Abby Mellick Lopes

• Professor, Social Design, Faculty of Design and Society, University of Technology Sydney

Professor Abby Mellick Lopes is a social design expert and design researcher in the Design Studies program at UTS.

Abby was a founder and co-leads the multi-institutional, internationally recognised initiative Cooling the Commons, which explores the capacity of communities to respond to urban heat and the role of the built environment in creating socially just and liveable futures in Western Sydney and other hot cities.

Abby is currently a Chief Investigator on three Category 1 research projects. She co-leads the ARC Linkage project Living with Urban Heat: Becoming Climate-Ready in Social Housing (2022-2026), which is focused on building creative, community-led solutions to the challenge of urban heat across different communities and housing typologies. She is a Chief Investigator on the RACE for 2030 CRC project Energy Scenarios for Future Living (2024-2027), which aims to support better decision-making capacity for the Australian energy sector through scenarios, models, tools, and design innovations that centre people's everyday lives and expectations alongside emerging technology and energy trends. She is also a Chief Investigator on the NHMRC Targeted Research Call project, Community Resilience Centres for Improving Climate Adaptation to Bushfire Smoke and Heatwaves in Changing Urban Environments (2025-2028). This project will engage communities in the design of accessible resilience centres that protect people from bushfire smoke and heat, and assess implementation challenges and scalability opportunities in fast-growing, heavily affected suburbs in Western Sydney and Canberra.

Abby also leads research on Circular Economy transitions, and was previously a Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery project Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy (2021-2024). This project explored economic and social innovation in three key waste streams: organics, single-use plastics, and textiles. A key focus of this study was understanding exactly how more circular practices are created. This question also informed consultancy work Abby led for Circular Australia, resulting in the Citizens' Report Circular Economy Community Hubs: a vision for a zero-waste, zero-carbon future, available in short and extended forms on the Circular Australia website.

• 2024–present Professor, University of Technology Sydney

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