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Shuang is an internationally recognised intercultural communication expert, specialising in the areas of ageing and immigration, acculturation, identity negotiation, and intercultural relations. Her research examines how older people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds build a sense of home as they live and age in a foreign land; how family and community care can be integrated to provide culturally appropriate, accessible and sustainale care for older people; how older people interact with their physical, social, cultural, and digital environments to develop attachment to place; and the consequences of these interactions for well-being. Shuang's work has been published in high-ranking international journals, and two sole authored books: Identity, hybirdity and cultural home (2015; Rowman & Littlefield) and Chinese migrants ageing in a foreign land (2019; Routledge). Her lead-authored textbook, Introducing intercultural communication: Global cultures and contexts, is in its 4th edition, and previous three editions have been adopted in 26 countries across 4 continents, with holdings in libraries of prestigeous institutions including Stanford University, Yale University, University of Oxford, University of Cape Town, and University of Zurich. Shuang is a fellow of the International Academy of Intercultural Research.

Shuang welcomes inquires from prospective Higher Degreee by Research students who are interested in working with her on their theses in any of the related research areas.

Dr Qiao Liu is an Honorary Professor at the TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland and Professor at the School of Law, City University of Hong Kong. His previous posts include Associate Professor at the TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland; Lee Ka Shing Visiting Professor at McGill University Faculty of Law; and specially appointed Tengfei Adjunct Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University School of Law (China).

Professor Liu teaches in and researches a wide range of business-related common law and Chinese law topics including contract, commercial law, unjust enrichment, international commercial law (sale of goods, transfer of funds etc) and financial transactions, with a particular interest in comparative study of Chinese and Anglo-Australian private law. He has published widely in the above areas. His articles have appeared in leading journals including the Modern Law Review, American Journal of Comparative Law and the Cambridge Law Journal. His book entitled “Anticipatory Breach” (Hart Publishing Oxford 2011) is regarded by epic common law courts and top scholars as a leading monograph on an important topic of English contract law. Professor Liu’s works have been cited by epic common law courts including the High Court of Australia, the Singapore Court of Appeal and the New Zealand Court of Appeal as well as by the English High Court and the House of Lords.

Professor Liu has been Founding Deputy Editor-in-Chief for the Chinese Journal of Comparative Law (OUP) since 2013 and has served as its Editor-in-Chief since late 2017. He is also Foreign-related Commercial and Maritime Adjudication Expert at the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing, a United Nations Commission on International Trade Law expert for updating the UNCITRAL Digest of Case Law on the CISG and currently a contributor to Chitty on Contracts: Hong Kong. Professor Liu has won highly prestigious and fiercely competitive grants in Australia, China and elsewhere, and has served as expert witness in law courts in Australia, Singapore and Greater China in a number of international commercial cases and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (CIArb) and a listed arbitrator with the South China International Arbitration Centre (Hong Kong).

Dr Liu is a research fellow with more than 15 years of experience in the field of pharmacometrics. She specialises in population pharmacokinetic modelling and provides popPK analysis and dosing simulation support for various projects in Centre of Research Excellence RESPOND

Dr. Guoquan Liu has more than ten years experience in sorghum tissue culture and genetic transformation. He developed a highly efficient sorghum particle transformation system in 2012. Since then, hundreds of transgenic plants have been regenerated from tens of constructs that are invoved in plant disease resistant genes (e.g. Lr34), report gene (gfp), specific-promoters (e.g. alpha- beta- kafirin, A2, LSG), G proteins etc.. He has trained many students how to transform sorghum including honor students, master students, and PhD students.

He has focused on improving sorghum grain yield and grain quality through biotechnologies including genetic transformation, genome-editing, synthetic biology, and plant apomixis.

Dr. Jiajun Liu is Principal Research Scientist and Science Leader for the Distributed Sensing Systems Group (DSSG) at the CSIRO, and leads the Distributed Intelligence team in the DSSG. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor@UQ. He received his PhD/BEng from the University of Queensland, Australia, and Nanjing University, China, in 2013 and 2006, respectively.

