Dr Jenny Gordon is an Honorary Professor at the Centre for Social Research and Methods, at the Australian National University. She is also a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute, one of Australia’s leading think tanks on foreign policy. Jenny is a member of the Australian International Agricultural Research Centre’s Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Advisory Panel, and on the Asian Development Bank Institute’s (ADBI) Advisory Committee. She was a co-chair for the taskforce on Peace, Stability and Governance for the T7, organised by the ADBI.Jenny was the Chief Economist at DFAT from 2019 to 2021, tasked with setting up the Office of the Chief Economist to integrate development and trade and investment policy analysis. Jenny joined DFAT from Nous Group, where she was the inaugural Chief Economist. Her work at Nous included a report for APEC on the economic impact of investment in earth observation, understanding the motivations for and impediments to business investment in innovation for Science and Innovation Australia, and an assessment of Queensland’s innovation program. From 2007 Jenny spent 10 years with the Australian Productivity Commission as Principal Adviser (Research), where she worked on a wide range of policy reviews including regulation reform, aged care, childcare, the not-for-profit sector and migration. Joining in 1995, Jenny became a partner at the Centre for International Economics (The CIE), where her work included financial market stabilisation and development in Indonesia following the Asian Financial Crisis, economic policy development in a number of countries in the region, applying triple bottom line evaluation methods to agricultural and other research and development (R&D) investments, and strategic planning for R&D investment portfolios.
Jenny’s current research focus is on better integration of economic and security policy, which leads into topics such as improving agricultural productivity, investing more effectively in human capital, and mitigating climate related risks. She has a PhD in Economics from Harvard University and started her professional career at the Reserve Bank of Australia."