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Associate Professor Jasneek Chawla undertook her specialist training in Edinburgh UK, followed by a Paediatric Sleep Medicine Fellowship at the Mater Children's Hospital in Brisbane. She is now a Paediatric Respiratory and Sleep Medicine Physician at the Queensland Children’s Hospital in Brisbane and Associate Professor at Child Health Research Centre, University of Queensland.

Associate Professor Jasneek Chawla is a clinician researcher who leads the Kids Sleep Research group at Child Health Research Centre. She was awarded three fellowships during her PhD, evaluating the impact of sleep interventions on outcomes in children with Down syndrome, completed in May 23. A/Prof Chawla leaders large-scale multi-centre research addressing sleep in children with neurodisability and has a national and international profile in this field. She undertakes both respiratory and sleep focused research but has a specific interest in sleep in children with disability, the relationship between sleep and long-term cognitive & behavioural outcomes in children and development of novel technology for clinical use. She has received MRFF, philanthropic and industry funding for her research.

Associate Professor Chawla is a board director and education chair for the Australasian Sleep Association and has been appointed as the incoming president elect for the organisation, commencing Oct 2024. She has served on multiple other national professional commitees and was a senior editor for the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health. A/Professor Chawla led the revision of the TSANZ/ASA paediatric home ventilation guidelines and a national consensus document relating to oximetry use for paediatric sleep-disordered breathing.

Associate Professor Chawla has presented nationally and internationally and was a plenary speaker at the World Down syndrome Congress in 2024. She is a mentor for the UQ Faculty of Medicine Women in Leadership Program, the Child Unlimited Youth Mentorship Program and the UQ Clincian Researcher Development Program. A/Prof Chawla is an associate investigator on 2 ARC Centre for Research Excellence- the life course centre and the digital child.

Jacqui is an experienced Occupational Therapist and Postdoctoral Clinical Researcher with the Child Health Research Centre, at the University of Queensland. She is committed to creating a shift in early childhood intervention where parents are at the centre of therapy, and child outcomes are better optimised by strengthening parent-child interactions. Jacqui is involved in several clinical research projects that focus on supporting parents who have a child with developmental difficulties. She has also developed an innovative and practical training package for early childhood practitioners. This training package supports practitioners to feel confident incorporating a relationship-focused approach in their therapy as a foundation for all other areas of child development.

Dr Emma Cooke is a sociologist, qualitative researcher, and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland working in the Kids Sleep Research Group at the Child Health Research Centre and the Child Development, Education and Care Research Group at the Queensland Brain Institute. Dr Cooke researches and represents the often-overlooked stories of children, families, educators and clinicians. She works in interdisciplinary teams with a dual focus on disability and early childhood education and care. As the qualitative research lead in the Kids Sleep Research Group, Dr Cooke facilitates research training and support, and collaborates with clinicians, students and researchers to conduct qualitative research.

Dr Cooke’s research interests include the lived experiences of sleep, relaxation, wellbeing, disability, gender, intersectional inequality, healthcare, education and social services. She also has expertise in DRAWing (Departing Radically in Academic Writing) and knowledge translation. As an active member of the DRAW Group, Dr Cooke’s recent academic work is written creatively to have an emotional as well as intellectual impact.

In her PhD thesis, Dr Cooke utilised a crystallization methodological framework to gain multifaceted insights into children’s rights, early childhood discourses, and children’s relaxation and unrestful experiences in early childhood education and care. She has extensive experience interviewing children and adults across a range of contexts, and uses different qualitative analysis methodologies, including thematic analysis, discourse analysis, and creative analytical practices.

Dr Laetitia Coles is a Research Fellow within the Child Development, Education and Care group at the Queensland Brain Institute, led by Laureate Prof Karen Thorpe. As a mixed-methods applied sociologist, she leads the Workforces component of the Thriving Queensland Kids Brain Builders Initiative (https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain-builders) in support of the generation, translation, and application of knowledge from neurosciences into policy and practice, as well as leading the award-winning project entitled Families in Focus: Amplifying the voices of children with disability and their families (https://child-health-research.centre.uq.edu.au/event/5632/families-focus), in collaboration with Queensland Children's Hospital. She is committed to undertaking research that helps improve understandings of children’s care environments, with a specific focus on supporting those who care for and educate children. Dr Coles’ experience in multi-disciplinary research and in industry engagement underpins her strong track record in knowledge and research translation through both traditional and non-traditional research outputs.

