University of Ballarat

The University of Ballarat has marked the beginning of the 2008 academic year with the appointment of a number of new senior academics.

 

Dr Mike Willis, the new Associate Professor of Marketing at the University, has spent more than fifteen years travelling China undertaking research into business and cultural issues.

Dr Willis has made over 70 trips to China and has researched topics including foreign business activities, modes of market entry, cultural issues, and educational collaboration.

"Australia has a wide range of business activities in China and many companies still face huge challenges making them work," he said.

"Some of the problems include a lack of real and detailed understanding of the china market, cross cultural tensions and issues, and the need to properly resource a business in the massive China market - which is, at once, one of the largest in the world - but also one of the most ruthless."

He has worked with companies from Australia, Europe, Asia and USA in China and has also taught across China over a ten year period. He has published 24 journal papers, and is currently researching educational alliance issues (to update previous research), cultural factors, and other China based projects. He has links with many universities in China.

Prior to his appointment at UB, Mike was employed for ten years at Monash University where he taught in a range of marketing areas in Australia and Hong Kong.

"I have come to UB because I want to work again in a great regional environment, with a university that cares about staff and students in an environment which is committed to real research and quality teaching. Ballarat is also Victoria's premier heritage city and it is a great place to live," Dr Willis said.

In other new appointments at UB, Professor Peter Gell has been appointed Professor of Environmental Science and Director of the Centre for Environmental Management at the University’s School of Science and Engineering.

Peter Gell is a palaeolimnologist with particular interests in the taxonomy and ecology of diatom algae. Diatoms are particularly sensitive to water quality and so are important bio-indicators of the condition of streams and other wetlands.

They also preserve as fossils in sediments and changes in suites of species down a sediment core can reflect changes in the condition of a wetland or reservoir over time.

Over the past 13 years at the University of Adelaide, Peter has used fossil diatom records to reveal the degree to which wetlands along our large rivers have been affected by river regulation and catchment disturbance.

“It is remarkable how resilient to change many wetlands have been over hundred, to even thousand year timescales. This is in stark contrast to the rapid changes they underwent from early in European settlement,” Peter said.

“In most cases these wetlands are now in a state that is unprecedented in their existence.”

In coming to Ballarat, Peter returns to the landscape in which he did his doctoral work on long term climate change.

“Western Victoria is an internationally recognised region for the reconstruction of past climate changes,” Peter said.

“Ballarat is a strategic location for me to use these sites to learn and teach about past climates, to compare the record of the past with the extreme conditions of today, and to weave this knowledge into the broader management of water resources across the region.”

In addition, Philippa Wells has been appointed Associate Professor of Law in the School of Business. She comes to Australia from Auckland, New Zealand, where she worked at AUT University for five years.

While there she completed her doctorate in New Zealand environmental history, focusing mainly on debates surrounding hydroelectricity projects.

“We need to look at the past to understand the present environmental challenges,” Philippa said.

“Because water issues more than anything else will dictate Australia’s future, moving here has opened up a whole new range of research challenges.”

Although her main research interests are environmental policy and management, she teaches and publishes in a wide range of commercial and business law areas. <//font>