Alex Bainton

Alex Bainton is a Senior Policy Analyst at the CIS, working in the Energy Program. His background spans software engineering and data analysis through to policy advice in Federal Parliament and Consultancy to major federal departments. He combines deep technical expertise with clear analysis and persuasive communication.

In his work with large federal departments Alex wrote and helped lead analysis of Australia’s public infrastructure workforce shortage, model and project workforce requirements for individual agencies, and map Australia’s supercomputing landscape to improve planning and researcher access.

He has written cabinet submissions and policy briefs for Members and Senators. These were on issues such as resolving policy deadlock between departments and NGO involvement in elections.

He was a software engineer at an automotive safety company which focused on machine learning and computer vision. While there he created processes for ingesting big data and curated large datasets. This gave him experience with every stage of the data pipeline from collection to analysis and communication.

Throughout, Alex has maintained an interest in interdisciplinary approaches to understanding complex systems. He studied politics, philosophy, and economics at the Australian National University.