Image: Dr Timothy Neal, recipient of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia Early Career Research Award 2021
CEPAR Senior Research Fellow Dr Timothy Neal has been honoured with a 2021 Paul Bourke Award for Early Career Research by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA).
The ASSA Early Career Research Award recognises some of Australia’s best emerging social science researchers who have achieved excellence. Dr Neal is one of four Australia’s best emerging researchers who have been named as recipient of the 2021 Paul Bourke Award for Early Career Research.
Academy President Professor Jane Hall said that the recipients had been selected from an extremely talented field of applicants.
“These young researchers are working at the very highest level to address some of the critical challenges facing our society today,” said Professor Hall.
“They are deserving winners of this award and join a very select list of previous recipients; many of whom have gone on to make substantial contributions to society.”
The Academy notes that Dr Tim Neal "is an outstanding economist, destined to become one of Australia’s distinguished academic leaders. In the years following his PhD, he has demonstrated his extraordinary gift for methodological innovation and creative use of new (sometimes big) data sources, to generate a truly impressive early portfolio of top tier publications. He exemplifies the best instincts of an applied academic economist: concern with policy issues, which motivates the topics he chooses to study, and equity, which was the underpinning of his PhD. Dr Neal also brings experience from his work at Ernst and Young, where he was an economist for two years before returning to academe, and this experience has further broadened the resources he will deploy for an influential future, and has honed his instincts for relevance in rigorous policy analysis."
Dr Neal has published in some of the leading Economics journals, including the Journal of Econometrics, Quantitative Economics, and the Econometrics Journal, and works closely with CEPAR Chief Investigator Professor Mike Keane, in CEPAR’s research stream Decision Making, Expectations and Cognitive Ageing. He has been affiliated with CEPAR since his appointment in 2016 after completing his PhD with the School of Economics at the UNSW Business School.
The Paul Bourke Award for Early Career Research recognises social science researchers in the early part of their careers. It is named in honour of the late Professor Paul Bourke, an influential political historian who served as Academy President from 1993 to 1997.
A Paul Bourke Award interview with Dr Neal is available here. He will be delivering a Public Lecture on his research in late 2022.
The full 2021 Paul Bourke Award recipients list can be found online here.