Associate ProfessorRobert Faggian

Associate Professor Robert Faggian is a climate adaptation and sustainability researcher whose work examines how institutions plan for climate change across land, water, agriculture and regional development. His research combines climate adaptation governance, spatial analysis and applied decision-support.

The responsible use of models, data and emerging AI-enabled tools in planning and policy is a central concern: how these tools perform when they inform choices about land-use change, infrastructure, agriculture, public health and regional development, especially where decisions are long-term, path-dependent or difficult to reverse. Rather than treating analytical sophistication as an end in itself, Robert asks whether analysis is usable, defensible under scrutiny and suited to the institutions expected to act on it.

Before joining academia, Robert spent fourteen years in senior government science leadership at the Victorian Department of Primary Industries, including five years directing the Department's Parkville research centre and a period leading its statewide Ecosystems Analysis research group, each comprising around 35 staff, while working with agencies responsible for land, water and environmental planning. During this period he led national research projects on water management and the reuse of recycled water in agriculture, and international projects on plant pathology and biosecurity, including collaborations with the New Zealand government and the University of Warwick, UK, and built formal collaborative partnerships between the Department and the University of Melbourne. He also led the development of a systems thinking capability program within the Victorian public service, working with internationally recognised systems scholars, which grew over several years into a large, widely recognised initiative across government — a grounding that continues to shape the systems thinking components of his teaching and doctoral supervision at Deakin. He supervised four doctoral completions during this time.

From 2009 to 2012, alongside his government role, Robert held honorary positions at the University of Melbourne in the Melbourne School of Engineering and the Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences. In 2012 he moved into academia full-time as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, officially employed within the Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences, hosted by the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and affiliated with the Centre for Disaster Management and Public Safety, before being recruited to Deakin University in 2014 to build the agricultural research capacity of the newly established Centre for Regional and Rural Futures (CeRRF). With a Deakin colleague, he developed the Master of Science (Sustainable Regional Development) from scratch during this period; the program has since evolved into the current Master of Sustainability.

Since joining Deakin, Robert has built a research programme funded primarily through government contracts, industry co-investment and international scholarship schemes, converting each partnership into applied outputs, doctoral training and durable institutional relationships. This is most developed in Latin America, where in 2016 he and Victor Sposito co-established the ANII government scholarship scheme, which has since brought a continuing pipeline of research students to Deakin from Uruguay; he has personally mentored fourteen of the sixteen Uruguayan masters students who have come through the scheme since 2017. In 2017 the Vice-Chancellor conferred on him the honorific title Senior Advisor, Latin America, and in 2020 he was appointed an honorary professor at ORT University Uruguay. He has also led Deakin's institutional engagement with the region, serving on Deakin's Latin America Steering Committee from 2018 to 2021, with the initiative sustained in part through Deakin International funding over that period.

This work extends into India, through doctoral and research collaborations with the Indian Institutes of Technology at Hyderabad and Madras, TERI, and VIT, and into Europe, through cotutelle doctoral partnerships with Coventry University and an emerging research partnership in Italy. Robert convenes this international work as the Climate Governance and Decision Systems programme, bringing together applied research, doctoral supervision and external partnerships across Latin America, India and Europe, with linked work in Australia.

Government, regional and international bodies have independently adopted this work. The New South Wales Department of Primary Industries built its primary-industries climate vulnerability assessment on Robert's multi-criteria land-suitability method in 2020; the same method underpins Southern Grampians Shire Council's current Climate Change Adaptation Plan, running to 2027, and the Glenelg Hopkins Catchment Management Authority's current Regional Catchment Strategy. As an invited member of the national Expert Working Group convened by the Australian Academy of Science and Future Earth Australia, he also contributed the agriculture and food sector content to the National Strategy for Just Adaptation (2022).

AI-enabled decision-support has become an increasingly central strand of Robert's work. His current doctoral candidates are developing explainable AI for human-machine teaming, AI-enabled emergency response, and AI applications in water management, and in 2026 he secured a second, competitive Coventry-Deakin cotutelle extending this work into climate storylines and agentic AI decision-support. He was selected in November 2024, through a competitive process, as FutureFocus Lead for the Policy and Environment stream, a university-wide initiative on generative AI in curriculum, assessment and graduate capability, taking up the role in January 2025 and co-authoring its curriculum-wide recommendations. These have since been presented at several higher education conferences, with other universities exploring their implementation.

At Deakin University, Robert leads the Sustainable Regional Development group, which he has led since 2014, originally within CeRRF and continuing under his leadership since the Centre ceased operation in December 2024. He supervises doctoral and masters research across climate adaptation, spatial decision-support and AI-enabled decision systems, extending the same pattern of institution-building and mentoring that has run through his career since his earliest government leadership roles. He welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD students, collaborators and partner organisations working at the science-policy interface.