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Dr Kirat Chand is a Research Fellow at the Perinatal Research Centre at The University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research (UQCCR). His field of expertise include the establishment of synaptic connections, neurodevelopment and cellular changes associated with injury in the neonatal brain. His current work investigates the evolution of brain injury in fetal growth restricted newborns (FGR) with a particular interest in understanding mechanisms to develop better detection and treatment strategies for FGR newborns. FGR is the second leading cause of perinatal morbidity and mortality, with around 32 million babies born FGR globally each year. FGR is commonly caused by placental insufficiency, resulting in an inadequate supply of oxygen and nutrients to the foetus. The brain is particularly vulnerable to FGR conditions and adverse outcomes in these children range from mild learning difficulties, to neurobehavioral issues, and in some cases cerebral palsy. Currently there are no interventions available to protect the FGR brain. Using the pre-clinical pig model of FGR, we are able to examine perturbations to white and grey matter regions of the newborn brain, with the aim of developing appropriate therapeutic strategies to aid this vulnerable population.

• My academic qualifications include a PhD in Neurosciences, an MSc in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and a Bachelor of Medicine.
• I have initiated and managed multiple projects to develop novel therapeutics for neurological disorders, including: 1) Developing a nanoparticle-based siRNA delivery system for the treatment of Huntington’s disease (ARC project; as Postdoctoral Research Fellow). 2) Examining the treatment effects of intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) on epilepsy (Advance Queensland Women’s Academic Fund; as Sole Investigator). 2) Examining the effectiveness of three neuroinflammation modulatory agents on traumatic brain injury and epilepsy through randomised controlled preclinical trials (Seed projects sponsored by industry partners: VivaZome Therapeutics, Implicit Bioscience, and Innate Immunotherapeutics; as Co-investigator). 3) Developing treatment strategies to prevent the development of epilepsy after severe traumatic brain injury and identifying medical imaging biomarkers to evaluate the risk of epilepsy post-injury (two U.S. Department of Defense, Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs; as Co-investigator). 4) Developing exosomal therapy for traumatic brain injury (Cooperative Research Centres Projects (CRC-P) Grant with two research groups from academic institutions and three pharmaceutical companies; as Principal Investigator).

Dr Kai-Hsiang Chuang received his Ph.D. degree in electrical and biomedical engineering from the National Taiwan University, Taiwan, in 2001. During his graduate study, he developed methods for improving the detection of brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He undertook postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health, USA, from 2003 to 2007, where he focused on understanding brain connectivity using novel functional and molecular imaging. He developed manganese-enhanced MRI for high-resolution imaging functional neural pathways in the rodent brain and cerebral blood flow imaging for mapping the resting-state network of the human brain. He joined the Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore, in 2008 as the head of MRI Group in the Singapore Bioimaging Consortium (a national research institute). He established the first preclinical imaging facility in Singapore and facilitated research collaboration across academia, clinic and industry. His lab pioneered functional connectivity imaging of the rodent brain to understand the neural basis and function of resting-state brain network, and the development and application of MRI biomarkers for treatment development. In late 2015, he moved to the University of Queensland, Australia, as an Associate Professor with the Queensland Brain Institute and the Centre for Advanced Imaging. His current research focuses on understanding the structure and function of brain network that underlies cognition and behavior, such as learning, memory and dementia. He is developing multimodal techniques, including fMRI, calcium recording, electrophysiology and optogenetic/chemogenetic neuromodulation, to test hypothesis in transgenic mouse models and then translating to humans to improve the diagnosis and intervention of disorders. The imaging and analysis techniques he developed have been widely used in the research community and some in clinical trials. He is serving on the editorial boards of Frontiers in Neuroscience: Brain Imaging Methods, Imaging Neuroscience and Scientific Reports.

Brett Collins is an NHMRC Career Development Fellow and head of the Molecular Trafficking Lab at UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience. He was a lead investigator in the seminal structural studies of AP2, the protein adaptor molecule central to clathrin-mediated endocytosis, and has since defined the molecular basis for the function of critical proteins regulating membrane trafficking and signalling at the endosome organelle. His team is now focused on understanding how discrete molecular interactions between proteins and lipids control these processes in human cells.

Associate Professor Collins was awarded his PhD in 2001 and has published over 75 papers including in Cell, Nature, Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, Developmental Cell, and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, altogether cited more than 3100 times. He is the recipient of 3 prestigious fellowships, including a previous Career Development Award from the National Health and Medical Research Council and a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council, and was awarded the University of Queensland Research Excellence Award in 2008. In 2015 he was awarded the Emerging Leader Award of the ANZSCDB and in 2016 the Merck Research Medal from the ASBMB. He is currently the President of the Queensland Protein Group.

