Our Team
Dr Tim Patston
Dr Tim Patston is the leader of Creative Actions consultancy activities. He is a researcher and educator with more than thirty years’ experience working with Primary, Secondary and Tertiary education providers. Tim’s interests lie in the use of data-based evidence from the science of creativity to improve educational practice and student outcomes.
He is a Senior Adjunct at the University of South Australia in UniSA STEM and a Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne in the Graduate School of Education. He publishes widely in the field of Creative Education and the development of creative competencies. He is the featured expert on creativity in the documentary Finding Creativity, to be released in 2021. He is co-author with an Indigenous Elder of an educational resource focusing on Indigenous Astronomy.
He also publishes on Digital Competencies with Deloitte Centre for the Edge. He was previously Head of Music at NIDA, where he introduced Peak Performance Psychology to the undergraduate and postgraduate programs. He was the inaugural Coordinator of Creativity and Innovation at Geelong Grammar School.
Professor David Cropley
Professor David Cropley is a partner at Creative Actions. He is the Professor of Engineering Innovation at the University of South Australia. Professor Cropley joined the School of Engineering at the South Australian Institute of Technology (SAIT) in 1990, after serving for four years in the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy.
His research interests lie in the measurement of product creativity, measuring innovation capacity in organisations, creativity in schools and education, creativity and innovation in terrorism and crime, and the nexus of creative problem-solving and engineering.
Professor Cropley is author/co-author of eight books including Homo Problematis Solvendis: Problem Solving Man – A History of Human Creativity (Springer Nature, 2019); Creativity in Engineering: Novel Solutions to Complex Problems (Academic Press, 2015); and The Psychology of Innovation in Organizations (Cambridge University Press, 2015), as well as over 150 papers on various topics in creativity.
Now a recognised expert in creative problem solving and innovation, Professor Cropley was a scientific consultant and on-screen expert for the Australian ABC TV Documentaries Redesign My Brain (2013), Life at 9 (2014) and Redesign My Brain, Series 2 (2015).
Dr. Hansika Kapoor
Dr. Hansika Kapoor is our Research Designer and Data Analyst. She is also the Research Author at the Department of Psychology, Monk Prayogshala, Mumbai. She holds a PhD from IIT, Bombay in the area of negative creativity, aka how people get good ideas to do bad things.
She is the recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship (2019-2020), and is an Affiliate at the University of Connecticut.
Her work has been published in several international peer-reviewed academic journals, such as Creativity Research Journal, Thinking Skills and Creativity, Personality and Individual Differences, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, and Journal of Gender Studies.
She also regularly contributes to popular media publications, including Aeon Magazine, The Atlantic, Mint, and Firstpost. Dr. Kapoor has been cited as a subject matter expert in numerous features on social and cognitive psychology in the Indian context.
She is a practicing psychologist and visiting/adjunct faculty at several liberal arts colleges in India. Her research interests lie in creativity, behavioural science, and social and personality psychology.
Hansika has also been featured in the book 31 Fantastic Adventures in Science: Women Scientists in India and is an avid Pokémon GO trainer. She tweets @hansika_kapoor. To know more, please visit: www.hansikakapoor.in
Professor James C. Kaufman
Professor James C. Kaufman is a partner at Creative Actions. He is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author/editor of more than 50 books, including Creativity 101 (2nd Edition, 2016) and the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (2nd Edition, 2019; with Robert Sternberg).
He has published more than 300 papers, including the study that spawned the “Sylvia Plath Effect,” and three well-known theories of creativity, including (with Ron Beghetto) the Four-C Model of Creativity.
He is a past president of Division 10 of the American Psychological Association. James has won many awards, including Mensa’s research award, the Torrance Award from the National Association for Gifted Children, and APA’s Berlyne and Farnsworth awards. He co-founded two major journals (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts and Psychology of Popular Media Culture).
Ms Sue Gaardboe
Sue is Creative Actions’ Primary Years Specialist. Sue’s current focus is on the development of Creative Thinking and Critical Thinking skills in primary school students, in support of her PhD. She comes from a combined arts and sciences background having qualifications in Applied Science (Textile Conservation) and Teacher Education.
Her employment background includes Assistant Principal in a South Australian primary school, Textiles Conservator in the Australian War Memorial and the Australian National Gallery and University Lecturer in Objects Conservation at the University of Canberra.
Sue’s innovative teaching methods have been recognised by the award for Early Career STEM Educator of the Year (Science Excellence Awards, SA) in 2012, and invitations to present at National Conferences and Workshops in STEM, Problem Based Learning, and developing Critical and Creative Thinking skills in students.