Dr Coles completed her PhD in Sociology in 2020, looking at long work hours and fathers' engagement with children and caregiving – particularly focusing on the factors that facilitate participation in caregiving.

James leads the Child and Youth Research Group at the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research and the Youth Mental Health Research Group at the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research. He also practices clinically as a Child and Youth Psychiatrist with the Metro North Mental Health Service, where he is the Director of the Early Psychosis Service. James is the recipient of a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Practitioner Fellowship (2016-2020), awarded for his research into prevention and intervention strategies to improve the mental health of adolescents.

James has established a programme of research developing preventative strategies and cost-effective real-world interventions for mental illness in children and youth. His research incorporates studies in epidemiology, clinical trials, bullying and psychiatric neuro-immunology. He is the elected chair of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists Section for Youth Mental Health and an editor of the Journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. In 2018, he was awarded the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists’ Senior Research Award, conferred on the “Fellow who has made the most significant contribution to psychiatric research in Australia and New Zealand over the preceding five years”.

Paul specialises in Assessment and Management of Risk and Impact of Socio-Environmental determinants on the Wellbeing of our younger generations across their life span.

His overall vision is about how we use Environmental Health Intelligence to improve decision-making towards delivering more efficient Environmental Health Practices, Services and Solutions for local and regional communities in remote and disadvantaged socio-economic settings.

Within the complex interdisciplinary domains that hold the socio-environmental determinants of wellbeing, Paul’s operational research focuses on how / what interventions would best support communities to prevent, mitigate and adapt to EH risk and impact in rapidly changing environments and climate.

My group works to understand and improve sleep for children and families. Sleep is a key ‘pillar of health’ alongside nutrition and activity. It is critical for healthy development, growth, learning, social and emotional functioning, and community participation.

I am the UQ Node Director for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (the Life Course Centre). The Life Course Centre is committed to understanding and overcoming the problems of disadvantage, and to helping improve the lives of disadvantaged children and families. The Centre brings together researchers across multiple disciplines in four leading Universities, and significant government and non-government agencies to address these questions.

I am also the UQ Node director for the ARC centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. The Digital Child aims to support children growing up in the rapidly changing digital world, and provide strong evidence and guidance for children, families, educators, government and other concerned with children’s wellbeing.

We collaborate with many other groups around broader issues of sleep and technology, sleep and the environment (including disasters), mental health and wellbeing, pain, disability, and new technologies and approaches. Our work has been supported by the ARC, NHMRC, the MRFF, the NIH, and the DSTG. We use a wide range of methods and measures, including direct physiological and behavioural measurement (inc. ECG, EEG, EMG, actigraphy, computerized tests, simulations, environmental monitoring etc.), quantitative methods (inc. experimental and secondary data approaches), and qualitative methods including co-design and co-conduct approaches.

My team has additional expertise in evaluation of health and other services for government and other agencies, the design of complex interventions, and community consultation and engagement.

https://lifecoursecentre.org.au

https://digitalchild.org.au

Dr Desalegn Markos Shifti (PhD, MSc, BSc) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Child Health Research Centre (CHRC) at the University of Queensland. He is currently engaged in the comprehensive investigation of the prevalence, natural history, causes and consequences of allergic diseases.

Desalegn obtained his PhD in Clinical Epidemiology and Medical Statistics from the University of Newcastle, Australia, in 2022. Before pursuing his PhD, Desalegn worked as an Assistant Professor, Lecturer, and Graduate Assistant at various universities in Ethiopia, where he held both academic and research roles.

Desalegn has authored and co-authored several peer-reviewed research articles published in high-impact journals, such as the Lancet, JAMA Paediatrics, JAMA Oncology, and the International Journal of Public Health. He has expertise in several epidemiological and statistical skills, including generalised linear modelling, multilevel modelling, causal inferences for observational studies, mediation analysis, socio-economic assessment, geospatial analysis, big data analysis, systematic review, meta-analysis, and network meta-analysis.

Desalegn collaborates widely with public and clinical health researchers within Australia, low and middle-income countries, and internationally, across epidemiological studies. Key areas of interest and collaboration include allergies, maternal and child health, Indigenous health and well-being, reproductive health, health services research, chronic disease, and public health.

