Dr Kirsten Sadler

Dr Kirsten Sadler is an Honorary Fellow with the College of Arts & Education.

Kirsten works across the college to assist staff with securing funding, conducting research and producing research outputs, particularly early career researchers.

Kirsten's research and industry experience have focused on understanding peoples' lived experiences to then inform the development of new strategies, processes, policies, services, products and technologies for organisations, individuals and communities.

Her research interests focus on:

• technology education
• community education
• innovative technology use in primary schools and classrooms
• the attraction and retention of STEM students at all educational stages.

She is particularly interested in applied research that brings direct benefits to people's everyday lives and in ways to build closer links between industry and academic research.

Kirsten completed her interdisciplinary PhD at UTS in 2010, combining social science, design and IT. Her thesis developed an understanding of the experiences of film and TV freelancers and the role of social connections and technologies in stabilising their highly mobile lives. During her PhD Kirsten also worked as a lecturer, tutor, freelance researcher and human-centred designer.

Prior to undertaking her PhD, Kirsten's early career work was in electrical/electronic engineering, where she designed, developed and implemented innovative solutions for start-up telecommunications companies and the control engineering sector.

Publications

Industry publications

'Going social: how businesses are making the most of social media, KPMG, 2011 (with Schram, P. and Alder, M.)

'Social media: the voyage of discovery for business’, KPMG, 2011 (with Alder, M.)

'Work fragmentation: how much is too much', KPMG, 2011 (with McCabe, B.). Presented at 2011 Universities HR Benchmarking Conference, Sydney, Australia.

'How Australian companies can extract more value from business intelligence', KPMG, 2010 (with McCabe, B.). Presented at IIM (Institute for International Management) National Conference 2011.

Thesis

Sadler, K. 2010. 'Managing mobility in practice: empirical studies of the everyday practices and technology use of film and television freelancers', University of Technology, Sydney.

Refereed journal articles

Hagen, P., Robertson, T., Kan, M. & Sadler, K. 2007. 'Accessing data: methods for understanding mobile technology use', The Australasian Journal of Information Systems, vol.13, no.2, pp.135-149.

Conference presentations

Sadler, K., Robertson, T. & Kan, M. 2009. 'Exploring the project transitions and everyday mobile practices of freelancers: Emergent concepts from empirical studies of practice', OzCHI'09, Melbourne, Australia

Professional memberships

• Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE)

Industry experience

• Management consulting – business innovation, IT management
• Human-centred design consulting – web design, various
• Electronic Engineering – telecommunications system design for start-ups
• Engineering consulting – control engineering