RPAS 2025 Speaker Bio

Coleby Thew

Assistant Director of Drone Operations

DCCEEW 

Coleby Thew is the Assistant Director of Drone Operations in the Office of the Chief Remote Pilot, Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, where he leads the integratuion of cutting-edge drone technologies to support environmental monitoring, conservation and emergency response. With a background spanning enterprise drone strategy, autonomous systems and prototyping and AI driven edge computing, Coleby has worked across industry and government to deploy innovative uncrewed solutions in some of Australia’s most remote protected areas. His career includes leading enterprise operations at D1 Store and more recently pioneering research into proximal remote sensing, drone dock networks in remote locations, hypertemporal drone data collection and automated wildife detection.