Dear SEI Community,

This will be my last Director’s Note as I prepare to leave SEI, the University of Sydney, and Australia. It has been an immense privilege to have co-founded, co-directed, and directed SEI for the past 12 years. In this time, SEI has become globally recognised for its impactful environmental research – multidisciplinary and inclusive, but grounded in the social sciences, humanities, and arts.

I am incredibly proud of what SEI has achieved, and it has been the highlight of my career to support collaborative multidisciplinary work which centres, learns from, and benefits our community, government, and industry partners. Colleagues at SEI have fostered long-lasting partnerships locally and globally, and have brought real political and cultural impact from the local to the global, from the City of Sydney to the UN. The success of SEI has been a genuinely collective achievement, and I am grateful to all our researchers, members, partners, incomparable professional staff, visitors, and affiliates who have made this possible over the years.

I was genuinely touched by the outpouring of recognition and appreciation of my work, leadership, and support of colleagues and partners last month. Many SEI members have long told us of how thankful they are for the scholarly home the institute provides, but it was important for me to thank everyone for this community we have built, and the sustenance and reward it has brought to me personally.

There are literally hundreds of people to thank for their support and contributions to SEI over the years, so apologies that I cannot name you all here. That said, I do want to recognise three key colleagues who made it all possible. First, the former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research Professor Duncan Ivison, who initially supported the development of a centre for environmental humanities and social sciences at Sydney. Second, of course, SEI’s co-founder and co-Director for many years, Professor Iain McCalman, who taught me an immense amount about multidisciplinarity and leadership. And finally, Professor Danielle Celermajer, who has been a genuinely inspirational research collaborator for a decade, and Deputy Director of SEI for the last six years.

From 1 September I will be starting a new position, generously funded by the Finnish Research Council, as Professor of Environmental Politics at the University of Helsinki. There I will have the opportunity to expand my work on environmental justice, climate turbulence, and democratic responses. I look forward to sharing all of this scholarship with students in Helsinki’s multidisciplinary environmental programs.