His research interest covers a range of topics in Machine Learning and Data Science, including efficient neural nets, graph learning, and multimedia/multimodal analytics. At CSIRO he is looking into how to make sensing systems more intelligent and efficient, by developing knowledge distillation and efficient neural architectures to enable efficient AI models on edge devices and distributed sensing applications.

He also serves as a reviewer/TPC member/Area Chair for numerous international journals and conferences, such as IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, The VLDB Journal, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Big Data, Clustering Computing, Ad Hoc Networks, Neurocomputing, Multimedia Systems, ACM Multimedia Conference 14' 21', CIKM 21', PAKDD 17~20', APWeb 16', etc.

Bio

Dr. Yang Liu is an evolutionary geneticist, currently working at the University of Queensland (UQ) as a Research Fellow. Prior to UQ, he obtained a PhD from the University of British Columbia (UBC) and did a postdoc research at UBC and University of Cambridge. He is broadly interested in the eco-evolutionary dynamics of plant populations that have undergone environmental heterogeneity over spatiotemporal scales. The goal of his research is to increase our understanding of the impacts of major episodes in plant demography and life histories on trait evolution and to foster sustainability. He tackles research questions at the interface between ecology and evolutionary biology with the integration of population genetics and quantitative genomics to elucidate the ecological and genetic basis of phenotypic traits and biological adaptation.

Currently, he leverages available Arabidopsis natural accessions across its geographic distribution range, coupled with their genomic data, to perform common-garden and divergent selection experiments. From these he aims to dissect features of the genetic architecture of traits and to reveal their relationships to environmental conditions. He is focusing on the shoot branching phenotype and its associated traits including flowering timing.

ECO-EVO-GENOMICS TEAM

Three PhD positions available in 2023-2025

Ongoing Projects

Project 1: Unification of selection and inheritance informs adaptive potential for generations to come (Applications open in 2023; CLOSED)

Natural selection acts on phenotypes and produces immediate phenotypic effects within a generation. In this short-term process, some phenotypes are more successful than others. Use of single traits for selection analysis could generate opposing outcomes and cannot predict how selection operates on an organism. In contrast, multivariate selection in trait combinations utilizes the attribute of functional integrations to reveal how selection works in a multi-dimensional trait space. Selection is an important force driving evolution but not equal to evolution; the latter leads to changes in genetic variation. Only through assessment of the evolutionary responses of phenotypes can we understand the transmission of such selection from one generation to the next. How does selection occurring within a generation affect evolution across generations? In the project, we aim to address the question by unifying the two processes to forecast evolutionary potential in relation to selection. To that end, we partition genetic variance into components based on an experimental design, employ experimental evolution to estimate additive genetic variance-covariances (G) on quantitative scales and evaluate G-matrix evolution. We eventually hope to elucidate how populations subjected to artificial selection move along evolutionary trajectories and whether there are genetic constraints making the fitness optimum evolutionarily inaccessible.

Project 2: Genetic and ecological bases of shoot branching divergence across Arabidopsis species-wide accessions (Applications open in 2024; CLOSED)

Spatial patterns of genetic variation are shaped by environmental factors, topological features, and dispersal barriers. As a result, we often can identify population genetic structure stratified by geographic locations or ecological niches, the drivers of population isolation by distance or the environment, clinal genetic variation over space in alignment with gradually varying environment gradients, and adaptive genetic variation in relation to environmental variables. At the ecological level, assembly rules uncover the coordination of phenotypic traits along environmental clines. Tradeoffs between traits represent the consequence of environmental filters and reflect adaptation to environmental heterogeneity. For example, three fundamental adaptive strategies are delineated by a CSR theory, that is, Competitors, Stress-tolerators, and Ruderals. As such, ways of genetic and phenotypic assemblage over space and throughout time point to a role for natural selection driven by spatially varying environmental conditions to maintain genetic variation that confers natural variation in phenotypes. In this project, we focus on an important agronomic trait – shoot branching – due to its important contribution to the overall shoot architecture of a plant and being a potential target for yield optimization. We aim to dissect features of the genetic architecture of the trait and to reveal its relationships to environmental conditions. We integrate geographic, environmental, and genomic data from the 1001 Arabidopsis Genomes Project, coupled with the branching phenotype measured in selected accessions and then forecasted for the rest of the 1001 accessions using machine-learning models, to investigate the ecological relevance and genetic underpinnings of branching divergence across the Arabidopsis species-wide accessions. Our study has implications for enhancing our understanding of the genetic and ecological basis of shoot branching divergence and the potential for generating novel knowledge for improving phenotypic predictability.

