Lena has a wealth of experience conducting and managing research and evaluation across a broad range of topics.

Lena has been professionally engaged in research and evaluation since 2006, managing research and evaluation projects since 2012 for public and private sector clients including Commonwealth Department of Health, NSW Department of Customer Service, InvoCare, and Dementia Australia.

She has published eight peer-reviewed research articles and one book chapter, and has produced four public, online data tools for policy makers. Lena has a Master of Science in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2006), where she specialized in social stratification (inequality) and demography.

As a biracial, multicultural, immigrant to Australia Lena brings her own lived experience to bear on multicultural and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research at CIRCA. At CIRCA Lena has overseen and guided research on a wide variety of topics including community AOD treatment service needs; suicide; housing; child protection; tobacco control; attitudes toward data collection, privacy, and dissemination; and health – all with a purpose of ensuring the perspectives of culturally and linguistically diverse Australians as well as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are heard and recognized.

Prior to joining CIRCA, Lena worked for three years at the Centre for Social Impact at UNSW-Sydney, and before that worked for 10 years as an applied Social Demographer at Oregon State University (OSU) (USA). At the Centre for Social Impact, she worked on projects to establish outcomes measurement and evaluation frameworks for government and non-profit clients. At OSU Lena’s evaluation research focused on Developmental Evaluation, measuring and understanding the impact of rural community development initiatives on health (obesity), social outcomes, and natural resource management. Her applied research projects focused on measuring and understanding rural social demographic change.