About the Panel

Sarah Close is a Partner in Deloitte’s Infrastructure & Real Estate team and is an infrastructure economics specialist. She has spent 20 years specialising in the development of business cases, feasibility studies and economic analysis of major social and economic infrastructure across Australia. This has involved advising the Federal and State/territory governments to support investment decisions for public infrastructure including transport, precincts, health, education, housing, technology, and resilience/emergency response infrastructure. Through her work Sarah is passionate about improving people’s lives, enhancing productivity and shaping land use to create cities and regions of the future. Sarah is also a strong supporter of diversity and inclusion, as a founding committee member of the NSW Branch Women in Economics Network (WEN).

Jennifer Jenkins is Director of Project Advisory and Evaluation at Infrastructure Australia, the independent infrastructure advisor to the Australian Government. Jennifer leads the evaluation of nationally significant transport, water, energy, and communications infrastructure proposals seeking $250 million or more in Australian Government funding.

Jennifer is an economist, with over 10 years’ experience in infrastructure, policy development and environmental economics. Her work in government has included leading development of national emissions values for use in economic analysis, developing guidance on valuing green infrastructure and the use of non-market valuation methods to improve government investment decision making.

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Associate Professor Jaithri Ananthapavan leads the Economics of Obesity team within Deakin Health Economics (DHE) and the Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition (GLOBE) at Deakin University.

She is an experienced health economist with over 15 years of experience in both health economics consulting and academia. Jaithri’s research interest is the economic evaluation of preventive health interventions and policies, economic modelling, priority setting and in methods to better assist decision-makers use economic evidence in resource allocation decisions. She holds a Bachelor of Physiotherapy (Hons), Master of Public Health, both from University of Melbourne and a PhD in health economics from Deakin University titled ‘Developing a cost-benefit analysis framework for obesity prevention decision-making’.

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