Our team
Professor Angus Webb
Professor in Hydrology and Water Resources, University of Melbourne
MRIC Director
Angus Webb is a Professor in the Water, Agriculture and Environment Program of the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Melbourne. He has been passionate about natural environments as long as he can remember and originally completed a PhD in marine ecology before switching to freshwater systems. His research centres on the study and restoration of large-scale environmental problems in freshwater systems.
Angus is one of Australia’s leading experts in the monitoring, evaluation, and adaptive management of environmental monitoring data, concentrating on environmental flows, where he has been an innovator for more than 15 years. He is centrally involved in the monitoring, evaluation and adaptive management of environmental water delivered under the Australian government’s Murray-Darling Basin Plan, leading the program for the Goulburn River, Victoria since 2014.
He has served on the Board of Directors for the international Society for Freshwater Science and was recently elected as the Vice-President of the Australian Freshwater Science Society. Angus’ 2017 book, Water for the Environment (Elsevier, 2017) brought together 59 authors from around the world to create the first book that covers the entire environmental water management cycle. He is also a co-author of the 2019 book, Environmental flow assessment: methods and applications (Wiley), and has edited two journal special issues on the science and adaptive management of environmental flows (Environmental Management 2018, Freshwater Biology 2018). He has 189 peer-reviewed publications in the international literature, comprising 3 books, 105 journal papers, 10 book chapters, 38 conference proceedings papers, and 33 technical reports.
Professor Ashley Franks
Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research Capability), La Trobe University
MRIC Co-director
Professor Ashley Franks is the Co-Director of MRIC, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research Capability) and Director of the Securing Food, Water and Environment Research Focus Area at La Trobe University. He has extensive research management experience having served as the School of Life Science’s Research Director and the Academic Coordinator of Research For the College of Science, Health and Engineering. As an Applied Environmental Microbiologist, his has research interests in soils, plant-microbe interactions and sustainability.
Wayne Ketchen
General Manager of Education Delivery, SuniTAFE
MRIC Co-director
Wayne Ketchen holds a Bachelor of Architecture with honours from Deakin University and has more than 20 years’ experience in design and construction positions both in Australia and overseas, specialising in environmentally sustainable and passive design principles, and project management.
Wayne has also worked in the TAFE sector for 15 years, previously in the roles of Head of Centre: Design and Construction, Acting Director of Education, Acting Enterprise Manager, Constructing Futures and Program Manager: Advanced Design and Building beginning his career as a teacher.
Wayne is currently employed at SuniTAFE as General Manager of Education Delivery, having recently moved to Mildura from his hometown of Ocean Grove to commence the role.
Rebecca Wells
Chief Executive Officer
Rebecca Wells was born in Mildura and raised on a vineyard in Merbein, returning to the region in late 2008 after several years in a media career internationally. Throughout the past decade, Rebecca has re-immersed herself in community and professional networks in the Mallee region.
Rebecca holds a range of leadership and advocacy roles in the region including Chair, Director and representative roles for organisations including Merbein and District Community Bank Branch of Bendigo Bank and formally Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s Community Bank National Council, Victorian State Government’s Mallee Regional Partnership and as communications manager for Australian Table Grape Association.
Alina Saeed
Agriculture Manager
Alina is the Centre's Agriculture Manager and commenced in May 2023. Alina has a pivotal role in the development and execution of projects and activities that the Centre leads as a node of the Victoria Drought and Innovation Hub.
Alina has approx.14 years of experience in agriculture, and has managed projects in livelihoods, food security, micro credits, improving post-harvest value chains, building cold-chain infrastructure and business to business linkages. Much of her work in Pakistan was in post conflict and post disaster recovery scenarios.
Paul McClure
Project Officer
Paul commenced with MRIC in March 2023.
Paul grew up on a mixed dryland farm in Victoria’s Western District. Later, while building a career working a “mixed bag” of jobs, Paul managed his own horticultural property at Irymple in his spare time, growing vegetables, cut flowers, dried fruit and wine grapes at different times.
A key part of Paul’s role at the Centre is to support the researchers working on Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub projects.