Find an expert

Professor Bowen is recognised both nationally and internationally for research at the interface of nanotechnology and quantum science; including bioimaging, nanophotonics, nanomechanics, quantum optomechanics and photonic/quantum sensing. He is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Physics, is Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Quantum Biotechnology, and leads the Quantum Optics Laboratory at UQ.

The research in Professor Bowen's lab spans from the very fundamental, e.g. how does quantum physics transition into our everyday world at large scales?, to applied, e.g. developing next generation sensors for medical diagnostics and navigation. To pursue this research, his lab works in close partnership with industry and uses state-of-the-art facilities for nanofabrication, nanoanalysis, precision optical measurement and deep cryogenic refrigeration available in-house or on campus at UQ.

Professor Bowen has supervised more than thirty postgraduate students, who have been recognised with prizes such as Fulbright Scholarships, an Australian Youth Science Ambassadorship, a Springer PhD theses prize, the Queensland nomination for the Australian Institute of Physics Bragg Medal, the Australian Optical Society Postgraduate Student Prize and UQ Graduate of the Year. He regularly has projects available, both for postgraduate students and for postdoctoral researchers. Please check his website, above, or contact him directly for details (w.bowen@uq.edu.au).

Research in the Bredy laboratory is aimed at elucidating how the genome is connected to the environment through epigenetic modifications, and how this relationship shapes brain and behaviour throughout life. The group is particularly interested in how epigenetic mechanisms, including DNA methylation, histone modifications. the activity of non-coding RNAs, and RNA modification regulate the formation and maintenance of associative fear-related memory.

Paul Dennis leads an exciting research group that applies cutting-edge technologies to understand the roles of microorganisms and their responses to environmental change.

He is also a passionate educator and public speaker who advocates for the importance of biological diversity and evidence-based environmental awareness. He has talked about his research on ABC Radio and a range of other media outlets.

His teaching covers aspects of ecology, microbiology, plant and soil science, and climatology. He considers these topics to be of fundamental importance for the development of more sustainable societies and takes pride in helping others to obtain the knowledge and skills they need to build a better future.

Paul's research has taken him to Antarctica, the Amazon Rainforest, high mountains and oceans. The approaches used in his lab draw on a wide range of expertise in molecular biology, ecology, statistics, computer science, advanced imaging and soil science. He applies these skills to a wide-range of topics and systems including plant-microbe interactions, Antarctic marine and terrestrial ecology, biogeography, pollution and human health.

Professor Peter Gray is a pioneer of biotechnology research and development in Australia. In 2003 he was appointed AIBN’s inaugural Director and has since overseen the institute’s growth to 450 people and an annual turnover of $40million. Before joining AIBN, he was Professor and Head of Biotechnology at UNSW.

Professor Gray has held academic positions at University College London and the University of California, Berkeley. He has had commercial experience in the US, working for Eli Lilly and Co and the Cetus Corporation. His research collaborations include groups at Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

He serves on several boards and government committees. He is on the board of Engineering Conferences International, New York, a group that runs global, multi-disciplinary engineering conferences, many of which have played key roles in developing emerging industry sectors. The conferences include cell culture engineering; vaccine technology; and scale-up and manufacturing of cell-based therapies. Professor Gray also serves on the board of Biopharmaceuticals Australia Pty Ltd, the company established to build a GMP grade biopharmaceuticals manufacturing facility in Brisbane, and has been heavily involved in negotiations that led to DSM Biologics becoming the facility’s operator.

Professor Gray is a Fellow and Vice-President of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He has chaired, served on organising committees for, and given plenary and keynote addresses at many key international conferences. In 2006 he attracted to Sydney and chaired the International Biotechnology Symposium – the first time a conference in the four-yearly series was held in the southern hemisphere. Professor Gray is a founder and past president of the Australian Biotechnology Association (Ausbiotech).

