ms Littleboy shaped the value proposition that saw the approval of a new multi-million dollar National Research Flagship in the minerals domain.
Internationally recognised for her prior work into characterising long-term environmental risks associated with the underground disposal of radioactive wastes, Ms Littleboy's Master of Philosophy with University College, London examined the challenges to scientists arising from the high level concepts of sustainability and looked at new forms of presentation and communication as a means of enabling constructive deliberation on complex issues.
As a new honours graduate in geology and chemistry in the late eighties, Ms Littleboy's early career was spent at the bench and in the field examining the coupled reactive transport of contaminants in ground and urban water.
