Dr Ciara Smyth is a Senior Research Fellow at the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW Sydney. She has over 20 years’ applied social policy and evaluation research experience covering domestic and family violence, disability, homelessness, parenting, settlement services and child protection. Her research program is committed to improving services and supports for excluded, marginalised and disadvantaged groups. She has successfully managed large scale evaluation research projects of government-funded services, which have had significant impact by informing policy, program design and service quality improvements. She has made significant contributions to conducting research - literature reviews, policy analysis, research design, qualitative and quantitative data collection, data analysis, mixed method data synthesis - and generating high quality research outputs that contribute to the knowledge and evidence base.