Fiona Haslam McKenzie is a Winthrop Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. She has expertise in regional economic development with extensive global experience in population and analysis of socio-economic indicators in remote, regional and urban settings. She has published widely and undertaken work for all three tiers of government in Australia, the corporate and small business sectors both internationally and in Australia. She is currently the Director of the Centre for Regional Development at the University of Western Australia, the Deputy Director of the Healing Country Centre at Curtin University and the program lead for regional economic development at the Co-operative Research Centre for Transformation in Mining Economies, a national applied-research organisation working across industry and governments, assessing socio-economic preparedness of mining regions and designing re-purposed mining economies.

She currently serves as a board member of the Western Australian Environmental Protection Authority and the Regional Australia Institute and as reference board member for the Western Australian Wheatbelt Regional University Centre.

James Petesic is the co-founder of PV Industries and first learned of the solar panel waste issue when he was working with local government during his career in technology sales. Since starting the business in 2018, the PV Industries team have established a number of drop-off points, worked with both private and public sector customers and secured $3.8 million in government grant funding. After developing their own machinery, an app to identify and charaterise defects in ageing panels, they are now focused on scaling the business to tackle the largest waste issue in Australia’s history