A well-presented, self-motivated and professional MSc graduate in sport sciences with a strong passion for human sensorimotor control and kinesiology of musculoskeletal system. Samuele conducted research about neurological impairments of upper limb sensorimotor control, together with investigations of sport/rehab exercise biomechanics. His current research is focusing on context-dependent modulation of rapid visuomotor responses of plausible subcortical origin. His research has showed that there are meaningful subcortical contributions to human reaching behavior.

Professor David Copland is a Speech Pathologist conducting research in the areas of aphasia, language neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and neuroimaging of normal and disordered language. He is Director of the Queensland Aphasia Research Centre (https://shrs.uq.edu.au/qarc), Co-Director of the STARS Education Research Alliance (https://metronorth.health.qld.gov.au/stars/education-research-alliance), Co-Director of the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Aphasia Rehabilitation and Recovery (https://www.latrobe.edu.au/research/centres/health/aphasia) and Deputy Chair of the Research and Postgraduate Studies Committee of the UQ School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences.

Professor Elizabeth (Lizzie) Coulson did her undergraduate Honours degree at the University of Melbourne, majoring in Genetics and Biochemistry. Her PhD (1997) in the Department of Pathology, University of Melbourne, with Professor Colin Masters, was on the normal function of the amyloid precursor protein of Alzheimer’s disease. Following a year at the ZMBH, University of Heidelberg, Germany, she pursued postdoctoral work studying neuronal cell death in neurodegeneration and development at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute with Professor Perry Bartlett before being recruited in 2003 to the University of Queensland as a founding member of the Queensland Brain Institute. She was appointed Professor in 2015, joining the School of Biomedical Sciences and becoming Deputy Head of School in 2016/7 and 2019 and Head of School in 2020. She maintains a 20% Queensland Brain Institutes appointment and is a member of the Clem Jones Centre for Ageing Dementia Research.

Her Lab webpage is: Coulson Lab - Neurotrophin - School of Biomedical Sciences ...

Dr Gary Cowin is the Facility Fellow for the Queensland Node of the National Imaging Facility (NIF) as part of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme (NCRIS), based at the Centre for Advanced Imaging, The University of Queensland.

Dr Cowin's research projects are:

• Ultrahigh field magnetic resonance microimaging
• Simultaneous dynamic MRI and PET imaging
• Multimodal MRI/PET/CT imaging
• Development of magnetic resonance techniques for non-invasive determination of liver steatosis and fibrosis
• Monitoring changing fat distribution in diabetes and exercise trials
• Spinal cord imaging research
• Prostate research
• Application of ultrahigh field MRI microimaging for tissue analysis
• Molecular imaging of novel contrast agents by MRI and PET
• MRI zebrafish brain atlas
• Lung imaging with hyperpolarized Helium in humans and animals
• Investigation of the effect of gradient non-linearity on image quality

David Craik (AO, FRS, FAA) is in the Centre for Chemistry and Drug Discovery at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland, Australia. He discovered the cyclotide family of circular proteins and has characterized the structures of many animal toxins including conotoxins from cone snail venoms. He heads a research team of 35 researchers whose current work focuses on applications of circular proteins, drugs in plants, toxins and NMR in drug design.

He is author of over 810 scientific papers, including 14 in Nature publications (Nature/Nature Communications/Nature Neuoroscience/Nature Structural Biology/Nature Chemical Biology/Nature Chemistry/Scientific Reports/Nature Protocols, 1 in Science, 12 in PNAS, 9 in JACS, 3 in Chemical Reviews, and 16 in Angewandte Chemie. He has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, appointed as an Officer (AO) of the Order of Australia and has received numerous awards for his research, including the Ralph F. Hirschmann Award from the American Chemical Society (2011), Ramaciotti Medal for Excellence in Biomedical Research (2014), GlaxoSmithKline Award for Research Excellence (2014), the Vincent du Vigneaud Award from the American Peptide Society (2015),the FAOBMB Award for Research Excellence (2015) and the Cathay Award from the Chinese Peptide Society (2018). He received the Australian Academy of Science David Craig Medal in 2023. He is an Honorary Professor of Jinan University, Guangzhou and has an Honorary Doctorate from Kalmar University in Sweden.

Biography

David Craik obtained his PhD in organic chemistry from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia and undertook postdoctoral studies at Florida State and Syracuse Universities before taking up a lectureship at the Victorian College of Pharmacy in 1983. He was appointed Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Head of School in 1988. He moved to University of Queensland in 1995 to set up a new biomolecular NMR, held an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow (2015-2020) and is currently a NHMRC Fellow, as well as Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Peptide and Protein Science.

