About

Ante Prodan

Ante Prodan is a complex-systems scientist and AI systems architect. His work is aimed at making rigorous computational methods usable by the people who have to act on them, under the constraints they actually face. He is, first, a builder. His career began in commercial software development in Croatia in the early 1990s, and across three decades he has never stopped writing code, from enterprise business and insurance systems, through agent-based simulations, to the generative-AI tools he ships today. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Technology Sydney, a multi-agent systems thesis completed through a linkage project with Bell Labs, and has published in journals including The Lancet, the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, and Addiction.

Over more than a decade of collaboration with the Sax Institute, the Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, and the Brain and Mind Centre at the University of Sydney, he built dynamic simulation models (system-dynamics, agent-based, and discrete-event) that directly shaped health policy at state and national level in Australia. His models informed investment decisions on suicide prevention, mental-health service delivery, alcohol harm reduction, tobacco control, childhood obesity, and cardiovascular risk. They were built as decision-support tools, in close partnership with policymakers, to let governments test the downstream consequences of a choice before committing resources.

The same instinct shows up well outside health policy. In 2008 he contributed the foundational software behind what became AirJaldi (now a leading rural internet provider across nine Indian states), adapting OpenWRT to connect remote Himalayan villages using off-the-shelf hardware, with no infrastructure to fall back on. Working that way, with nothing to spare, set the habit he has kept since: design for the conditions that actually exist.

Today he works across generative AI and complex systems, as Managing Director of CLARA Pty Ltd, Chief Advisor on AI to the University of Sydney's Mental Wealth Initiative, an affiliate researcher at the Sydney School of Public Health, and Independent Director of CSART. He develops AI-assisted tools for health data extraction, analysis, and surveillance that combine large language models with simulation frameworks and run on modest hardware without cloud dependency, and he researches how generative AI is reshaping economies, labour, health, and energy systems.

Approach

Rigour that survives contact with reality

Ante's work is directed at practical impact. He builds tools in close partnership with the people who will use them, under the constraints they actually face: in government health departments, in rural field settings, and in privacy-sensitive environments where cloud services are not an option.

He publishes methods and tools openly where he can, so that others can apply and extend them, and he is as comfortable with the messy reality of implementation as with the underlying mathematics. Most of his work happens in that gap, between computational precision and a decision someone has to make.

Roles now

Career timeline

  1. 2026–present

    Managing Director, CLARA Pty Ltd

  2. 2024–present

    Chief Advisor on AI, Mental Wealth Initiative, University of Sydney

  3. 2026–present

    Affiliate Researcher, School of Public Health, University of Sydney

  4. 2019–present

    Independent Director, CSART

  5. 2020–2025

    Systems Architect, Brain and Mind Centre (Mental Wealth Initiative), University of Sydney

  6. 2018–2025

    Senior Lecturer in Computational Epidemiology, Western Sydney University

  7. 2016–2020

    Systems Architect, Sax Institute (Australian Prevention Partnership Centre)

  8. 2014–2016

    Director of Online Programs (eDAP), Western Sydney University

  9. 2010–2018

    Lecturer in Networking and Web Science, Western Sydney University

  10. 2009–2010

    Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Technology Sydney

  11. 2001–2008

    IT Consultant, financial and media recruitment sectors

  12. 1994–1998

    Senior Software Developer, AdriaInfo, Croatia

  13. 1991–1993

    Software Developer, Euroherc Insurance, Croatia

Qualifications

  • PhD, Computer Science, University of Technology Sydney (ARC linkage with Bell Labs), 2009
  • Graduate Diploma, Research Commercialisation, University of Technology Sydney, 2010
  • Bachelor of Computing (Internet Commerce), University of Technology Sydney, 2002

PhD

Computer Science, UTS (Bell Labs linkage)

$11M+

in research funding

Memberships and service

  • Member, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
  • Member, Health Informatics Society of Australia
  • Member, Society for Modelling and Simulation
  • Peer reviewer for the Czech Science Foundation (2015–2021), BMJ Global Health, IEEE ISCC, MEDINFO, and the System Dynamics Society

Selected international engagements

  • University of Colombo, Sri Lanka (2017): simulation-modelling workshop.
  • Billings Clinic, Montana, USA (2016–2017): surgical patient-flow simulation informing scheduling reforms.
  • University of Saskatchewan, Canada (2014–2017): Dynamic Modelling for Health masterclasses with Professor Nate Osgood.
  • AirJaldi rural network, Dharamsala, India (2008): foundational OpenWRT software, now operating across nine Indian states.