John Foster

John Foster has been a Professor of Economics at UQ since 1991, was Head of the School of Economics from 1999 to 2008 and is now Leader of the Energy Economics and Management Group (EEMG). He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, Fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Science, President of the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society and Vice-President of the Queensland Branch of the Economic Society of Australia. He was an appointed Member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts from 2005 to 2007 and was appointed by Senator Kim Carr to the Panel Reviewing the National Innovation System in 2008.

His current research interests are in the following fields: innovation strategies and policies to promote renewable energy; modelling the impacts of distributed energy generation systems (CSIRO Flagship Program funded); modelling the impacts of carbon mitigation policies on the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity and on the wider economy (ARC Linkage Grant funded); developing statistical/econometric modelling methodologies for application in the presence of structural transitions in time series data (ARC Discovery Grant funded); integrating the energy sector into an evolutionary macroeconomic model of economic growth; complex economic systems theory.