Our Research Committee

Dr. Bernadette Boss CSC is an Australian legal professional, former magistrate, and senior officer in the Australian Army, with extensive service in law, defence, and veteran affairs. She is a graduate of the Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies and holds masters degrees in law and public policy with a PhD in law from Sydney University.  As the Interim National Commissioner for Defence and Veteran Suicide she took a significant interest in research, particularly in disproportionally represented women veterans.   

Rach Ranton is an Australian Army veteran, serving from 1997-2008. As an Electronic Warfare operator, she was embedded in frontline patrols to provide intercept, warning, and advice on the battlefield and served within the forward-most elements during the first regular army deployments to East Timor and Afghanistan. 

Post-service, Rach carved out a corporate career leading large teams at St.George Bank and Westpac Bank to the top of leaderboards. These included leadership roles managing multi-billion dollar portfolios in Sales, Service, Profit/Loss, and compliance, along with executive roles in Change, Projects, and Organisational Development. Rach designed and delivered world-leading Neurodiversity and Veterans Hiring programs, alongside cutting-edge cultural change and leadership programs which were implemented across the forty-thousand-strong workforce at Westpac Bank. 

Rach is a keen veterans advocate, with broad and varied connections across the veteran community. She is an inaugural member of the Veterans Impact Group (providing advice to Gallipoli Medical Research Institute), and has previously served on the board of the Veteran Surf Project. 

SQNLDR (Ret’d) Revd. Dr. Nikki Coleman is a leading military ethics, space ethics and military medical ethics researcher. Nikki taught military ethics for 10 years at the Australian Defence Force Academy and 3 years at the ADF Chaplains College. She has taught medical ethics at the Australian National University and Yale University in the US, where she was also a visiting research fellow.

Whilst in the ADF Nikki served as the support chaplain to all of Canberra (including HQJOC), as well as in the role of the senior chaplain ethicist in the RAAF Space Domain Review team, ADF Space Command, Australian Defence College, and the Centre for Defence 

Leadership and Ethics.   Nikki’s current research position is as a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Space Governance in Canberra and the Case Western Reserve University Inamori Centre for Ethics and Excellence in Cleveland, Ohio.

Nikki is the founder and senior coordinator of the International Space Ethics Collaborative Research Group. The thing Nikki loves most about her work is helping support other researchers.

In 2024 Nikki won the ADM Women in Defence Award (People & Culture) for her work on fighting unacceptable behaviour and sexual violence in the ADF.

In her spare time Nikki is a volunteer with The Athena Project (a peer support group for veterans impacted by military sexual violence), and enjoys teaching her granddaughter to bake Anzac biscuits and swim, but not at the same time.