The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia has announced the winners of the 2025 Paul Bourke Awards, recognising four of the nation’s most exceptional early career researchers in the social sciences.
Academy President Professor Kate Darian-Smith congratulated the awardees for their contributions across diverse disciplines and the role their work plays in advancing our understanding of complex societal issues.
‘These four remarkable scholars are advancing knowledge in youth substance use, Indigenous media and education scholarship, legal rights of rivers and forest governance. Their innovative work is helping us better understand and solve real-world challenges, from improving Indigenous water justice to reducing youth vaping rates,’ Professor Darian-Smith said.
‘The Academy is proud to highlight these rising stars of the social sciences, and we look forward to seeing how their research continues to shape our understanding of human behaviour and societal development.’
The 2025 Paul Bourke Awards recipients are:
Dr Tianze Sun
Dr Tianze Sun is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Queensland’s National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research in the School of Psychology. Tianze’s research has directly shaped public policy, practice and public understanding of youth substance use in Australia. She has authored ten government submissions on drug related issues (including the Australian National Tobacco Strategy and the Vaping Reform Bill, with two as lead author) and provided expert testimony at the 2024 Senate hearing on vaping. Tianze’s research was cited in the WHO’s 9th Tobacco Regulation Report and at COP10, which is the world’s highest decision-making body for tobacco policy.
Dr Erin O’Donnell
Dr Erin O’Donnell is a Senior Lecturer and ARC Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne Law School. Erin’s research is shaping national conversations about rivers, with a focus on water law, legal rights of rivers, and Indigenous water justice. As the lead author of Cultural Water for Cultural Economies, Erin partnered with Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN) and twenty other Indigenous organisations to identify law and policy pathways to address the inherent water rights of Traditional Owners and First Nations in Victoria. This innovative collaborative project delivered Victoria’s first return of water rights to Traditional Owners in 2020 and prompted an unprecedented state government policy response to improve Traditional Owner access to and care for water.
Dr Kathryn Baragwanath
Dr Kathryn Baragwanath is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s economics department who has advanced the study of environmental governance by bridging economics and political science through innovative use of satellite data and causal inference. Her landmark 2020 PNAS paper on collective property rights in the Amazon, with over 235 citations, reshaped understanding of indigenous tenure and deforestation, while her 2023 PNAS article showed such rights also drive forest regeneration. Kathryn’s research is shaping environmental policy debates globally by providing rigorous, policy-relevant evidence on forest governance. She was awarded an internationally competitive Harvard Academy Scholar fellowship in 2023–24.
Dr Archie Thomas
Dr Archie Thomas is a Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney in Social and Political Sciences. Archie is working on collaborative research that explores how communities change schools and media institutions for social justice. His achievements include co-authoring the influential book Does the media fail Aboriginal political aspirations? during his PhD and co-securing a 2025 ARC Discovery Grant to undertake the first major Australian study of lived experience of diverse workers in news media. His research informs Indigenous policy, is embedded in school curricula and is widely shared in media and academic settings.
About the Paul Bourke Awards
The Paul Bourke Awards for Early Career Research are named in honour of the Academy’s past president Paul Francis Bourke (1938–1999) who was a product of the History school at the University of Melbourne and went on to become one of the first Australian historians to obtain American style doctoral training.
Whilst at Flinders University, he served as Professor of American Studies and also as Pro-Vice Chancellor. From Flinders University, he went on to become the Director of the RSSS at ANU and also served as the President of ASSA (1993-1997). The contribution Paul made to the field of performance measurement is considered to be invaluable by academic scholars.
Four Paul Bourke Award recipients are selected each year by members of the Academy’s Panel Committees. The awards are presented to social science researchers within five years of receiving their doctorate (with allowances for career interruptions).