Inger Blackford Mewburn (born 1970) is a Professor and Director of Research Training at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

The bulk of the content was organized around the emotions experienced by most PhD students: Confidence; Frustration; Loneliness; Fear; Curiosity; Confusion; Boredom and Love.

In 2010, Robyn Barnacle and Mewburn published an influential paper[3] showing that scholarly identity is distributed and is performed through both traditional and non‐traditional sites of learning.

[24] In 2011, she built on this work, and on material published on her Thesis Whisperer blog, to argue that PhD student ‘troubles talk’ in everyday interactions form an important aspect of identity formation.

[30] In 2016, Rachael E Pitt and Mewburn published an analysis of advertisements for academic positions that sought to understand what graduate attributes universities were seeking from PhD candidates.

One reviewer commented that Mewburn's approach allowed her to engage with "...topics that are only discussed in conversations hidden in the office kitchenette.

Grant, Hanna Suominen and Stephanie Kizimchuk used machine learning and natural language processing to analyze the content of non-academic Australian job advertisements to understand what proportion of positions would be suitable for PhD graduates.