Mandy Yap is a Fellow at CAEPR. She is part of the team evaluating the Aboriginal Affairs NSW Local Decision Making Initiative of the Opportunity, Choice, Healing, Responsibility, Empowerment (OCHRE) plan. 

Before returning to CAEPR in 2019, she was employed at the Crawford School of Public Policy working on the Individual Deprivation Measure (IDM), a gender sensitive measures individual deprivation. She co-led the IDM study in two districts in South Sulawesi.  Prior to joining the ANU, Mandy worked the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling.  Mandy has undertaken quantitative social science research in the areas of wellbeing and social exclusion, health, disability and ageing, income distribution, fertility and family formation, empowerment and unpaid care and work. 

Mandy has an interest in the composite measures of quality of life with a particular focus on methodologies surrounding selection and weighting of composite measures of wellbeing which gives priority to the lived realities and perspectives of communities and individuals on the ground. She is also committed to working with Indigenous communities to co-produce data and information fit for their purposes and needs. Since 2013, Mandy has been working in partnership with the Yawuru community in Broome to develop culturally-relevant indicators of Indigenous wellbeing. Mandy is an Australian Endeavour Fellow and has collaborated with other researchers nationally and internationally on projects such as ‘Data sovereignty for Indigenous peoples’ and ‘Indigenous peoples, sustainable development and the capability approach’.