Key Discoveries

David Craik has made discoveries of new classes of proteins, generated new knowledge on their structure and function, and used this information to design and chemically re-engineer new classes of protein-based drug leads and agricultural pest control agents. In particular, his major achievements are:

• the discovery of cyclotides, the largest known family of circular proteins. As well as a circular backbone, cyclotides contain a knotted arrangement of cross-linking disulfide bonds, making them remarkably stable. His discovery of these proteins was sparked in part from anecdotal reports of medicinal practices in Africa where women make a tea from the plant Oldenlandia affinis by boiling it in water and sipping it during labour to accelerate child birth. He determined the structure of the bioactive component of this medicinal tea and found that it had an unprecedented head-to-tail cyclic peptide backbone combined with a cystine knot.
• the first structural and functional characterizations of prototypic circular proteins in higher organisms - Professor Craik was one of the first to recognize that other families of ribosomally synthesized cyclic peptides exist. As examples from bacteria and animals emerged, Professor Craik was at the forefront of their structural characterization, reporting the first structures of theta-defensins from animals and the threaded lasso peptide microcin J25 from bacteria, as well as new examples of cyclic peptides from plants.
• the development of artificially cyclized peptide toxins as drug leads – he developed an orally active peptide that is 100 times more potent than the leading clinically used drug for neuropathic pain.

Research Training

Professor Craik has trained more than 70 PhD students. He was awarded UQ’s Research Supervision Excellence Award in 2007 on the basis of his mentoring and innovations in postgraduate training, including his “writing retreats” to mentor students and postdocs on science writing skills. He received the Institute for Molecular Bioscience Individual Leadership Award in 2019. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Kalmar University, Sweden for his contributions to international student exchange programs, and is an Honorary Professor of Jinan University, Guangzhou.

Professional Activities

Professor Craik founded and chaired the 1st, 2nd and 3rd International Conferences on Circular Proteins (2009, 2012 and 2015) and was on the Scientific Program Committee for ISMAR 2021. He is on the Boards of six international journals, including Angewandte Chemie, ACS Chemical Biology, Chemical Biology and Drug Design, and ChemBioChem. He was on the Council of the American Peptide Society (2015-2021). He was the director two Brisbane-based biotech companies. He is on the Scientific Advisory Boards of James Cook University’s Centre for Biodiscovery and Molecular Development of Therapeutics (BMDT), the University of Wollongong’s Illawara Health and Medical Research Institute (IHMRI) and Enzytag. He conceived and supports two publicly accessible databases - Cybase on circular proteins (www.cybase.org.au), and conotoxins (www.conoserver.org).

Peter Csurhes is an immunologist with a strong research track record in multiple sclerosis (MS) research within UQ that has spanned 30 years.

Together with Emeritus Professor Michael Pender, Peter’s work in a number of preclinical research studies into the role that immunity to Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) plays in MS disease pathogenesis has translated to clinical trials testing of potentially ground-breaking new T cell immunotherapeutic treatments for progressive MS. Collaborative links between QIMR Berghofer, Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital and commercial partners have been established and clinical trials are ongoing.

After the retirement of Professor Pender, Peter has taken on a chief investigator role, and in 2023 gained successful NHMRC MRFF funding to continue research into the biology of the Epstein-Barr virus and the role it plays in the multiple sclerosis disease process.

Peter has also been involved in studying the role of reactivity to autoantigens in MS and in diseases of the peripheral nervous system including Guillain-Barre syndrome and CIDP.

For several years he worked on the immunology of potential malaria vaccine candidates and also worked part-time for 18 months on research into EBV-related cancers within the QIMR-Berghofer Medical Research Institute.

Dr Carlie Cullen leads the Glial Neurobiology, Cognition and Behaviour Research Group at Mater Research and is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research, University of Tasmania. Her research vision is to understand the neurobiological mechanisms that drive healthy brain function, and what happens when the system goes awry, to inform the development of sustained and effective treatments for neurodevelopmental, neurological, and neuropsychiatric disorders. More specifically, Carlie and her team are working to demonstrate the importance of myelin formation during brain development and ongoing adaptability of myelin content in shaping the way information is processed in the brain, and subsequently how this impacts behavioural actions throughout life. By uncovering how myelination and myelin plasticity influences brain function and behaviour, Carlie hopes to determine whether these processes could be targeted to treat the pathological symptoms of neurodevelopmental disorders, neuropsychiatric disease, and other neurological conditions.

