Amanda Webster, AE, is an accomplished academic editor, a gifted fiction editor and an aspiring author. Ms Webster has an intuitive understanding of how to make a work of writing flow seamlessly and enjoys the challenge of helping students and academics articulate their ideas clearly and concisely.

Ms Webster has managed, coordinated and coached several teams in a variety of settings. She is experienced in managing workflows and is passionate about helping others learn. As a former intermediate artistic roller skating coach, Ms Webster has years of experience training and mentoring students at an elite level. Competing at an elite level (including at the world championships) inculcated upon Ms Webster not only outstanding dedication and motivation but also the ability to work remarkably well in a team. She enthusiastically applies all this skill and knowledge in her role as Assistant Program Coordinator at Capstone Editing, helping our course participants learn efficiently, remain driven and become exceptional editors themselves. In particular, her ability to break down complex ideas and convey them plainly yet comprehensively serves her well as our Assistant Program Coordinator. Ms Webster works closely with the rest of the YECL team to ensure that all our students have a fantastic learning experience and that their educational and career goals are met.

Dr Jackson is an editor, educator, literary critic, poet and writer with numerous awards and publications and years of experience in writing, editing and training. They have outstanding IT skills, excellent verbal and written communication skills and considerable experience with international students.

As well as a superb editor, Dr Jackson is a trained, experienced adult educator. In particular, they have taught writing since 2008 and have taught the English language in both China and Australia. As our Editor Training Coordinator, their role includes providing personalised training and ongoing professional development.

Dr Jackson’s 2018 PhD thesis in Writing won the University Research Medal, the Arts and Humanities Research Medal and the Magdalena Prize for Feminist Research. It comprises a book of poems, a metafictional narrative and four critical essays, and explores how poetry might bring together spiritual and scientific discourses, focusing primarily on philosophical Daoism (Taoism) and contemporary physics.

Having a background in both the humanities and the sciences makes Dr Jackson an excellent generalist and academic editor whose work benefits from creativity and broad reading as well as logic and meticulous attention to detail. Whatever someone is writing—be it a research proposal, journal article, essay, thesis or textbook, or a novel, memoir, story or book of poems—Dr Jackson believes the goal of editing is to make the document the best it can be, because by helping the document fulfil its potential, we can help the client fulfil theirs.

Dr Sarah Pearce is a specialist academic editor, fiction editor, poetry editor, early career researcher and poet. Her research interests include poetry, Gothic literature, nineteenth-century women’s literature, feminist criticism and female embodiment. Dr Pearce’s scholarly and creative publications appear in Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies, Outskirts: Feminisms along the edge, Meniscus, Writing from Below, TEXT, The Suburban Review, Overland, Cordite and various anthologies. Her poetry has been taught in several Australian undergraduate Creative Writing courses, and she has been awarded multiple writing residencies. She has also peer reviewed various journal articles and books, co-edited special issues of Writing from Below and completed an internship at The Suburban Review.

Dr Pearce is deeply familiar with the publishing expectations for both scholarly and creative work, including the specific academic requirements for Honours, master’s and PhD theses. She is also highly experienced in developing and editing applications for academic employment, promotion and grant funding.

In addition to her editing expertise, Dr Pearce is an experienced presenter and performer, having presented her scholarly and creative work in a variety of forums across Australia and overseas. She is also experienced in teaching English to overseas students and has several years of experience teaching Linguistics and English Literature to undergraduate students at several universities, in addition to private tutoring.

Dr Pearce is an accomplished, flexible and professional editor whose broad-ranging research, publishing and editorial experience equips her to approach a variety of editing and teaching roles with sensitivity and rigour.

Dr Lines is an academic editor, author and historian. As one of Australia’s most experienced specialist academic editors, Dr Lines has edited thousands of academic documents during an editing career spanning over two decades and has been training editors to build successful careers for 15 years.

In addition, Dr Lines has over 15 years of employment experience in Australian universities. She has lectured and tutored at all three South Australian universities, as well as the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Canberra. Her expertise is in the fields of modern European history (specifically the Spanish Civil War), communications, management, and learning and teaching, including research into academic integrity and plagiarism.

After refining her skills for over a decade through the training and professional development of her in-house editors, Dr Lines developed Your Editing Career Launched as a way to contribute to the wider editing community.

Dr Lines knows exactly what it takes to become a highly skilled and well-paid editor, and she passes that knowledge on to you through this course.

Dr Megan Cross is a biochemist and specialist medical, science and technical editor. Her groundbreaking PhD thesis described the use of structural biology to discover how an essential enzyme can be used to prevent and treat parasitic diseases, as developed during her research tenure at the Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery, Griffith University.

With 10 years’ research experience and a lifelong love of writing, Dr Cross has written and published 10 research articles in top peer-reviewed scientific journals and a textbook chapter for undergraduate enzymologists in Wilson and Walker’s Principles and Techniques of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, an essential and best-selling resource for budding molecular biologists and biochemists.

Dr Cross is passionate about science communication and is currently responsible for the hands-on science experiments in the That’s RAD! Science book series, which aims to inspire children through engaging STEM stories written by real scientists. Through her editing, she helps academics, thesis students and medical researchers/writers to present their work in a manner that is structurally consistent, concise and clear, but also demonstrates their technical excellence and experimental rigour while remaining engaging for the reader.

She enjoys assisting students with their academic writing, particularly those from diverse language backgrounds. As a research assistant and early career researcher, she has supervised many international interns and undergraduate project students and relished the opportunity to edit their writing to communicate their ideas in the best way possible and help them grow as young scientists.

Bachelor of International Business and Bachelor of Management

Symone is one of Capstone’s key YECL course presenters. She is passionate about communication and uses her motivating, personable presentation style to help participants engage deeply with the YECL coursework. Symone also runs a highly successful freelance marketing business, which allows her to provide valuable insights to course participants who are looking to launch or expand their freelance editing careers.