Tina Qi

Dr Xiaoqiong (Tina) Qi is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Queensland (UQ). She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Lanzhou University, China, and was subsequently offered direct entry into a PhD program. Her PhD research focused on high-speed, long-haul optical fibre transmission system design. During her doctoral studies, she was awarded a China Scholarship Council (CSC) scholarship to study two years at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she focuses on semiconductor laser dynamics and their applications in radio-over-fibre communications and optical sensing.

She was awarded her PhD in Photonics in 2009 and subsequently joined the Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where she secured three national grants and two industry grants as lead Chief Investigator in optical sensing system design. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2015. In the same year, she was awarded a UQ Fellowship and relocated to Australia, where she expanded her research into laser dynamics in terahertz quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) for biomedical applications.

She received the Mid-Career Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellowship (AQIRF) in 2020 and the UQ Amplify Fellowship in 2023. She has developed advanced optical sensing technologies spanning ultraviolet, near-infrared, and far-infrared (terahertz) wavelengths, with applications in greenhouse gas monitoring, road weather sensing, and skin cancer detection. Her AQIRF project focuses on terahertz imaging for early melanoma diagnosis, with translational research conducted in collaboration with the Princess Alexandra Hospital and the Translational Research Institute in Australia.