Associate Professor Brooke Wilmsen is Deputy Director of the La Trobe Centre for Global Security. A Human Geographer in the Department of Social Inquiry, she teaches and researches in the areas of critical development studies, forced displacement, planned relocation, climate adaptation and security and critical agrarian change. Brooke was previously elected to the executive of the Development Studies Association of Australia. She is a World Social Science Fellow of the International Science Council and an Associate of the Centre for Contemporary China Studies at The University of Melbourne.

Brooke is currently CI on two multi-year projects "Reframing the Yield Gap" funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) which is exploring smallholder rice production in the Philippines and "Strengthening Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) Standards and Practices for a Just Transition" funded by KONEKSI. She is also CI on two smaller projects, one that is attempting to reframe the notion of climate security through place-based understandings and another following China's agrochemical engagement in Australia.

Bringing together insights from human geography, critical development studies, critical security studies, agrarian change, forced migration and climate adaptation, Brooke's work is located at the intersection of political, social and environmental change. She seeks to understand how global actors, governments and subnational actors intervene to progress or mitigate change and how these interventions are absorbed, hybridised, circumvented and resisted by smallholder farmers, displacees, informal dwellers, refugees and others.

She graduated with a Bachelor of Science (Environmental Science), a Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours) and a PhD in Geography from The University of Melbourne. She predominantly works in China, although she has also conducted research in West Africa, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Maldives and Australia. 

Brooke was Chief Investigator on an ARC Discovery Project (DP180100519, 2018-2023) examining the restructuring of China's agricultural sector. Between 2012-2017, she held an ARC DECRA (DE120101037) to study the longitudinal impacts of the Three Gorges Dam on the livelihoods of those displaced. From 2015-2019 she was a collaborating researcher on the New Directions in Social Policy Project for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development on social protection in Indonesia. Brooke is the author of more than 60 publications in the top development studies, human geography and climate change journals including Global Environmental Change, World Development, Development and Change, Geoforum, Progress in Human Geography and Political Geography. Before joining academia, Brooke worked as a consultant for the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, government affiliates and the private sector.