Associate Professor Magnus Moglia

Biography

Associate Professor Magnus Moglia is a systems scientist with an interest in urban and regional sustainability solutions. He is a Research Theme Leader for Eco-urban infrastructure, systems, and practices at the Centre for Urban Transitions (CUT). The CUT's mission is to enable just, healthy, and productive urban futures through actionable and solutions-oriented research.

Magnus’s primary research interests are in exploring the adoption, implementation and mainstreaming of sustainability solutions in cities. Examples of such sustainability solutions include Low-Emission Freight, Circular Economy practices, Urban Forestry, Rainwater Harvesting, Residential Solar PV Systems, Urban Regeneration, and Water Sensitive Development.

The exploration of these adaptation pathways often includes technological innovation and their adoption drivers and barriers amongst multiple agents; as well as the adaptive and reflexive governance that require forward-looking capability as well as effective interfaces between community and decision makers.

Before Magnus joined Swinburne, he was a researcher at the CSIRO from 2001 until 2020, as a Principal Research Scientist and where he was leading numerous studies, including in the Low Carbon Living CRC, Smart Water Fund, and research projects with various state government departments across the country. He was also on the steering committee for Committee of Melbourne’s Melbourne 4.0 project. His early research at CSIRO, in collaboration with water companies, included the development of software systems and algorithms to support risk-based management of infrastructure systems, which are now used widely in the water industry.

Magnus also has extensive experience in international research, including being a science leader in the large and award-winning CSIRO-AusAID three-year study on Climate Adaptation through Sustainable Urban Development in Can Tho City, Vietnam. In a large study with ACIAR, he was lead investigator in a multi-year study on the adoption of new technologies such as rice-farming practices amongst small-holder farmers in Laos. Through his PhD at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy, he researched climate adaptation and water management in the Pacific Island Countries.