Our people
Phyllis Tharenou
I have been working at UniSA since April 2004 and I love it.
I love it because of the people ... and the job ... and Adelaide is a great city to live in.
I trained as an organisational psychologist in the Psychology Department at the University of Queensland and, over the years, I drifted into a lot of mentoring of other staff. In fact the mentoring seemed to happen right from when I was a lecturer at UQ.
So my job now is a natural progression of that interest. A big part of what I do today is about helping people to develop their research skills and their research careers.
Being Dean of Research in the Division of Business is creative – I think up ways to improve the division’s research performance and I get a lot of help to follow those ideas through.
One of the best aspects of the job is that the academics and research candidates I deal with are easy to work with and they appreciate what I do.
The work is both developmental and strategic. It is about formulating strategies to meet the University’s research objectives and at the same time providing colleagues with the development, information and support they need to achieve their research goals.
Out of the office I’m busy. I’m a Member of the College of Experts for the Australian Research Council’s Social, Behavioural and Economic Sciences, so I spend a lot of my “spare” time assessing Discovery and Linkage grants – more than 200 a year.
I have my own ARC Discovery Grant to work on with my PhD student and research assistant which I am doing with the state government to find out why skilled South Australians come back home to live after they have lived overseas.
The study has meant I get out and talk to a lot of different people – which has been a perfect way to get to know Adelaide. The more I see of it the more I like it, so from a personal point of view, I have no trouble in understanding why they come back.
Phyllis Tharenou is the Dean of Research, Division of Business.