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Dr Kate Brady is both a disaster recovery practitioner and researcher. Following a distinguished career shaping disaster policy and programming, Kate moved to academia to address questions and gaps she identified in the sector. She chooses to work in multi-disciplinary and applied ways at the intersection of practice and research to create meaningful impact.

Can you tell us a bit about your yourself?

I have a background as a disaster recovery practitioner, and most of my research looks at what people find helpful and unhelpful after disasters. I am now a Senior Research Fellow at a new initiative at ºÚÁÏÍø´óÊÂ¼Ç called , and the Technical Adviser for Australian Red Cross Emergency Services.

I’ve never really seen myself as a proper academic, and didn’t follow a traditional pathway to becoming a researcher. I headed up the Australian Red Cross disaster recovery program for 13 years while completing my PhD at the University of Melbourne part-time over six years. I also had three of my four kids during this time, so it’s fair to say that research has always been something that I do along with other things.  

Before starting my PhD, I had been an industry co-investigator with the Disasters, Climate and Adversity unit, working in that team as a part-time researcher. By the time I was a university employee, I had been working with them for about 10 years in different capacities.

What or who sparked your interest in this area of research?

When I started working in disaster recovery after the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, there wasn’t as much training and resources as there is now. I had loads of questions about how we could and should be serving communities in ways that were supported by evidence and found it hard to get the information I felt I needed to do my job properly.

I didn’t do my PhD because I wanted the qualification. I had questions in my work that I couldn’t get answers to, and it ended up being the vehicle I used to try to get that information.

Disasters affect every facet of our lives. In a perverse way, they make for a beautiful research arena. There is simply so much to understand, there are hundreds of research perspectives. Psychology, built environment, economics, health, power, gender, justice, engineering, biology and on and on.   

But if you have been affected by a disaster, you don’t have the luxury of separating the impacts into all those different silos, like we do in research. So, I think that we have an obligation to work in multi-disciplinary, applied ways to make sure that research work addresses the realities that disaster affected people find themselves in.

What are you working on right now?

In my role at ºÚÁÏÍø´óʼÇ, I am helping set up a new, long-term program.  is a 40 year, independently funded initiative focussing on improving outcomes for disaster affected people through using community centred approaches. We’re using research, advocacy and education to do this.

I’m working across a few projects, but there are three that are taking up most of my research time. The first is looking at the principle of community-led approaches to disaster recovery. Despite it being a core policy principle in Australia, we don’t have a consistent way of defining or executing it. The second is a look into knowledge translation between disaster researchers and practitioners. The third one is identifying key indicators that we can measure for the next four decades to track outcomes and experiences of disaster affected people.

We’re also doing lots of other interesting things like establishing a new disaster recovery publication which will bring invite community leaders, practitioners and policy makers and researchers to bring different perspectives to issues in disaster recovery, and working on a range of professional development supports for people in the disaster sector.

What do you find most rewarding about being a researcher?

Most of my research is very applied, and I am often in the role of a ‘bridge’ between practitioners or policy makers and researchers. The most rewarding part of my research role is when I’m able to work with disaster affected communities to try and figure out how to make issues they’re grappling with a bit easier, or a bit less stressful.

Disasters are increasing at such a rapid rate in Australia and globally that it means that working on disaster recovery is a real-time, relevant, translatable issue. Because of the funny position I have, with a foot in both practice and research, it means that I can often then bring relevant information to policy makers and practitioners reasonably quickly, and that feels gratifying.

What piece of advice would you give to someone who is considering or about to transition into academia?

No sensible person would ask me for advice about a career in academia, I’m really not the poster girl for it. I didn’t take a traditional path to academia, and there are still a lot of unspoken rules and etiquette that I am blind to. I rely on the kindness of others when I don’t understand things that people who took a more traditional path absorbed along the way.

Despite this, I would like to offer an observation as someone who came to academia later and worked in different organisations and sectors previously. For all of its good bits, academia is often a precarious, opaque sector. There isn’t enough funding or roles for the number of people vying for them. Despite this, it is set up in a way that seems to make individuals feel like it’s a personal failure if they haven’t been able to make it all work easily. The researchers I’ve worked with who haven’t worked outside of academia often seem to accept some of the cut-throat brutality of academia as just a normal part of work life. I don’t think it is, and it makes me feel disheartened to see dedicated, talented people take unwinnable math as a personal failure. I guess I’m saying be gentle with yourself.

To learn more about Dr Kate Brady research, projects and achievements, visit her Researcher Profile.

To find out more about the research and advocacy of HowWeSurvive, visit their .