Dr Maria Balatbat is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Accounting and a founding member of the Collaboration on Energy and Environmental Markets (CEEM) at UNSW Sydney. She is a recipient of several Australian Research Council (ARC) competitive grants researching on the capital market implications of Integrated Reporting and use of environmental and social indicators to develop a valuation methodology for investment decisions in an industrial ecology laboratory. She also works with the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living in Australia and has led a team that developed a built environment impact assessment framework, a decision-making tool that aims to unlock the value creation capabilities of sustainability reporting in the built environment sector. On teaching, Maria has developed a postgraduate course on reporting for climate change and sustainability and has received a UNPRME teaching award for pioneering teaching sustainability reporting in the Business School. Maria also teaches and has co-developed a course on Integrated Reporting, a new course in the Business School that is accredited by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC). Maria also serves in the accreditation review panel for numerous Universities in Saudi Arabia and Colleges in Australia with the mission to ensure equality in accounting education for women. Maria is also a Fellow at CPA Australia and an elected Councillor at CPA Australia’s NSW Divisional Council. She is a member of the Technical Working Group, Carbon Disclosure Standards Board (London) and a Director for the Australasian Reporting Awards.

Before joining UNSW Sydney, Maria was a Teaching Fellow at Nanyang Business School in Singapore, a Lecturer at the University of Sydney and the RJ Chambers scholar while doing her PhD research at the University of Sydney. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a consultant and auditor in Big 4 accounting firms in the US and Asia.

Maria’s selected research publications and other achievements are available on her website at the following link: https://research.unsw.edu.au/people/dr-maria-cleofas-balatbat.