Karen Thorpe is Australian Research Council, Laureate Professor and Group Leader in Child Development, Education and Care at the Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland. Her research is grounded in the understanding that early learning experiences shape brain development and are critical in establishing trajectories of health, social inclusion and learning across the lifespan. A particular focus of her work is early care and education environments including parenting, parent work, quality of care and education, and the early years workforce.

Karen leads a multi-disciplinary team of developmental scientists undertaking large scale longitudinal studies with embedded studies to explicate mechanisms that enable or limit children’s life chances. She was Foundation Psychologist on the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children at the University of Bristol, UK; led the evaluation of the Preparing School Trial for Queensland Government; led the Queensland team of the E4Kids study of quality in Australian Early Education and Care and a recent data linkage project with Queensland Government to track participants through their school journey. In partnership with Queensland Government, Goodstart Early Learning and the Creche and Kindergarten Association she led a large population study of the Australian ECEC workforce (ARC Linkage). Her current research, as a chief investigator on the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families across the life course, and through an ARC Laureate fellowship, is to examine barriers to providing high quality early learning services in developmentally vulnerable communities.

In 2013 and again in 2019 Karen was named by the Australian Financial Review as among Australia's 100 Women of Influence for the impacts of her research on educational and family policy. In 2020 she was recognised by Australian Government, Advance Global Awards for her international contribution to education. Karen chairs the Australian Early Years Reference Council for Evidence for Learning, Australia whose remit is to build a strong evidence-base in early childhood education and care with focus on translation into policy and practice. She is also director on the board of the Australian Research Council for Children and Youth and advisor to the national board of Beyond Blue – Be You.

Dr Erin Pitt is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the area of Childhood Allergy and Epidemiology within the Child Health Research Centre (CHRC). Erin possesses a Bachelor of Health Science (Nutrition); a Master of Public Health (Epidemiology and Research Methods); and a PhD, which was conferred in March, 2020. Her doctoral research investigated the influence of local food environment and socio-ecological determinants on early childhood dietary intake using a mixed methods research approach, which had a strong focus on nutritional epidemiology in the context of public health nutrition.

Prior to pursuing an academic career, Erin worked as a Public Health Nutritionist with Queensland Health where she managed, designed, implemented, and evaluated community-based public health nutrition interventions in a range of settings and locations including rural/remote and metropolitan regions. Erin collaborated and engaged with a range of diverse government and non-government organisations and industry bodies to address priority areas including rural and remote food supply issues, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and nutrition, children’s food literacy and local government nutrition-related policy and planning.

Erin is currently working on a diverse range of projects including determinants of developing cow’s milk allergy in infancy; the role of migration in allergy prevalence; and the potential co-occurrence of allergy with neurodevelopmental conditions. She has a particular interest in the role of maternal and child dietary diversity as well as socio-economic determinants and their association with the development of allergy in children.

Dr Sally Staton is a Senior Research Fellow in the Science of Learning Research Centre at the Queensland Brain Institute, UQ. Dr Staton has a strong commitment to research that can inform and ensure positive early life experience for all children. Her research focuses on the role of early education and care settings in supporting young children’s immediate and on-going social-emotional, cognitive and physical development. Dr Staton’s research spans a range of study designs and methodologies, including evaluation studies in educational settings (applying randomised control trial and quasi-experimental designs), longitudinal studies tracking large child cohorts (>2000 children), standard observation techniques (in vivo and video), survey and individualised standard child assessment (using educational and psychological measures), as well as studies employing physiological (cortisol, actigraphy, heart rate variability) and qualitative (child, educator and parent interviews, socio-metric) designs. She has a particular expertise in the development, application and interpretation of observational measurement for educational practices and teacher-child interactions in education contexts, including early childhood settings. Dr Staton has a strong track record in research translation and community engagement, including delivery of reports for government and non-government organisations, professional development packages for early childhood professionals and teachers, presentations, workshops, videos and articles for parents, government regulatory officers and the early childhood sector. In 2016, she was named among Queensland’s Young Tall Poppy Scientists for her contribution to science translation and engagement. In 2019 her succesful research partnerships with industry and government was acknowledged in a Partners in Research Excellence Award from UQ.

