Roger Bradbury leads the Strategy and Statecraft in Cyberspace research program for the National Security College at the Australian National University. He is a complex systems scientist, trained originally as a zoologist. His research interests lie in the modelling and simulation of the dynamics of coupled social and natural systems. In recent years he worked in the Australian Intelligence Community on the strategic analysis of international science and technology issues. He is particularly interested in cyberspace as a strategic domain.

He was Chief Scientist in the Bureau of Resource Sciences in the 90s and leader of the Marine Systems Group and Deputy Director at the Australian Institute of Marine Science in the 80s. He is a Fellow of the CSIRO Centre for Complex Systems Science, and, in the past, has held adjunct positions at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program (both at the ANU), the School of Integrative Biology at the University of Queensland, and the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne.

COVID-19 Expertise

Roger Bradbury is Emeritus Professor of Complex Systems Science in the Crawford School where he taught postgraduate courses in emerging infectious diseases. He has worked on outbreaks in humans and other biosystems for forty years. In the period 2001-2017, he was the senior strategic analyst for science and technology at the Office of National Intelligence (formerly known as the Office of National Assessments). In that role, he led the analysis and assessment of the strategic dimensions of outbreaks of infectious diseases, including SARS, MERS, Ebola, swine flu, and avian flu. His recent opinion pieces on the coronavirus pandemic have been published in The Australian Financial Review and The Canberra Times.

Roger Bradbury (2020) Dead hand of health bureaucracy is failing to flatten virus. Australian Financial Review, 23 March 2020.

Roger Bradbury (2020) What plan, and what stockpile? Australia’s pandemic preparedness. Canberra Times, 16 April 2020.