Dr Cullen attained her PhD from The University of Queensland in 2014, under the supervision of Professor Karen Moritz, Associate Professor Nickolas Lavidis and Associate Professor Thomas Burne, where she used rodent models to demonstrate that chronic exposure to even a small amount of alcohol during gestation was associated with long-lasting anxiety-like behaviour in adult offspring. Carlie then joined the laboratory of Prof. Kaylene Young at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research, University of Tasmania where she developed a passion for understanding how glial cells influence healthy brain function, cognition and behaviour. In particular, her research focussed on understanding how cells of the oligodendrocyte lineage communicate with neurons; how this communication influences learning, memory and motor behaviour and whether this interaction could be targeted to promote brain repair in diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS).

My research focuses on Action and Attention in the human brain, examining neural activity underlying the preparation for voluntary movement and the recognition of others' actions

I am a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the School of Psychology, University of Queensland. My major research interests include understanding the brain processes involved in attention and the preparation and readiness for voluntary action, the "mirror neuron" system and how we perceive and understand the actions of others.

I am an endorsed Clinical and Health Psychologist, and my main area of research interest is in optimising non-pharmacological treatment options for chronic pain. My program of research is primarily focused on implementing randomised controlled trials designed to evaluate the efficacy and mechanisms of cognitive-behavioural and mindfulness-based interventions for heterogeneous chronic pain conditions. My concurrent line of research aims to further our understanding of the experience of chronic pain via converging methodologies (including experimental pain paradigms and electroencephalogram), as well as advance our capacity to accurately assess its multidimensional nature. I have led the development, application, and evaluation of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for chronic pain, and I disseminated this treatment approach for research and clinical use via my sole-authored book, published by Wiley in 2017. My US-based collaborators and I have a number of on-going NIH and foundation funded treatment trials underway at the University of Washington, Seattle. I am also an Affiliate Associate Professor at the University of Washington.

As of 2021, I was elected the inaugural Chairperson of the Australian SHAPE Futures EMCR Network, which is in development with the support of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences. The purpose of the Network is to ensure SHAPE disciplines (Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and Environment) thrive and excel in Australia, by fostering an inclusive and diverse community that supports, empowers and promotes early and mid-career researchers (EMCRs) in Australia, within and beyond academia.

Professor Nadeeka Dissanayaka is a UQ Amplify Professorial Research Fellow. She is founder and director of the Dementia & Neuro Mental Health Research Unit at the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research. She is also the director of the UQ Dementia Friendly University Initiative. Her expertise include multidisciplinary areas ranging from basic science (eg: pharmacology, genetics, cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging) to clinical science and medicine (eg: psychology, psychiatry, neurology, clinical trials and implementation science).

Ageing, Mental Health, and Neurodegenerative diseases such as Dementia and Parkinson's disease are key areas of Prof. Dissanayaka's research. Her primary research themes include:

1. Evaluation and Treatment of Behavioural and Psychological Symptoms in Dementia (BPSD), with a special focus on anxiety and depression.

2. Development of a Mental Health Benchmarking Industry Specific Tool for Residential Aged Care (MHICare Project)

3. Pychotherapeutic Interventions including artificial intelligence, virtual reality and telehealth guided by biofeedback systems for persons with cognitive impairment and Parkinson's disease

4. Neuropsychiatric Manifestations in Parkinson's disease including anxiety, depression, cognitive dysfunction, sleep and impulse control disorders.

5. Neurobiological Underpinnings of Cognitive and Emotional Impairment in Dementia and Parkinson's disease (neuroimaging studies) and drug repurposing.

Emmah is an experienced occupational therapist and researcher in the field of brain injury rehabilitation. Emmah's PhD, completed in 2010, compared the effectiveness of an outpatient brain injury rehabilitation program in home and hospital settings.

Research Interests

Emmah has conducted collaborative research in the field of neurorehabilitation, partnering with consumers and clinicians to develop and trial rehabilitation approaches to enhance person-centred care, goal setting and cognitive rehabilitation. Other research interest areas include metacognitive and occupation-based treatment approaches, the use of technology in rehabilitation, outcome measurement, and community-based rehabilitation.

Research Expertise

Emmah has conducted research using quantitative and qualitative methodologies including randomised controlled trials and single case experimental design. Emmah has an interest in knowledge translation, has conducted implementation research using a range of implementation frameworks, and codesigned with end-users including consumers and clinicians.

Prof Darryl Eyles is the head of the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research Developmental Neurobiology laboratory. One of Darryl’s research directions is focused on how known risk-factors for schizophrenia change the way the brain develops. His group have established the biological plausibility of various epidemiological risk factors for this disease including developmental vitamin D deficiency, prenatal hypoxia and maternal immune activation. Strikingly all these exposures affect the early development and later differentiation of early dopamine neurons. A second major focus is on understanding the effects of increased dopamine release in selective circuits and how this may be causal in schizophrenia. A third major interest is in factors such as the gut microbiome, and how increased testosterone contribute to altered brain function related to autism.