Professor Gray has graduated more than 60 PhD students from his research group, in fields including secondary metabolite bioprocesses; bioconversion of cellulosic substrates; mammalian cell expression of complex proteins; nanoparticles for drug delivery; and the development of stem-cell based bioprocesses. He has twice been listed by Engineers Australia among the top 100 most influential engineers in Australia, and in 2001 was awarded the Australian Government’s Centenary Medal.

Dr. Wenyi Gu’s early education was conducted in China which include his undergraduate and master’s degrees in veterinary medicine. In 1996, he migrated to Australia and pursued his PhD study in biochemistry & molecular biology at the Australian National University (ANU). After a short period of work at John Curtin Medical School ANU as a junior scientist, he moved to Brisbane in 2001 for his post-doc at the University of Queensland and currently a post-doctoral research fellow at AIBN. He held a Peter Doherty Fellowship (2006-2009) and was further supported by NHMRC to spend 7 months at Harvard University as a visiting fellow in 2008. Since his post-doctoral research he has been working in the area of using RNAi to treat viral diseases and cancers. He also has a strong background in immunology and vaccine development.

I lead a research program with extensive expertise in immunology, particularly in natural killer (NK) cells, focused on developing innovative approaches for treating hard-to-cure diseases like metastatic cancers. Our mission is to improve patient outcomes and extend lives. My research group is based at the Translational Research Institute (TRI).

My dedication to my field has been recognized through numerous peer-reviwed grants as sole-CI or CIA/Principal Investigator, including a NHMRC ECF Peter Doherty Fellowship, an NHMRC Project Grant, an US DoD, a MRFF EMCR among others. Since 2009, I've amassed an impressive portfolio of 96 publications in renowned journals like Blood, Cell Death Dis, JEM, PNAS, Nat Comms, and Nat Immunol with an H-index = 40. My body of work and contributions have been acknowledged with awards such as the 2019 Researcher of the Year by CCA, 2020 QLD Young Tall Poppy Science, 2020 UQ Frazer Institute's Rising Star, 2022 Frazer Institute's Mentor of the Year, 2023 Translational Research Institute - Connecting with the Clinic among others. Recognized as an international leader in my field, I've been instrumental in identifying novel regulators of our immune functions, and developing NK cell-based immunotherapies.

At present, I am a Group Leader / Principal Research Fellow & Associate Professor with the University of Queensland's Frazer Institute. Here, I lead a high-performing research team with a keen focus on developing and innovating immunotherapy approaches for a spectrum of diseases.

I am a Research Fellow and Leader in Pain Relief Innovation at AIBN, UQ. My research interests sit at the interface of drug delivery and the pain field. My overarching research goal is to improve the quality of day to day life of patients suffering from chronic pain, by applying nanotechnology to the development of novel highly effective pain-killer products for improving chronic pain management. I am looking for highly motivated postgraduate students.

I also enjoy volunteering within the academic community, most notably as Head of the SBMS ECR Committee and Treasurer for The Queensland Chinese Association of Scientists and Engineers (QCASE). I am currently serving as guest editor of Pain Research and Management.and JoVE Methods Collection.

Research Interests

My research is focusing on nano-based drug formulation and development to improve chronic pain management. I have a broad and unique background in both pharmacology and drug delivery systems, with specific expertise in the development of novel drug products and testing their analgesic efficacy and safety including pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies. To date, I have established five different techniques to produce painkiller–loaded nanoparticles and nanofibers aimed at improving pain relief for patients where currently available pain-killers either lack efficacy or produce dose-limiting side-effects. For example, there is a small and very potent peptide that has been on the market as a chemical for over 10 years but which cannot be used as a therapeutic due to its short half-life and poor oral bioavailability. In the form of my nanoparticles, that peptide has the potential to become an oral treatment for improving pain management in patients whose pain is currently poorly alleviated by clinically used pain-killers. I have significant expertise in the use of rodent pain models to assess novel analgesics, and I have received excellent training in conducting research in accordance with the stringent requirements of the Quality Management System (quality accreditations (GLP and ISO17025) from NATA). Together, my knowledge, skills and experience will facilitate the efficient translation of my research from the bench to the clinic.

