Our Team

Professor George Tanewski is director and research leader of the IPA-Deakin SME Research Centre and a Professor of Accounting in the Deakin Business School. George’s research interests include disclosure matters related to financial reporting and corporate governance with a focus on the SME ecosystem and the not-for-profit sector, the value relevance of financial reporting, and ownership structure issues associated with both public and private companies. He has published research in a number of leading academic journals including Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory, Abacus, The Australian Journal of Management, Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Accounting and Finance, The Journal of Business, Finance and Accounting, The British Accounting Review, Journal of Business Venturing, Family Business Review, Journal of Small Business Management and Small Business Economics. His teaching interests are mainly in the areas of research methods, quantitative methods, financial reporting, and financial statement analysis. George is often called upon to advise policy makers on accounting standards and on issues related to private/SME firms. George has been a chief investigator on a number of externally funded research projects, including the prestigious National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) grant received in December 2019 to evaluate a potentially high-impact intervention strategy to help upskill accountants to deliver mental health first aid to their small-medium enterprise (SME) clients, who are particularly vulnerable to mental health and financial stress issues.

Carol is a registered psychologist with a master in Industrial/Organisational Psychology. She has over 14 years’ experience in the field working in both public and private sector organisations. Practical research work she has conducted whilst working in industry include the design, implementation, analyses and reporting of multiple employee engagement, leadership development, organisational culture, and workplace bullying surveys. During her time with Deakin Business School, she has contributed towards research projects involving integrated approaches to workplace mental health interventions. As an experienced organisational development and strategic HR professional, she has worked both as an internal specialist in organisations like Australia Post, Victorian State Department of Education & Training, ME Bank, HESTA; and as an external HR consultant at organisations like Evaluation Solutions and Right Management Consultants. She has a Project Management certification from the Australian Institute of Management, and combines lean and agile principles in managing projects. She is a Mental Health First Aid practitioner and accredited in the Mayer-Sallovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT).

Arla has over 20 years’ experience in business coordination/logistics, administration and operations, working across multiple SMEs in the creative art, photography, fashion and retail sectors. In her role as CoU Program Coordinator, she is responsible for stakeholder liaison (including accountant/bookkeeper professional bodies and their members, and mental health organisations), marketing and communications collateral, desktop research for CoU research and consulting activities, note-taking and transcriptions for meetings/focus groups/interviews, survey set-up and administration, thematic analysis of qualitative data, process mapping, and day-to-day coordination of the program.

Dr Arlene Walker obtained her PhD in 2008 in the field of organisational psychology. Arlene is a Senior Lecturer and chairs several units in the postgraduate organisational psychology program at Deakin University. Over the last five years, Arlene has consolidated her research expertise in graduate transition experiences, graduate work readiness and employee wellbeing and receives regular requests to review articles for scholarly journals relating to these topics. In 2011, Arlene and colleagues developed and validated the only known measure of work readiness in an Australian context with graduates from the commerce, finance and science industries. An updated, revised version of the work readiness scale for graduates in the health sector was published in 2015. More recently Arlene has developed a new research profile in family and domestic violence (FDV), with a focus on how FDV impacts the workplace, the nature of support/resources available to victims of FDV in the workplace and victim experience accessing these supports/resources. 

Michael Berk is an NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow, and is Alfred Deakin Chair of Psychiatry at Deakin University and Barwon Health, where he heads the IMPACT Strategic Research Centre. He also is an Honorary Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry, the Florey Institute for Neuroscience and Mental Health and Orygen Youth Health at the University of Melbourne, as well as in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University. He is past president of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders and the Australasian Society for Bipolar and Depressive Disorders. Michael’s major interests are in the discovery and implementation of novel therapies, and risk factors and prevention of psychiatric disorders. 

Nicola leads a research program that focuses on improving public knowledge and beliefs about mental illnesses and particularly on interventions that focus on prevention and on improving support for people with mental disorders. She is a Chief Investigator on five NHMRC-funded projects, four of which aim to improve mental health literacy in members of the public. She has also been the lead investigator on a number of projects that aim to assist workplaces to better manage mental health issues, including two Beyond Blue-funded projects.