At the Lab, our CEO is an international development expert with a background in Government, non-government organisations, private sector and public policy. The team at the Lab love how Bridi helps the international affairs community tackle development challenges with a healthy combination of kind heartedness and cut through clarity. Secretly, Bridi always thought she’d be a world class athlete, an investigative journalist or a human rights lawyer. As it turns out, living in Canberra running an Indo-Pacific facing think tank is the next best thing. When she’s not having a ball with the Lab team and our collaborators, you’ll find Bridi on her bike or horse in the bush.

In a previous life, Bridi oversaw Australian bilateral legal cooperation programs as a Director at the Australian Attorney-General’s Department, ran public sector consulting gigs as a Senior Manager for Ernst & Young and represented Australia’s leading NGOs to Government as a Director of the Australian Council for International Development. She’s no stranger to policy entrepreneurship, having co-founded the Asia Pacific Development Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue and been an anti-corruption adviser embedded in the Papua New Guinea Department of Justice.

Over the years, Bridi has honed her academic research skills with a Law Degree, Arts Degree, Honours thesis on locally owned transitional justice and a Master’s thesis on locally-led capacity development in Papua New Guinea.  In 2021, Bridi was the national awardee of the Fulbright Scholarship in Not-For Profit Leadership and has current non-resident affiliations with Washington D.C. based Centre for Strategic International Studies and the Australian National University’s RegNet.