Invited Distinguished Guests-The University of Queensland

Professor Andrew Griffiths is Executive Dean of The University of Queensland’s Faculty of Business, Economics and Law.

As Executive Dean, Professor Griffiths reports to the Vice-Chancellor and oversees academic and administrative matters in the Faculty's schools of business, economics and law. He is accountable for academic programs, staff management and resource allocation. He also represents the Faculty and the University to the wider community, both in Australia and overseas.

Prior to his appointment as Executive Dean in December 2016, Professor Griffiths was Dean of the UQ Business School – a world leader in business and management learning, teaching and research – from 2012 to 2016. He was also previously Chair in Business Sustainability and Strategy at the School.

Professor Griffiths holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in politics from Griffith University, and a PhD in strategy from the University of New South Wales.

He is an internationally recognised scholar and maintains an active research program, examining how organisations deal with the impacts of climate change, and how executives and employees can transform organisations to better manage sustainability issues.

During his career, he has published more than 100 academic articles, books, book chapters and conference papers on a range of topics relating to corporate sustainability strategy and climate change.

As an advocate for research and industry partnerships, Professor Griffiths has worked extensively with local and global organisations to apply new knowledge and deliver sustainability assessments, strategies and workshops.

Professor Griffiths previously chaired the Library Board of Queensland, was a board member of the Queensland Futures Institute and previously was a member of the Council of Governors for the American Chamber of Commerce.

Professor Daniel Zizzo is the Academic Dean and Head of School for the School of Economics, and commenced in the role in October 2018.

Prior to joining UQ, Professor Zizzo was the Dean of Research and Innovation in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Professor of Economics in the Business School at Newcastle University, UK. In his Dean role, Professor Zizzo was primarily responsible for the research, innovation and engagement strategy of the Faculty as well as for the allocation of associated resources, and had a role in the broader co-determination of Faculty policies. Professor Zizzo was the Chair of the University Developing Excellent Researchers Sub-Committee, and oversaw the definition of the 2016-18 Newcastle HR Excellence Award implementation plan as well as of the 2018-22 Newcastle HR Excellence Award strategy plan. He led on an overhaul of University researcher support governance to make it more collectively and collegially owned. He was University lead on Global Challenges and oversaw the creation and development of the Newcastle University Global Challenges Academy. He was Acting Director of Newcastle University Business School during most of the 2016/17 academic year.

Previously, Professor Zizzo held senior and executive roles at the University of East Anglia, UK, including as Head of the School of Economics for six years. Under his leadership, the School more than doubled in size and broke into the top 10 in the Guardian league table, as well as a top 20 rank in both the Times Leagues Table and the Comprehensive University Guide. Under his role as Academic Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Social Sciences, the Faculty also achieved substantial improvements in research quality in the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 across the board, with broad comparative ranking improvements across a range of areas.

Professor Zizzo is a Research Associate in the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis (CAMA) at Australian National University and a member of the UEA Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) and of the RCUK Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe). Professor Zizzo is also a Coordinating Editor of Theory and Decision and, among his other roles, he is both a Fellow of the ESRC Peer Review College and a member of the ESRC’s Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) Peer Review College. He is also an Associate Member of the EPSRC Peer Review College and an ARC Assessor. Professor Zizzo was also Secretary of the Conference of Heads of University Departments of Economics (CHUDE), a committee of the Royal Economic Society, for six years.

Professor Zizzo is primarily an experimental and behavioural economist, and his research is motivated by the search for more realistic empirical and theoretical foundations of economic decision-making, using mainly experimental, but also analytical and computational methods as required. He considers himself a mainstream economist, but one interested in pushing forward the boundaries of mainstream economics, and one firmly committed to a wider perspective as an interdisciplinary social scientist.

Current research interests include authority and organisational behaviour, antisocial preferences, voting preferences, behavioural and cognitive game theory, bounded rationality and nudging, social preferences, trust, and the methodology of experimental economics. These more broadly include macroeconomic and microeconomic applications of theoretical ideas, such as in the context of health behaviour and unlawful file-sharing. Professor Zizzo’s work has been widely cited and funded, he has supervised to completion a number of PhD students, and he ranks within the top 0.7% of authors for downloads on the Social Sciences Research Network.