Project 3: Dimensionality, modularity, and integration: Insights from the architecture features of pan-genomes, pan-transcriptome, pan-epigenomes, and pan-chromatin (applications open in 2025) Application Portal ALSO ACCEPTING EXPRESSION OF INTEREST FROM INTERNATIONAL APPLICANTS

Organisms are functionally integrated systems, where interactions among phenotypic traits make the whole more than the sum of its parts. How is a suite of traits assembled into an adaptive module? How is an intramodule rewired to form a regulatory network? What is the persistence and stability of a module under exposures to perturbations triggered by altered interactions between the response to disparate environmental conditions or between the responses of multiple traits to the same environment? What constrains modules to vary independently, reflecting the integration and canalization of evolutionary trajectories? In this project, we utilize a compilation of pan-genomes, pan-transcriptome, pan-epigenomes, and pan-chromatin resources of Arabidopsis thaliana to uncover how dimensionality, modularity, and integration are organized at different omics levels including genetic polymorphisms, structural variants, RNA isoforms, expression abundance, epigenetic imprinting, and chromatin accessibility. Ultimately, we apply such functional elements to multivariate genomic selection, in the hope of enhancing multilayered omics-enabled prediction.

Mark Liu is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow focusing on the potential for clinical trials to affect change on a larger, longer-term scale. He was the interning early-career researcher for a multidisciplinary patient safety trial conducted at eight hospitals across Sydney, Melbourne and regional New South Wales. His doctoral research program involved physical activity for cancer patients, with an emphasis on creating long-term behaviour change for underserved groups.

Methodological expertise:

• Implementing trials in real-world contexts
• Behaviour change theory
• Consumer involvement
• Leveraging routinely collected healthcare data for research
• Other areas of interest: supportive care for people with cancer, inequities in healthcare

Dr Minran Liu is a Lecturer in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. His teaching and research focus on Asia-Pacific security, East Asian politics, Chinese politics and strategy.

Before joining UQ, he was a Lecturer in International & Political Studies at the School of Humanities & Social Sciences, UNSW Canberra, at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA). Additionally, he served as a Lecturer in International Relations within the Discipline of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, where he was also the Degree Director for the Master of International Security program. He is a Member-at-Large of the Executive Committee of the International Studies Association (ISA) Asia-Pacific. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Australia-China Relations Institute (ACRI), University of Technology Sydney and an Honorary Member of the University of Sydney's China Studies Centre. He regularly provides commentary on international relations through various Australian and international media outlets, including ABC, SBS, Sky News, CNA, The Straits Times, China Daily, and Het Financieele Dagblad, among others.

Transporters for Catecholamines and Serotonin. Science Education.

The overall theme of Lesley Lluka's research over 3 decades has been the structure and function of the noradrenaline transporter (NET) and the serotonin transporter (SERT). These transporters are important sites of action of drugs such as antidepressants.

More recently, Lesley Lluka's work has increasingly moved to Science Education, with a focus on areas such as student engagement in practical classes, innovative assessment practices to drive deep learning, and internationalization of the curriculum.

Organic functional materials development (design, synthesis & characterisation) for quantum based optoelectronics

Associate Professor Shih-Chun Lo (Lawrence)

Lawrence held a prestigious Swire Scholarship while carrying out his PhD study on semiconductor material development for organic solar cells and light emitting diodes (LEDs) at Oxford University, UK (1996-2000). His post-doctoral research at Oxford University focused on the design, synthesis and characterisation of fluorescent and phosphorescent dendrimers for highly efficient LEDs. Dendrimers have been recognised internationally as the third main class of LED materials, alongside small molecules and polymers, in which he played a key role. In December 2007, he joined the University of Queensland as a Lecturer in Chemistry of Materials. His research work has focused on the development of new functional semiconductor materials for quantum based optoelectronic applications (e.g. solar cells, LEDs, photodetectors, sensors, superconductors & organic lasers) as well as clean energy generation.

