I have never seen the world through a single lens. That is exactly the point.

Where It Begins

I was born in Australia, but I did not grow up there. My childhood was outside Mexico City and Bangkok, monsoons and market days, languages absorbed before they were studied. I was what researchers now call a Third Culture Kid, someone who grows up between cultures, belonging fully to none of them, and drawing something essential from all of them.

At the time, it just felt like life. Looking back, I understand what it gave me: an instinct for reading a room in any language, a genuine curiosity about what makes people tick, and a deep comfort with complexity and ambiguity. These turned out to be the most important tools I would ever carry into my work.

When I eventually moved to Australia for secondary school and then university, studying Modern Asian Studies at Griffith University, I was not settling down. I was preparing to leave again. And I have been on the move ever since, in the best possible way.

Twenty Years of Real-World Leadership

After completing my Master's in Intercultural International Management at the School for International Training in the United States, one of the world's leading institutions in cross-cultural education, I went to work in some of the most demanding environments on earth.

Montenegro during the Balkan aftermath. Iraq in 2003, in the first months after the fall of Baghdad, designing protection programmes for 15,000 children in a country that was simultaneously rebuilding and unravelling. Ethiopia. Indonesia. Mozambique after Cyclone Idai. Bangladesh. And for many years, Zambia, which has become something close to home.

Across all of it, I was leading teams, building organisations, securing funding, navigating complexity, and always developing people. The formal job titles varied. The real work was consistent: helping human beings become more capable, more confident, and more effective in conditions where it genuinely mattered.

I worked with and for organisations including CARE, Save the Children, Mercy Corps, Catholic Relief Services, UNICEF, Oxfam, the EU, USAID, and the Australian Embassy, among many others. I published research on gender, climate, and community resilience. I built teams from the ground up in places where the infrastructure, the funding, and sometimes the security were uncertain.

And through all of it, I kept noticing the same thing: the most important variable in whether a programme succeeded was not its design or its budget. It was the quality of its leadership.

From Leading Programmes to Developing Leaders

The decision to launch Ninderry Catalyst was not a pivot. It was an arrival.

For most of my career, I was coaching without calling it that. Mentoring the country director who was technically excellent but struggling under the weight of leadership. Supporting the founder building a social enterprise from scratch who had no idea what to do next. Sitting with programme managers who were overwhelmed, or brilliant, or both, and helping them find their footing.

In 2023, after leading Catholic Relief Services' Bangladesh programme through a significant period of organisational change, securing $4 million in new funding, managing a 16-member team, and leading a complex staff transition process in under nine months, I stepped back and asked myself an honest question: where is my greatest contribution?

The answer was clear. Not in the doing. In the developing. Not in running programmes, but in growing the leaders who run them.

Ninderry Catalyst is that answer, formalised. A boutique executive coaching and leadership development practice built on two decades of real-world insight, and grounded in structured coaching methodology developed through the Coach Catalyst Programme with the Management Performance Institute and Novus Global.

Why Ninderry Catalyst?

Ninderry is a place in Queensland, Australia, a place of deep significance and long perspective, where the view stretches further than you expect. A catalyst is the thing that makes transformation possible without being consumed by it.

Together, they describe what I am trying to do: help leaders find their long view, and then give them the tools to act from it.

Qualifications & Training

Master in Intercultural International Management, School for International Training, USA (2001)

Bachelor of Arts in Modern Asian Studies, Griffith University, Australia (1995)

Coach Catalyst Programme, Management Performance Institute / Novus Global (2026)

Coaching for Leadership, Aid for Aid Workers (2023)

Diploma in Adaptive Leadership in Development, University of Queensland (2019)

Diploma in Child Protection, Harvard & UNICEF (2019)

Sexual Exploitation, Abuse and Harassment Investigator Qualification (Tier 3), CHS Alliance (2024)