Dr Cassandra Pattinson has strong research interests in exploring the effects of sleep and circadian rhythms on health, wellbeing, and recovery across the lifespan. Dr Pattinson completed her PhD through Queensland University of Technology, Faculty of Health in 2017. Her thesis explored the effects of sleep and light exposure on child health, specifically childhood obesity, in preschool children, aged 3 to 5 years. Prior to joining UQ's Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR), Dr Pattinson worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. In this role Dr Pattinson examined the effect of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on health, including the effects of TBI on protein and gene expression, as well as exploring the role of sleep on TBI-related symptom perturbation, maintenance, and recovery.

Her research has involved a range of populations from children and adolescents, through to military personnel and athletes. Dr Pattinson's research spans a range of study designs and methodologies, including longitudinal studies tracking large child cohorts (>2000 children), standard observation techniques, survey and individualised standard child assessment, as well as studies employing physiological (actigraphy, heart rate variability) and biological (hormones, proteomic, genomic) designs. Dr Pattinson also has a strong track record in research translation, these have included manuscripts in top scientific journals, reports for government and non-government organisations, development of professional development programs, as well as designing and presenting vodcasts and resources (e.g. fact sheets, workshops) to parent groups, young adults, government departments and the early childhood sector.

Dr Pattinson also prioritises research mentorship and leadership. When mentoring, she aims to create an engaging learning environment which promotes critical analysis and reflection. She has co-supervised, two PhD students (NIH). eight Masters of Developmental and Education Psychology Students (QUT), and four NIH Postbaccalaureate students (equivalent of honours) to completion. She currently supervisors two honours of Psychology students, one honours of Biomedical Science student and one PhD candidate.

Professor Craig Munns is the Mayne Professor of Paediatrics and Director of the Child Health Research Centre, The University of Queensland. Professor Munns is also a Senior Medical Officer in Paediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes at Queensland Children’s Hospital. He graduated from The University of Queensland, before training in paediatrics and endocrinology at The Royal Children’s Hospital, Brisbane. Professor Munns completed his PhD in paediatric growth disorders through UQ. He then undertook a post-doctoral fellowship in paediatric genetic bone disorders at The Shriners Hospital for Children, Montreal, Canada. From 2004 to 2021, Prof Munns was Senior Staff Specialist in Genetic and Metabolic Bone Disorders and Paediatric Endocrinologist at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Sydney. He also undertook roles as Clinical Program Director, Division of Diagnostic Services and Clinical Trials Lead at Kids Research. As Clinical Trials Lead his focus was on developing a research-intensive health system and introducing advanced therapeutics.

Professor Munns is an international expert in paediatric musculoskeletal disorders. His primary clinical and research interests are in diagnosis and management of primary and secondary bone disorders, including osteogenesis imperfecta, hypophosphataemic rickets, disuse osteoporosis and nutritional rickets. He has undertaken a wide range of investigator initiated and sponsored clinical trials, authored international consensus documents and has supervised numerous PhD and Masters students. Prof Munns is actively involved in national and international scientific societies. He was treasurer of Asia Pacific Paediatric Endocrine Society, is the inaugural treasurer of the International Society of Children’s Bone Health and has chaired the program organising committees Australasian Paediatric Endocrine Group, Australian and New Zealand Bone and Mineral Society and International Conference of Children’s Bone Health.

Dr. Kelvin Tuong is a Senior Research Fellow/Group Leader at the Ian Frazer Centre for Children’s Immunotherapy Research (IFCCIR), Child Health Research Centre. He is interested in single-cell analysis of immune cells and harnessing adaptive immune receptors for understanding immune cell development and function in health and in cancer.

Dr. Tuong was born and raised in Singapore and moved to Brisbane, Australia, after completing national service in Singapore and obtaining a Diploma in Biomedical Laboratory Technology (Ngee Ann Polytechnic).

Dr. Tuong was originally trained as a molecular cell biologist and gradually transitioned into bioinformatics during his post-doctoral training. He has been very prolific for an early career researcher, having published >50 articles since 2013, with nearly a third of them as first/co-first or last author and has a stellar track record of pushing out highly collaborative work in prestigious journals including Nature, Cell, Science, Nature Medicine, Nature Biotechnology J Exp Med etc. He has the rare combination of having excellent laboratory and bioinformatics skill sets which provide him a strong command of both fundamental immunology and computational approaches.