I lead the extracellular vesicle (EV) diagnostic and therapeutic research theme within the Centre for Personalised Nanomedicine at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN). My expertise spans EV biology, hypoxia research, cancer metastasis, and cancer immunology. At the AIBN, my research program focuses on developing innovative approaches to engineer therapeutic EVs and develop cutting-edge technologies to profile circulating EVs in the bloodstream. I have made significant conceptual contributions in the field through new analytical techniques and optimal isolation methodologies for EVs. This has been fundamental to the field and has contributed to overcoming the limitations of existing purification protocols that have hindered the potential translational applications of EVs in cancer.

Dr Elton Lobo is a digital health researcher with specialised expertise in human-computer interaction and neurological disorders. He is currently a Research Fellow and Technology Lead for the Dementia & Neuro Mental Health Research Unit at the UQ Centre for Clinical Research, University of Queensland, where he leads co-design initiatives to develop user-centred technology solutions.

Dr Lobo holds a joint PhD in Public Health from the University of Copenhagen and Information Technology from Deakin University. His interdisciplinary work bridges public health, information technology and clinical practice to address complex consumer needs. His work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals including national and international research collaborations. He actively supervises medical, public health and engineering students, and leads technology development in multiple MRFF-funded projects focused on participatory design approaches.

Em. Professor Lockington primarily researchs topics in the area of water transport in coastal soils and aquifers, including water exchange with plants and atmosphere. However, he has also conducted research on moisture transport in building materials and the design of sustainable tourism destinations. In addition to substantial contributions as a reviewer for a wide range of journals and funding bodies, Em. Prof Lockington has held editorial roles on two major journals in the area of hydrology and water resources research (Water Resources Research 2007 - 2012; Advances in Water Resources 1997 - 2020). Em. Prof. Lockington has undertaken a number of leadership roles across his career, including Program Leader for the Sustainable Tourism CRC I and II (Engineering and Design) from 2000 - 2008, Head of the Environmental Engineering Division (School of Engineering, UQ) from 2004 - 2010, and Research Program Leader for the ARC SRI funded National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training from 2009 - 2015. From 2010 to 2020 he frequently acted as Head of the School of Civil Engineering. From 2007 till 2025 he was a Fellow of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.

Dr Krystal Lockwood is a Gumbaynggirr and Dunghutti woman, and Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous Futures at The University of Queensland. Krystal is an applied justice researcher with experience in using co-design, realist, and Indigenous methodologies. Broadly, she has focused her work on addressing the impact of the carceral system on Indigenous peoples and communities, and is particularly interested in supporting Indigenous knowledges, perspectives, and programs of justice. Krystal’s research has focused on influencing evidence-informed practice, with projects in sentencing, Indigenous initiatives in the justice sector, and reintegration programs.

Professor Jason M. Lodge is an educator, psychological scientist, and an internationally recognised authority on learning, educational technology, and artificial intelligence. His work focuses on translating evidence into effective and practical strategy for public and private sector organisations, including, but not limited to, educational institutions and departments of education and training.

He serves as an expert advisor on learning and AI to prominent international bodies, including UNESCO and the OECD. In Australia, he advises the National Ministerial Task Force on Artificial Intelligence in Education and the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA). For TEQSA, he led the development of the Assessment Reform for the Age of Artificial Intelligence resource, a framework that has informed assessment policy and practice globally.

Professor Lodge’s research and leadership are supported by over $5.3 million in competitive funding and numerous accolades, including being named in the top 2% of scientists worldwide. His experience includes academic leadership roles at The University of Queensland, board memberships for higher education institutions, and extensive public speaking and media commentary on the future of education and learning.