The current focus of the lab is on the development of drug-products to solve one of the largest unmet medical needs in the pain field through use of sustainable materials. 1) We are developing multifunctional sutures including biodegradable pain relief sutures. 2) We are developing my innovative novel nanoparticles, which deliver innate-immune targeting peptides for the treatment of cancer and cancer-related pain. We are establishing a platform for the development of safe, effective delivery for other small molecule peptide drugs in general to pave their way to clinical trials. 3) Our research also investigates the role of C5a and C3a, estrogen, etc. in the pathogenesis of chronic pain including neuropathic pain, cancer-related pain, low back pain and OA pain.

We work in collaboration with other leading Australian and international researchers to stay at the forefront of the drug delivery systems field and the pain field. We also provide preclinical evaluation of novel compounds and formulations.

Operations Manager - National Biologics Facility

Deputy Director - ARC Training Centre for Biopharmaceutical Innovation

Research Areas: Discovery and engineering of antibodies for diagnostic or therapeutic uses

BScApp (Biotech) Honours Class I (1998) The University of Queensland

PhD (2008) The University of Queensland

Dr. Aleksandr Kakinen is NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, the University of Queensland, Australia. He obtained his Ph.D. degree (2014) at Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, and worked as a postdoctoral fellow (2016–2020) at Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Monash University, Australia. His research interests range from nanomedicine and amyloids diseases to structural biology and nanotoxicology. Dr. Kakinen has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles in high impact factor journals e.g. Chemical Society Reviews, Advanced Materials, Nature Communications, Nano Letters and ACS Nano. In addition to his scientific activities, Aleksandr is also passionate about scientific design and has founded a design studio that specialises in scientific illustrations and biomedical animations.

Dibesh Karmacharya has a Conservation Biology degree from Wayne State College, USA and a PhD on Conservation and Microbiome Genetics from Griffith University, Australia. He worked extensively in the US for Caliper Lifesciences in New Jersey as a research scientist (transgenic animal models). He promoted Genomics and Proteomics technology platforms for GE Healthcare Lifesciences in the US and Canada. He founded the Center for Molecular Dynamics Nepal (CMDN), a wildlife genetics and clinical epidemiology research center and is the Chairman and Executive Director of the Organization. He also founded Intrepid Nepal Pvt. Ltd.-a molecular diagnostics-based Biotechnology Company, and Intrepid Cancer Diagnostics-a leading cancer diagnostic laboratory. He leads several innovative researches in Nepal including building Nepal’s first genetic database of wild tigers through Nepal Tiger Genome Project. He was the Principal Investigator of PREDICT Nepal project-an emerging pandemic threat project. He also founded BIOVAC Nepal Pvt. Ltd. - a vaccine research, development and manufacturing company. He is Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Regional Project Coordinator of Pandemic Prevention Leadership Initiative (PPLI). He specializes in One Health and Conservation Genetics.

Professor Khosrotehrani is a clinical scientist, dermatologist, interested in skin biology, regenerative medicine and skin cancer. He leads the Experimental Dermatology Group at the University of Queensland Diamantina Institute within the Translational Research Institute in Brisbane, Australia. He is also the deputy director of the Australian Skin and Skin Cancer Research Centre in Brisbane. Dr Khosrotehrani obtained his MD from the Cochin-Port Royal School of Medicine at René Descartes University, Paris, France, where he specialized in Dermatology. He is a former graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Institut Pasteur of Paris (Université Paris VI, Pierre et Marie Curie) where he obtained a PhD in Physiology and Physiopathology. He is a fellow of the Australian College of Dermatologists and a practising dermatologist at the Princess Alexandra Hospital, Prince Charles Hospital and the Skin and Cancer Foundation’s Queensland Institute of Dermatology.

