Penny Sullivan is a Sir Roland Wilson scholar and PhD candidate at the Crawford School of Public Policy at ANU. She has over ten years of experience working on water management in the Queensland and Australian public services. She worked on developing and implementing the controversial Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

Her research focuses on intergovernmental relations in federal water management, seeking to understand how state and federal governments pursue their objectives in water conflicts with each other. Thanks to her Sir Roland Wilson Foundation scholarship she has been able to conduct extensive fieldwork interviewing practitioners and participants for case studies in Spain and the United States, as well as in Australia.