People in R and E
Alicia Wright has recently been appointed to the position of general manager of the Centre for Social Research and Evaluation at the Ministry of Social Development (MSD). Before that she was the manager of the Older and Working Age People Research and Evaluation Unit. Prior to coming to MSD, Alicia worked as a director of her own consulting group and as a principal with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, and conducted policy research and evaluation at the Department of Labour.
Simon Crack will take up the position of project manager for SPEaR in mid-April 2006. As project manager, Simon will be responsible for managing the functions and deliverables of the SPEaR work programme. Before taking his new position, Simon has most recently been seconded as a private secretary to Minister Ruth Dyson from the Centre for Social Research and Evaluation, where he worked as a Research and Evaluation Analyst. He is a Master of Arts (human geography) graduate of the University of Otago.
Dr Jit Cheung has been appointed lead researcher with the Social and Population Statistics Group with Statistics New Zealand. Jit has a background in business and social research. After completing Bachelor and Master degrees in actuarial science and a short stint in the Australian insurance industry, he completed a doctorate in health demography at the University of Waikato.
Over the past decade he has worked in the New Zealand health sector and other social and business sectors. Prior to his appointment at Statistics New Zealand, he was the Chief Analyst at the New Zealand Health Information Service, a Business Unit of the Ministry of Health. Jit took up the position at Statistics New Zealand late last year. It is a self-managing role that entails initiating ideas and projects and undertaking analysis and research on priority issues in the area of social and population statistics.
New Team for Justice Department
The Justice Department has a new forecasting and modelling team comprising Paul Henderson, Dino Corbu, Jason Wang, Oscar Montes-de-Oca-Munguia, and Darren Skidmore. Paul says the team will develop what's known as the Pipeline Project, which involves cross-system modelling. "We'll look at the whole of the justice sector and build a way of forecasting that takes account of all the impacts across the system. For example, at the moment we can see the effect of a particular change on, say, the Police, but we can't forecast the downstream effects on the courts or the prison population. So we'll be building a model that will show the impact a new piece of legislation would have on the Police, Justice, Courts, Corrections and Child, Youth and Family. The model will be built on existing work but we'll be extending it so it can do more."
