Dr Thong Tran is an Honorary Lecturer at Fenner School of Environment and Society, College of Systems and Society, The Australian National University, where he obtained his PhD in Human Ecology in 2017. His research focuses on the competing interface of environment and agriculture amidst escalating climate-development complexities in mainland Southeast Asia. Specifically, he works on the interdisciplinary areas of (transboundary) environmental governance, rural agricultural innovations, agricultural extension, climate change adaptation, community agency, social learning, livelihood resilience, and institutional change. From January 2018 to May 2021, he was a Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, working on transboundary water challenges driven by upstream hydropower development and climate change in the Mekong region. From August 2022 to May 2024, he was a Research Fellow (Human Geography) at School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne, engaging in an ACIAR-funded project "Next generation agricultural extension: Social relations for practice change" led by Associate Professor Brian Robert Cook. The project aimed to reconceptualise agricultural extension as social relations and develop a social model of agricultural extension, focusing on Battambang and Pailin provinces in Cambodia.

At present, he is co-leading two international projects. They include: (1) "Between vulnerability and resilience: Hydrosocial and agrarian transitions in the Mekong Delta from An Giang Province, Vietnam to Phnom Penh, Cambodia," funded by Henry Luce Foundation in collaboration with East-West Centre, US, and Asian Vision Institute, Cambodia, and (2) “Climate action and participatory experiments for urban resilience in the Philippines and Vietnam” funded by CLARE-ASEAN (Accelerating Research for Sustainable and Inclusive Solutions for Enhanced Urban Resilience to Climate Change in ASEAN), focusing on urban communities exposed to various climatic conditions in Quezon City (the Philippines) and Can Tho City (Vietnam), in collaboration with researchers and practitioners from University of the Philippines (The Philipinnes), University of Melbourne (Australia), Lingnan University (Hong Kong, China), York University (Canada), and Work In Progress (The Philipinnes). 

Dr Thong Tran serves as an Associate Editor for Society and Natural Resources and Development in Practice. He also sits on the Editorial Board of Journal of Flood Risk Management.

BSc (Can Tho University, Vietnam), MA (Eastern Mennonite University, the United States), PhD (The Australian National University, Australia)

• (Transboundary) environmental governance
• Human-environment relationships
• Environment and development nexus
• State-society interactions in environment and development
• Social learning
• Climate change adaptation
• Institutional change
• Rural livelihoods
• Mainland Southeast Asia