Three international researchers are the recipients of the 2026 Australia-France Indo-Pacific Visiting Fellowship Studies grants. The Visiting Fellowship program supports early-career academic or professional researchers from Indo-Pacific Nations, France and French overseas territories, with support from the Australian Government. Each fellowship runs for up three months with one or more research organisations in Australia. The program enables visiting fellows to advance their individual research projects while also building meaningful connections with Australian and Indo-Pacific researchers and institutions.
2026 Visiting Fellowship Grant Recipients
Dr Astri Ferdiana
The University of Mataram, Indonesia
Visiting: The Kirby Institute, UNSW
Telepharmacy in Transition: A comparative study of service delivery and regulation in India and Indonesia
Dr Astri Ferdiana is a medical doctor and public health researcher with more than 15 years of experience in research and program evaluations. She has a PhD in Public Health from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She has vast experience with quantitative and qualitative methods in public health research and program evaluations. She is currently the Head of Master of Public Health and an assistant professor in public health at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Mataram in Indonesia.
Dr Ferdiana serves as a consultant on leprosy for WHO South-East Asia Regional Office (WHO SEARO) and as a Technical Advisor for leprosy control and research at NLR Indonesia, a non-governmental organisation working in leprosy control in Indonesia. She works as a researcher at the Center for Tropical Medicine at the Universitas Gadjah Mada in Indonesia in which she led a number of epidemiological studies on different topics such as malaria, antimicrobial resistance, leprosy etc. She has received funding from both national and international grant programmes including USAID, WHO and UNICEF to support her research and collaborative work. She is currently an associate editor for a number of national journals and also as a reviewer in a number of local and international peer-reviewed scientific journals especially those related to infectious disease, disability and rehabilitation.
Dr Raphael Deberdt
Copenhagen Business School
Visiting: The University of Queensland
Mining the commons: Community perspectives on sponsoring deep sea mining in Nauru
Dr Raphael Deberdt is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School, following two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Mining Engineering Department at the Colorado School of Mines. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia, where his doctoral research examined inequalities in green-transition supply chains through the case of artisanal cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His research lies at the intersection of political ecology and economy, socio-environmental justice, extractivism, and geopolitics. He studies how the growing demand for critical minerals is reshaping communities, industries, and resource frontiers, with particular attention to mining and mineral reprocessing in Europe, the United States, and to emerging frontiers such as deep-sea and space mining.
Dr Deberdt work examines the tensions between decarbonization, militarization, resource security, and justice, including how states, companies, and communities negotiate the social and environmental consequences of green and strategic extractivism. He has conducted fieldwork across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United States, Sweden, the Czech Republic, France, the United Kingdom, and Portugal and brings more than ten years of professional experience in responsible mineral supply chains. His research has appeared in leading academic journals, book chapters, and professional reports.
Dr Aakansha Natani
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India
Visiting: The University of Queensland
Data as Public Good: Cross-Regional Insights from India and Australia
Dr Aakansha Natani is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Human Sciences Research Centre, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India. Her research focuses on the geopolitics of data and digital technologies, data governance and regulatory frameworks, and public policy for data and AI infrastructures.
She received her PhD from the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 2020. She has worked at the University of Cambridge, UK as a D. C. Pavate Visiting Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies (2023), and at the University of Hamburg, Germany as a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Informatics (2026). In 2024, she was awarded a Jean Monnet Module Grant by the European Education and Culture Executive Agency of the European Commission for the project ‘Digital Democracy and Data Governance in the European Union’.