Dr. Tuong completed his undergraduate Bachelor's degree in Biomedical science with Class I Honours, followed by his PhD in macrophage cell biology and endocrinology at UQ (Prof. Jenny Stow lab and Emiritus Prof. George Muscat lab, IMB, UQ). He then went on to a post-doc position with Emiritus Prof. Ian Frazer (co-inventor of the Gardasil cervical cancer vaccine, UQ Frazer Institute, Translational Research Institute) where he worked on HPV immunology, cervical cancer and skin cancer. In his time in the Frazer lab, he developed an interest in bioinformatics analyses as a means to tackle and understanding immunology problems in health and disease. He then moved to the UK and joined Prof. Menna Clatworthy's lab at the University of Cambridge and Dr. Sarah Teichmann's lab at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He has focused his interests on single-cell analyses of tissue immune cells, including T and B cells and their specific receptors (TCR/BCR). He has developed bespoke bioinformatics software, including one tailored for single-cell B Cell Receptor sequencing analysis, Dandelion, which he used in one of the largest combined single-cell transcriptomic, surface proteomic and TCR/BCR sequencing dataset in the world, published in Nature Medicine, and more recently in Nature Biotechnology where we introduced a TCR-based pseudotime trajectory analysis method.

Dr. Tuong is now leading the Computational Immunology group at the IFCCIR and his lab is focused on investigating how pediatric immunity is perturbed during cancer at the cellular level and how this information can be used for creating novel warning systems for children with cancer. For potential students/post-docs/trainees interested in joining the team, please contact Dr. Tuong at z.tuong@uq.edu.au.

Shannon Edmed is a Research Fellow at the Child Health Research Centre and ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families Over the Life Course (Life Course Centre). She has an interest in environmental effects on sleep (including household and neighbourhood characteristics), and mental health and wellbeing.

I am a recipient of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Early Career Industry Fellowship 2023 and currently a Research Fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI-UQ) and Life Course Centre (LCC-UQ). I previously held a post-doctoral research fellow position (2019-2022) at the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR). I am a behavioural economist with a strong background in conducting economic, natural experiments (program and policy) and randomised control trial (RCT) evaluations. My research focuses on improving educational and well-being outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (First Nations) students, and I work closely and collaborate with social organisations to achieve these goals.

My research is grounded in prior experience living and working in regional and remote Indigenous communities in Far North Queensland (Aurukun, Cairns and Hope Vale), where I worked as a program designer and coach addressing community-based financial literacy. This gave me first-hand experience of the community strengths but also systemic barriers to health, education and social inclusion faced by First Nations peoples as specified in the Closing the Gap reform targets. This experience shaped my subsequent research agenda. I am applying my training in behavioural economics to improve student learning and redress social inequity. My focus is education as a mechanism to disrupt disadvantage. I apply experimental design methodologies to identify intervention points across the education pathway where support programs can best enable positive education outcomes. I have an 8-year track record of engagements with industry organisations in designing and evaluating education programs to support First Nations students.

These industry engagements have contributed to my receiving the ARC Industry Fellowship that supports successful educational pathways for First Nation students. The fellowship aims to develop strategies to prevent the steep drop in educational outcomes and disengagement of First Nations students as they transition from primary to secondary school. In collaboration with Indigenous communities, Former Origin Greats (FOGS) Achieving Results Through Indigenous Education (ARTIE) Academy and the Queensland Department of Education (DoE), the fellowship seeks to generate effective culturally embedded support strategies to avert this steep drop.

Conjoint Professor Paul Robinson is the Deputy Director of the Children’s Health Environment Program within the Child Health Research Centre (CHRC), and Senior Staff Specialist in Respiratory and Sleep Medicine at the Queensland Children’s Hospital. His research program performs translational research outlining the role of peripheral airway function tests in early lung disease detection and ongoing monitoring of established disease.

He has led the development and standardisation of novel measures of lung function across the entire age range from infancy onwards, facilitating the development of commercial equipment available for widespread use. His research focuses on defining the clinical utility of two specific peripheral airway function tests (Multiple breath washout, MBW, and oscillometry) in important obstructive lung diseases (e.g., asthma, cystic fibrosis, and post bone marrow transplant pulmonary graft vs host disease) and in understanding the impacts of environmental exposures. Structure-function relationships have been explored using state-of-the-art imaging techniques, with the aim of also developing new strategies to reduce any radiation exposure associated with these to advance incorporation into clinical care (e.g., ultra-low dose CT).

