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Nikky specialises in occupational health and safety research for the mining industry. She is currently working on characterisation of dust exposures in the mining and engineered stone work industries and its relation to occupational lung dieseases.

Nikky is a driven researcher with 18 years of experience in mining engineering with a focus on occupational health and safety research. Her research interests include respirable dust, real-time monitoring, accident and injury data analysis, emergency management and self-escape. She has underground and surface coal experience having worked in Australia, North & South America with a focus on strategic planning, project management and mine planning.

Research Interests

>Management of Particulates in the Resources Sector

Strategically assessing knowledge gaps in the understanding of particulates including inspirable dusts, respirable dusts, fine particles (including diesel emissions) and ultrafine particles and the growing awareness of the contribution of silica to respiratory disease. Establishing the current state of knowledge, gaps, and future opportunities for human exposure and health, monitoring, control effectiveness, non-coal mining, diesel particulate matter, and cumulative impacts. Trialling and comparative testing of gravimetric and real-time respirable dust monitoring technologies.

>Incident Management

Improving incident management practices by conducting Queensland Level 1 Emergency exercises and assessing the actions of the mines incident management team. Reviewing previous Level 1 exercise report recommendations and collating key themes to produce a best practices guide for industry. Aligning emergency management systems across all Queensland underground coal mines including escapeway markings, non-verbal communications, lifeline and hard hat colours. Establishing design criteria for built-in-place emergency shelters in underground mines.

>Injury Analysis and Accident Investigation

Reviewing and analysing fatality, high potential incident, serious accident and lost time injury data. Recoding data and creating a new injury classification taxonomy better suited to mining industry conditions to convey the trends in the data. Identifying organisational factors contributing to fatalities and high potential incidents. Reviewing occupational health statistics and disease surveillance systems with particular interest in relation to geographical distribution of disease prevalence.

Qualifications

>Bachelor of Science, Mining & Minerals Engineering, Virginia Tech

>Masters of Business Administration, Finance, University of Alabama Birmingham

>Registered Professional Engineer Queensland

>Chartered Professional AusIMM

Professor Marguerite La Caze’s research interests include: European philosophy, feminist philosophy, moral psychology, especially the emotions, and aesthetics, including philosophy and film.

Professor La Caze holds a BA (UQ); MA (Melbourne); and PhD (UQ), and is an Australian Research Fellow 2003-2007. She held an ARC Discovery Grant 2015-2018 on ‘Ethical Restoration After Oppressive Violence: A Philosophical Account’ and was a visiting Fellow at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland in 2022.

Her current research projects include:

• Film philosophy and everyday resistance
• Ontologies of force: Violence, non-violence, and resistance
• Conscientious objection in Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life
• European political cinema
• Finitude in Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death and Mia Hansen-Love's One Fine Morning

Marguerite has successfully supervised 30 PhD and Master’s students on a wide range of topics and is currently supervising students on projects including analogy and philosophical reasoning, authenticity and politics, on the work of Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir on political judgment, on the emotion of shame, on non-violence and resistance in Australian and Indian texts, on the work of Monique Wittig, critical phenomenology and abortion.

Dr. Larisa Labzin studies how our innate immune system detects viral infections and how it decodes different signals to mount an appropriate immune response. Dr. Labzin's interest in innate immunity started during her honours training with Prof. Matt Sweet at the IMB, looking at how inflammatory signalling is regulated in macrophages. After gaining more experience while working as a research assistant for Prof. Sweet, she moved to Germany to the University of Bonn for her PhD. At the Univeristy of Bonn, Dr. Labzin investigated the anti-inflammatory effects of High-Density Lipoprotein with Prof. Eicke Latz. Here she discovered novel regulatory pathways that control inflammation. Dr. Labzin then moved to Cambridge, UK as an EMBO postdoctoral fellow to work with Dr. Leo James at the Medical Research Council Laboratory for Molecular Biology. In Dr. James' lab Dr. Labzin focused on how viruses are sensed by the innate immune system to trigger inflammation. In particular, Dr Labzin investigated how antibodies change the way viruses trigger inflammation. While in Cambridge, Dr. Labzin was awarded an NHMRC CJ Martin Fellowship to return to Australia. Larisa returned to the IMB in September 2019 to work with Prof. Kate Schroder. Dr. Labzin is an IMB Fellow and leads an independent research team studying inflammation in response to influenza and SARS-CoV-2.

I was born in Argentina and found an early passion for mathematics as a high school student by participating in the Math and Programming Olympiads. I obtained an undergraduate degree from La Plata University in 2009, and a PhD in mathematics from Cordoba University under the supervision of Prof. Jorge Lauret in 2013. After that I was a postdoc in the Differential Geometry group at the University of Münster in Germany (first as a Humboldt fellow, and then as Prof. Wilking's assistant). I also spent three months at MSRI in Berkeley, California during 2016. Since mid 2018, I am a Lecturer at the School of Maths and Physics in UQ.

