Professor Kristy Muir is the CEO of the Centre for Social Impact (CSI), a Professor of Social Policy at UNSW Sydney and an elected member of UNSW Sydney’s Council. She has worked for more than two decades with for-purpose organisations to help understand, measure, and find innovative solutions to complex social problems.

Kristy has undertaken dozens of projects with many government, not-for-profit, corporate, and philanthropic organisations to help improve social impact. Her research, which has attracted more than $11 million in funding, has focused on children, young people, families and communities and spans many social domains (e.g. education, employment and social participation, wellbeing, disability, mental health, financial resilience). She has published widely in policy, sociology, social work, history and public health journals and in publicly accessible and popular media, such as TEDx, The Mandarin, The Guardian and The Conversation.

Kristy has strong leadership and management expertise, is an excellent communicator and public speaker, and is able to diagnose problems, identify key issues and work collaboratively to make progress. She asks and seeks answers to difficult questions like: How do we increase our social impact? Why are we so stuck? Why are services, supports and policies so fragmented? How might we work innovatively to find, measure, and understand solutions for complex social problems?

In 2013, Kristy won the UNSW Staff Excellence Award for Senior Leadership. She was formerly the Research Director at CSI (2013-15), the Associate Dean Research for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (2011-13) and the Director of the Disability Studies and Research Centre (2009-2010) at UNSW Sydney. She has a PhD in social history, is a graduate of the AICD and, prior to joining academia, worked in the not-for-profit sector.