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Dr Nyoman Kurniawan is a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Advanced Imaging and the Facility Manager for Preclincal 16.4T Microimaging 9.4T MRI scanners.

Dr Kurniawan’s research areas are:

• Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging of mouse neuroanatomy, with view to study neurological disease model, including:
  • developmental abnormalities
  • spinal cord diseases
• Development of 3D mouse brain, human spinal cord and cephalopod brain atlases using high resolution structural and diffusion MRI
• Development of MR methods for nephron imaging
• Application of MRI for agriculture imaging

Ella’s research seeks to understand the experiences of people experiencing deep and persistent disadvantage, including those who use and are subjected to domestic violence; those who experience poverty and homelessness; and those who are engaged with statutory child protection services. Although Ella is a qualitative scholar, she collaborates within a multidisciplinary team that leverages both qualitative and quantitative data to form a comprehensive picture of how different forms of disadvantage interact with each other, and with broader social structures and systems. Ella also collaborates and engages deeply with industry partners to ensure that her research and its outcomes align fully with their research and practice needs.

Within this broad picture, Ella’s research aims to develop strategies for overcoming the structural barriers that perpetuate social disadvantage.

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:

• Ontologies of force: Violence, non-violence, and resistance
• European political cinema and democracy
• Finitude in Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death and Mia Hansen-Love's One Fine Morning
• Beauvoir's concepts of independence, freedom, and happiness in Mia Hansen-Love's Things to Come
• Indigenous Australian documentary

Marguerite has successfully supervised more than 30 PhD and Master’s students on a wide range of topics and is currently supervising students on projects including analogy and philosophical reasoning, on women as authentic subjects in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, on non-violence and resistance in Australian and Indian texts, on the work of Monique Wittig, critical phenomenology and abortion, and Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur on forgiveness.

Dr Nikky LaBranche is an occupational health researcher and mining engineer specialising in dust and respiratory health. She leads the Dust and Respiratory Health Program at The University of Queensland’s Sustainable Minerals Institute, managing a $3.6 million portfolio of applied research.

Her work focuses on respirable dust characterisation, exposure assessment, control technologies, and return-to-work strategies for workers affected by lung disease. She has developed advanced methods using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) with automated mineralogy (MLA) and field emission SEM (FEG-SEM) to understand particle size, shape, mineralogy, and agglomeration. This research informs industry, government, and unions on practical measures to prevent occupational lung disease in coal, metal, smelting, and engineered stone industries.

Nikky also brings nearly two decades of broader mining health and safety experience, including:

• Incident management – improving underground coal mine emergency exercises, escape systems, and in-place shelters.

• Injury analysis and accident investigation – developing classification systems for mining incidents and identifying organisational risk factors.

• Occupational health systems – linking exposure and surveillance data to disease outcomes.

An AusIMM Fellow and Chartered Professional, Nikky has been recognised with the 2024 AusIMM Professional Excellence Award in Health & Safety and the 2025 QRC Exceptional Woman in Technological Innovation Award. She is committed to creating safer, healthier, and more sustainable workplaces across the resources sector.

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.

Dr. Liam Lachs is a marine scientist specialising in heatwaves impacts and eco-evolutionary dynamics on coral reef ecosystems. He is working on uncovering the natural capacity for corals to adapt to climate change and how this could support reefs, drawing from the past and present to then project future trajectories under warming and inform the design of effective climate-smart reef management strategies.

Dr. Lachs received his PhD from Newcastle University and was awarded by Science and SciLifeLab for research excellence in combining demography, ecology, evolutionary biology, and climate modelling, to explore marine heatwave impacts at numerous spatial and temporal scales. His works have included fine-tuning global predictions of mass bleaching, testing for historic shifts in coral thermal tolerance, and quantifying the evolutionary potential of corals to answer the long-standing question: can coral adaptation keep pace with ocean warming?

Now, Dr. Lachs is working at The University of Queensland as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the CORALADAPT project, generating some of the fundamental science insights needed to design climate-smart evolution-informed reef management and restoration interventions. He also contributes to the coral heat stress task team of the Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST), the AIMS-led group on Quantitative Genetics for Operationalising Assisted Evolution, the European Marine Board group for Coastal Resilience, and as a scientific advisor to the PICRC project developing a climate-smart framework for coral reef restoration in Palau.

Ramiro grew up in Argentina and found an early passion for mathematics as a high school student by participating in the Maths and Programming Olympiads. He 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, he 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). He also spent three months at MSRI in Berkeley, California, in 2016. Since mid-2018, he has been working at the School of Maths and Physics at 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.