Dr Melissa Lai is a Neonatologist at the Grantley Stable Neonatal Unit, Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, and serves as co-chair of the RBWH Neonatal Research Group. She is the site lead for a dynamic set of clinical trials and quality improvement projects, and helps to build research capacity and collaboration across institutions. Awarded in 2021, Dr Lai's PhD investigated the neurodevelopmental effects of infant massage in premature infants with a primary outcome measuring neonatal EEG power. Other clinical areas of interest include data management, clinician performed ultrasound and retrieval coordination. She is currently building an innovative body of work related to improving and supporting the provision of mother's own milk, and introducing new technologies into the neonatal intensive care environment.

Dr. Andrew Lai is a leading biotechnologist and translational researcher, specialising in the role of extracellular vesicles (EVs) in gynaecological cancers and reproductive diseases. His research focuses on developing innovative EV isolation methods and characterising EV cargo to discover biomarkers with potential clinical applications.

His work has directly influenced the development of an early-detection test for ovarian cancer, OCRF-7, which is currently being validated for clinical use. His expertise in mass spectrometry-based proteomics has been instrumental in advancing the understanding of EV roles in cancer progression and treatment resistance.

Sunil Lakhani is Executive Director Research and Senior Staff Specialist, Pathology Queensland, and Head of the Molecular Breast Group at the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research (UQCCR) at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital.

Prior to his move to Australia in 2004, he was Professor of Breast Pathology at The Institute of Cancer Research and The Royal Marsden Hospital, London, UK

His current research interests include lobular carcinoma and its variants, normal and stem cells, tumours with a basal phenotype, familial breast cancer and biology and therapeutic development for brain and distant metastases.

He was series editor for the 4th Edition WHO Tumour Classification Books and volume editor for the 4th Ed WHO Classification of Tumours of the Breast (2012). He is currently Standing member of the Board for the 5th Ed WHO Tumour Classification Books. He is also on the editorial board of a number of pathology and experimental research journals.

Ratilal Lalloo is an Associate Professor, Teaching and Research, in the School of Dentistry, University of Queensland (2016 - ); and was the Teaching & Learning Director (2020 - 2024) and Higher Degree Research Director (2016 - 2019). He was an Adjunct Professor in the Australian Research Centre for Population Oral Health (ARCPOH), University of Adelaide. He held an academic title of Professor in the School of Dentistry and Oral Health, Griffith University from 2014-2019. He is a dental public specialist, with an undergraduate degree in dentistry (1986), honours degree in Epidemiology (1992), Masters degree in Community Dentistry (1994) and PhD in Dental Public Health from the University College London (2002). After almost 20 years as a dental academic in South Africa he took up the position of Colgate Chair & Professor: Rural, Remote and Indigenous Oral Health, in the School of Dentistry & Oral Health, Griffith University, for 5-years from January 2009. He was then a Senior Research Fellow at ARCPOH for a year (2014-2015). He was an Associate Professor, on a short contract position, in the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Sydney (2015). He has been involved in the training of under- and post-graduate dental students, dental public health related research and various management roles. He has published widely and his main research interests vary across many dental public health issues including evidence-based dentistry, oral health-related quality of life and health inequalities.

Yasmine Lam is a researcher within the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation at the University of Queensland. Her main areas of interest are using biotehnological tools like gene editing to dissect key traits of interest in cereals to further understand the molecular mechanisms that underpin phenotypes. Currently, her main focus is dissecting various components of plant architecture using CRISPR and a holistic phenotyping approach to further disseminate the influences these genes can have for future trait improvement in key cereal crops. Additionally, she endeavours to form more integrative approaches to crop improvement by looking at ways to integrate biotechnological and molecular techniques to improve current breeding technologies.

A life-long fascination in sciences provided me with the inspiration to graduate in exercise physiology (University of Sherbrooke, Canada, 2004), complete a PhD in physiology/biophysics (University of Sherbrooke, 2009) and continue in my current role as a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Biomedical Sciences (SBMS) of The University of Queensland. I am a physiologist first and foremost with a particular interest in understanding how skeletal muscle cell normally functions so as to try and elucidate what changes or factors contribute to various forms of muscle weakness with ageing, inactivity or various chronic diseases.

During my previous postdoctoral appointment at La Trobe University (Melbourne, 2010-2017), I have gained considerable experience using the "mechanically skinned muscle fibre" technique in animal muscle. Importantly, I have developed this technique for the first time in human muscle which allows the exciting opportunity to investigate cellular mechanisms of muscle weakness in different clinical population. This is vitally important since most of our existing knowledge on muscle function comes from studies on muscles obtained from animal models. This technical breakthrough has been recognized by editorials of different leading scientific journals in the field of Physiology. I’m now a world recognized expert of this technique which has immense potential for examining any number of physiological questions and even allows for biochemical analyses of any protein of interest in the same cell.