During his post-doctoral training at Tufts-New England Medical Center, Boston, USA, Dr. Khosrotehrani helped establish the contribution of fetal stem cells to tissue repair by demonstrating their multipotent capacity with a specific potency towards the endothelial lineage. The originality of this work was acknowledged by the NHMRC through an achievement award (2011) and an NHMRC excellence award (2016). He is currently a fellow of the NHMRC of Australia. The main focus of his laboratory is on regenerative medicine and stem cell biology in particular in injury response in skin wounds and skin cancer and how these responses contribute to cancer initiation and progression. Translating his laboratory findings, Dr Khosrotehrani is leading innovative clinical trials in wound healing, keratinocyte cancers and melanoma.

Dr Kevin M. Koo is currently a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Investigator Fellow and Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia (PCFA) Future Leader Fellow at The University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research (UQCCR). Dr Koo was awarded his PhD (Dean’s Award for Outstanding Thesis) from the Australian Institute for Bioengineering & Nanotechnology (AIBN), UQ in 2018. His PhD research was on the molecular analysis of nucleic acid biomarkers in prostate cancer liquid biopsies (with a particular interest in fusion genes), and the development of associated nanotechnology-based biosensors to facilitate precision cancer treatment.

Post-PhD, he begun a productive postdoctoral career with dual industry/academia appointments: as the Head of Assay Development/Lab Director in XING Technologies Pty Ltd (a Brisbane-based biotech start-up) to undertake product development projects for commercialization of disease in vitro diagnostics, and as an Honorary Fellow/Principal Research Scientist at UQCCR to continue his academic research in precision cancer nanodiagnostics. His research skills and experiences are honed through dedicated career time spent in both academic research and regulated industry environments.

Dr Koo's research encompasses multi-disciplinary fields of molecular biomarker and nanobiosensor development, translation, and commercialization for precision disease management applications. Presently, he is working on the design and development of integrated multi-bioanalyte sensing technologies to resolve the various challenges around holistic disease pathway understanding and clinical biomarker profiling.

Dr Koo's research endeavours have been recognized by a Metrohm Australia-New Zealand Young Chemist Award (2018), Springer Thesis Award (2019) and Queensland Young Tall Poppy Science Award (2023).

Dr Arutha Kulasinghe is a Senior Research Fellow and leads the Clinical-oMx Lab at the University of Queensland. Dr Kulasinghe has pioneered spatial transcriptomics using digital spatial profiling approaches in the Asia-Pacific region, contributing to world-first studies for lung cancer, head and neck cancer, and COVID-19. His research aims to understand the underlying pathobiology by using an integrative multi-omics approach.

Dr Odette Leiter is a postdoctoral research fellow in the research group of Dr Tara Walker, investigating systemic brain rejuvenation. She was awarded a PhD in Neuroscience in 2018 by the Technische Universität Dresden in Germany. Her research focus lies on the regulation of adult hippocampal neurogenesis by physical exercise, a process critically involved in learning and memory.

To support her research at the Queensland Brain Institute, Dr Odette Leiter has received two postdoctoral fellowships, a postdoctoral fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service, followed by a Walter Benjamin Fellowship awarded by the German Research Foundation, allowing her to investigate the role of platelets in mediating neurogenesis-related learning and memory, and the capacity of platelet-released factors to restore cognitive function in ageing. More recently, Dr Leiter has been awarded a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to investigate the precise mechanisms through which platelets interact with adult hippocampal neural stem cells following exercise.

Dr Malcolm Lim is an experienced Cancer Biologist and His research interest spans cancer biology, biomarker discovery and theranostic nanomedicine.

