[5] She left Monash early in 2022 to take up a research leadership role at RMIT University, as Director of the Design and Creative Practice Enabling Capability Platform, where her job is to encourage and enable interdisciplinary research that has high impact and benefit to people and planet, between and beyond the design fields.
Stead has also undertaken a number of research fellowships, including Postdoctoral Fellow, Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden, Linkoping University (October 2007 – February 2008), and Honorary Visiting Scholar, School of Architecture, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium (June – December 2005).
[7] This involved eight researchers – Stead, Karen Burns, Justine Clark, Gill Matthewson, Amanda Roan, Gillian Whitehouse, Julie Willis and Sandra Kaji-O'Grady – and sought map women’s participation in the architectural profession in Australia, to understand why women are under-represented at senior management level, and to identify concrete strategies for change.
This is the first major Australian study to use interdisciplinary, qualitative and quantitative methods to question how workplace cultures and professional identity affect mental wellbeing in architecture – and thus lay the foundations for practical improvements in the future.
[25] She has edited academic journals, including Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, with Prof Johan Fornas and Dr Martin Fredriksson;[26] Architectural Theory Review, with Dr Lee Stickells and Prof Michael Tawa (2011 – 2014), and was on the Executive Committee of the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) from 2003 to 2005, and elected SAHANZ President from 2017-2019.
These include: Stead also regularly speaks at public and professional events on architecture and the built environment and has done a number of radio interviews.