Suzana Stipanovic

Suzana (Suzie) Stipanovic is a PhD candidate in the School of Education at Macquarie University, undertaking doctoral research as part of the Care Economy Cooperative Research Centre (EC-CRC). Her project uses Social Network Analysis to map the web of organisations that early childhood education and care (ECEC) services communicate with including regulators, allied health, the NDIS, Centrelink, schools and child protection in order to make visible the coordination work that has crept into the roles of educators, educational leaders and service managers, and to examine how this affects service quality. 

Suzie brings extensive sector experience to her research. She has worked in early childhood education since the late 1990s in educator and nominated supervisor roles, and has been an Approved Provider since 2008. She holds a Master of Research (2017), a Master of Educational Leadership in Early Childhood (2015), a Graduate Diploma in Early Childhood (2010) and a Bachelor of Teaching, Birth to School Age (2006), all from Macquarie University. Since 2016 she has held research and sessional academic roles at Macquarie, including Research Officer with MQ TaLK, and she was a member of the CSIRO ON Prime team awarded the Research Team Performance Prize in 2017. 

Her publications include a co-authored study with Professor Manjula Waniganayake analysing the preparation of early childhood leaders through coursework master's degrees across Australia (Journal of Early Childhood Education Research, 2016), and her doctoral dissertation exploring families' online social media networking experiences (2017). Her research interests include the ECEC workforce, educational leadership, coordination and administrative burden in early childhood services, and the use of mixed methods and Social Network Analysis to inform policy, workforce design and sector reform.