At the Lab, our Strategic Advisor is a development policy expert with a background in international aid and development, law, and human-centered design. The team at the Lab love Maddie’s ability to wear multiple hats and her patience and willingness to teach everyone what she knows. Secretly, Maddie always thought she’d be a family lawyer, or an unsuccessful painter. As it turns out, development – and working at the Lab – is just as messy and way more fun. When she’s not working at the Lab, you’ll find Maddie hitting up local op-shops or making said mess with oil paints.

In a previous life, Maddie oversaw policy and communications for the Australian Council for International Development, and worked at the Development Policy Centre at the Australian National University. She lived in Timor-Leste working on advocacy, communications, and legal education for women’s rights NGOs, and on civil society engagement and budgeting programs for the Timorese Parliament. She has also worked on legal analysis projects in Government and across a number of Ministerial offices in Canberra. And way back in the day, she was working from bean bags and playing ping-pong at a fintech company.

Over the years, Maddie has honed her legal and analysis skills with a Bachelor of Laws (Hons) from ANU, a Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice, and she’s admitted as a lawyer in the ACT. Maddie’s strategic communications expertise, research skill and policy nous, make her a unique and highly valuable member of The Lab. As The Lab’s first employee, Maddie has been essential to our success – she’s the mastermind behind The Intel and the Lab’s Pulse Check. She’s currently focusing her research and analysis on critical issues and implementation challenges as they relate to Australia’s new development policy.