Academic Board

Academic Board

Associate Professor Alison Owens is the Chair of the Academic Board and serves as a distinguished member of the Governing Council, Course & Industry Advisory Committee and Learning & Teaching Committee at Southern Cross Institute (SCI). She is the Academic Lead, Scholarship and Professional Learning at the Centre for Education and Innovation at the Australian Catholic University (ACU).

Associate Professor Owens has over twenty-five years’ experience in teaching and researching in higher education. She is the recipient of multiple internal and external research grants and publishes widely on higher education topics. Her fields of interest and impact are the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and Creative Arts.

Associate Professor Owens completed her Doctorate in Education in 2006 (University of Technology Sydney) and completed a PhD in Creative Arts (Central Queensland University) in 2018. In recognition of her commitment to professional learning for academic staff and PhD supervisions, she was awarded the ACU Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Postgraduate Teaching Excellence in 2023.

Associate Professor Antony John Drew serves as a distinguished member of the Academic Board at Southern Cross Institute (SCI). He is an experienced professional offering strategic consulting services globally for the internationalisation of higher education. Assoc Prof Drew is the Former Assistant Dean International (Faculty of Business and Law) and Associate Professor in International Business and Management at the University of Newcastle.

Associate Professor Drew specialises in institutional theory, economic sociology, and the internationalisation of higher education, developing frameworks to understand how informal business institutions evolve in different societies. His recent accomplishment includes the publication of “The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Higher Education Systems and University Management” (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Dr Angela Daddow serves as a distinguished member of the Academic Board at Southern Cross Institute (SCI). She has extensive experience in lecturing and researching in Social Work Education at Deakin University, Victoria University, and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She has had academic roles in Learning and Teaching at Australian Catholic University and Victoria University. Her social work experience includes working with vulnerable families who present with compounding health, mental health, trauma, addiction, and structural issues that significantly impact on their well-being.

Dr Daddow has expertise in family therapy, mental health, child and family welfare, supervision, and management. With post-graduate qualifications in Social Work, and Doctoral research in Education, her research interests include pedagogies for diverse learners, inclusive curriculum design, palliative care, and education toward ecological justice.

Adjunct Professor Asif Iqbal has over twenty years’ experience as an academic, most of it in academic management roles. Educated in several continents, Adjunct Professor Iqbal’s initial commerce degree in Pakistan and a degree from the UK was followed by employment as an academic at the Assumption University of Bangkok and as the Head of the Marketing Department at the Bradford University, Bangkok Campus/Centre.

In Australia, Adjunct Professor Iqbal lectured at the University of Wollongong, Australian Catholic University, Central Queensland University, and the University of Newcastle. He worked at the Central Queensland University for six years as lecturer and the Sub-Dean of the Faculty of Business and Law. In that role, Adjunct Professor Iqbal led a team of over 100 academics in wide- ranging disciplines. As Sub-Dean of the Faculty of Business and Law, Adjunct Professor Iqbal played a key role in the establishment of the new Sydney campus of Central Queensland University.

In 2005, Adjunct Professor Iqbal was instrumental in setting up the Sydney Campus of Curtin University of Technology where he worked as the Academic Director leading a large team of academics until 2009. He managed the comprehensive campus audits conducted by the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) and was the Chair of the Academic Board at the Sydney Campus of Curtin University of Technology.

Adjunct Professor Iqbal has been a member of various corporate and academic committees at the Central Queensland University, Curtin University of Technology, the University of Wollongong, the University of Newcastle, Australian Institute of Business and Queensland International Business Academy (QIBA Sydney).

As a member of the CPA Australia Universities Committee, he played a key participant’s role in establishing a new membership pathway through the study of foundation courses.

Following his role at Curtin University and prior to joining Southern Cross School of Business (SCSB), Adjunct Professor Iqbal established the higher education division of Williams Business College and led it successfully in gaining the status of a non-self-accrediting higher education institution. The College Governing Council then appointed Adjunct Professor Iqbal the Campus Director and Dean of Williams Business College. Adjunct Professor Iqbal served as the Chair of the Higher Education Executive Management team and a member of the Governing Council and the Academic Board. He is well-known for his expertise in higher education management and is widely consulted in the areas of higher education registration and course accreditation regulatory processes.

Associate Professor Georgia Clarkson is the Chair of the Course & Industry Advisory Committee and serves as a distinguished member of the Academic Board at Southern Cross Institute (SCI). She has a mixed disciplinary background in arts, teaching, and paramedicine. She has a focus on inclusivity in education having completed her PhD around the impact of inclusive educational practice.

Associate Professor Clarkson has worked as an academic since 2008 and has been employed by several higher education providers, where she has worked in leadership roles in shaping programs and projects. Her interdisciplinary experience has guided her leadership of numerous teaching development projects in collaboration with colleagues from a broad range of disciplines. Experience in policy development and governance enhances her higher education leadership experience.

Associate Professor Marie-Claire Cheron-Sauer is a distinguished member of the Academic Board and serves as the Head of the Social Work Department at Southern Cross Institute (SCI). She is a senior Social Work leader with a strong industry background in health and human services. Her career spans clinical practice and senior executive roles across government, commercial, and non-profit sectors. She has worked in the areas of child, family, and adult psychosocial health, disability, sexual assault, and domestic and family violence. She is also an accredited mental health social worker.

She has taught for over 15 years at Macquarie University, the Australian College of Applied Professions and Western Sydney University in the areas of sociology, research, and social policy. She is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD), the current Chair of Melanoma Patients Australia, a current member of the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) Accrediting Panel for Social Work Education in Australia, and a current member of the AASW Ethics Panel.

She has previously served twice on the AASW Board as National Vice President. She was awarded a prestigious Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship in 2012 and undertook research into the education and accreditation systems for the social work profession in the US, Canada, Denmark, and England. She has a Master of Management Studies from UNSW Sydney, a Master of Policy and Applied Social Research from Macquarie University, and a Bachelor of Social Work from UNSW Sydney. Her research interests lie in developing resilient and effective social work practitioners and leaders for the needs of the 21st century. More broadly, Associate Professor Cheron-Sauer is interested in psychosocial well-being for people living with cancer and chronic, non-communicable diseases and in the areas of psychosocial support for people living with gendered violence.