He received his PhD from the University of Queensland (UQ) in 2022. His research, conducted in the labs of Professors Sunil Lakhani and Kristofer Thurecht, involved evaluating the efficacy of using nanomedicine for precision delivery of chemo- or radiotherapeutics against biomarkers in brain metastases. For this work, he developed a clinically-relevant brain metastasis mouse model. His research was recognised with the UQ Dean’s Award for Outstanding Thesis 2022. (DOIs: 10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.3c00558, 10.3791/64216)

Currently, Malcolm serves as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the ARC Research Hub for Advanced Manufacture of Targeted Radiopharmaceuticals (AMTAR) and the Thurecht’s Lab at UQ-Centre for Advanced Imaging (CAI) in Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), where he will apply his multidisciplinary expertise to explore radiobiology and radiation-induced biological responses and to advance targeted pharmaceuticals for challenging cancers.

Prior to joining AMTAR, Malcolm served as a Postdoctoral Researcher where he investigated the molecular mechanisms underlying Early Breast Cancers at the Molecular Breast Pathology Lab, UQ-Centre for Clinical Research, under the mentorship of Professors Sunil Lakhani and Peter Simpson. Before his academic career, Malcolm had five years of experience as a histologist, which provided him with a broad skillset in the field.

Dr Malcolm’s research is well-documented in numerous publications in biomedical research journals despite his career stage, reflecting his passion to advancing cancer research.

Professor Stephen Mahler is a Senior Group Leader at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology and Director of the Australian Research Council Training Centre for Biopharmaceutical Innovation (CBI), University of Queensland. Professor Mahler is a biotechnologist with a focus on R&D of recombinant-DNA derived protein biopharmaceuticals, drug delivery systems and nanomedicines. Professor Mahler has a record of translational research success and engages extensively with industry associated with the biomedical sciences both nationally and internationally.

Research within CBI covers three thematic research areas; discovery of new biopharmaceuticals, engineering cells for production of protein-based biopharmaceuticals and advanced manufacturing for industrial production. A current research interest is at the interface of the life sciences and materials science, using a synthetic biology approach for creating novel therapeutic entities as well as new systems for drug delivery.

Professor Mahler has a strong interest in education and training and was formerly Head of the Chemical and Biological Engineering Plan at the University of Queensland (2010-2016). Other educational initiatives include development of Masters Programs and a Continuing Professional Development program in the area of biopharmaceuticals. The CPD program is available to stakeholders in the industry, both in Australia and internationally.

Dr Mostafa Kamal Masud is a CCQ Next Generation Cancer Research Fellow at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering & Nanotechnology (AIBN), the University of Queensland (UQ). In 2020, he received his PhD in Medical Biotechnology Diagnostics and Nanobiotechnology from AIBN, UQ. He received his MS and B.Sc. (Hons.) in Chemistry from Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST), Sylhet-3114, Bangladesh. After completing his PhD, he was awarded a prestigious JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship (success rate >10%) from Japan and served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Japan's National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS).He recently been awarded a highly prestigious ARC DECRA fellowship for the period 2024-2026 and a QLD Cancer Council fellowship for the period 2024–2028. His research focuses on the development of novel nanostructures and nanodiagnostic technologies to address critical issues in medical diagnosis. As an early career researcher, he has an excellent track record with more than 50 peer-reviewed publications in prestigious and high-impact journals in the area that achieve <2400 citations with an h-index of 26 (Scholar google link: https://bit.ly/2Vtv67l). He has developed new classes of superparamagnetic nanostructures and fabricated novel biosensors for the detection of disease-specific biomolecular targets e.g., for miRNA, DNA, exosome and protein biomarker detection that have proven to be easy and effective, allowing for rapid diagnosis with minimal equipment. He made a major contribution to nanotechnology integrated-analytical and diagnostic fields by providing analytical and technological input as well as developing key collaborations with clinicians and biologists for translational research. His strategy is to create nano-architecture point-of-care diagnostic technology for early diagnosis of cancer that could hopefully lead to a healthy and happier life for humans.