These novel lung function tools not only in the hospital setting but also in the school and home setting, enabling the successful development of a parent-supervised remote monitoring strategy for asthma which has been shown to reflect clinically meaningful outcomes missed by conventional approaches. In collaboration with industry, this strategy is now being employed in a series of research projects.

Involvement in longitudinal birth cohorts has outlined the early lung function trajectories in health, and the identification of risk factors affecting normal lung development and contributing to the early development of asthma. Studies investigating environmental health have highlighted the adverse effects of ultrafine particle air pollution.

Professor Robinson’s standing as an international expert, both in terms of clinical and research experience, has led to broader leadership roles across national and international levels.

A/Prof Jennifer Koplin is Group Leader of Childhood Allergy & Epidemiology at the University of Queensland Child Health Research Centre and Principal Research Fellow with the HERA 360-Kids Community Network. She leads the Evidence and Translation Hub of the National Allergy Centre of Excellence (www.nace.org.au) and the Food Allergy Prevention stream of the NHMRC-funded Centre of Research Excellence in Food Allergy (CFAR; www.foodallergyresearch.org.au). From 2019-2022 she was the Director of CFAR and Group Leader of the Population Allergy Research Group at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia.

A/Prof Koplin has over 15 years of research experience in epidemiology and allergy, and has developed an internationally recognised program of research in the epidemiology of childhood food allergy. Her research has explored the prevalence, natural history, causes and consequences of childhood allergic disease. She has led a series of large NHMRC-funded population-based allergy cohort studies including the EarlyNuts study and age 10 follow up of the HealthNuts cohort, collectively involving over 7,000 participants. She is also a co-investigator on the SchoolNuts and MACS studies as well as several food allergy prevention RCTs (VITALITY, PrEggNuts, TrEAT and Pebbles), an RCT of food allergy treatment (LMNOP) and collaborates on research exploring immunological mechanisms underlying childhood food allergy and improving food allergy diagnosis.

Her recent research focused on using population-based studies to inform the design and implementation of prevention interventions and determine their effectiveness in reducing allergy prevalence at the population level. She also has a strong research interest in the role of infant feeding in allergy prevention and contributed to the development of new Australian and international guidelines on infant feeding for preventing food allergy. In 2018, she received a National Health and Medical Research Council project grant to conduct the first study internationally to measure the impact of these guidelines on infant feeding practices and the population prevalence of peanut allergy.

A/Prof Koplin has been awarded over $20 million in competitive research funding as chief investigator, including 6 NHMRC project grants, 2 consecutive NHMRC fellowships and a Centre of Research Excellence. She has authored more than 150 peer reviewed journal articles with >4,500 citations and is on the editorial board of the international Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice.

Zephanie is a Senior Research Fellow and occupational therapist based at the Child Health Research Centre, and a member of the management team of the Centre for Children’s Burns and Trauma Research, Brisbane. She has a clinical background specialising in paediatrics and burn care. She has worked clinically and in management positions at Royal Children’s Hospital, Brisbane, in private practice and in research capacity building positions in hospitals and health services.

Since 2013 Zephanie’s research has focussed on developing and validating patient-reported outcome measures, as well as using these measures therapeutically for clinical decision making. She led the development of four versions of the Brisbane Burn Scar Impact Profile which have been translated into Czech and are undergoing cross-cultural validation for Brazilian Portuguese. She has a vision of providing all children and their caregivers with an opportunity to communicate their needs and priorities during treatment in a paediatric hospital or health service.

Her current program of work includes collaborative work with children, their caregivers and health professionals to co-design and test the effectiveness and implementation of technology-based interventions in clinical settings to improve quality of life. These interventions include a web-based intervention for paediatric health professionals to support the psychosocial health of families with a child who has experienced physical trauma, and an electronic intervention for children with skin conditions and their caregivers that provides feedback about the patient's health-related quality of life to health professionals. Zephanie also has a continued interest in investigating the effectiveness and implementation of novel interventions to prevent or improve the impact of skin conditions in children and their families. This includes the use of ablative fractional CO2 laser, medical needling, pressure garment and silicone therapy, medical hypnosis and interventions to promote adherence and reduce the burden of treatment.