Find an expert

Hamish MacDonald is a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland School of Law. His research interests include intellectual property law, international law, and law and technology. His recent work focuses on the international regulation of genetic resources, the technical and digital infrastructures underlying legal systems, and the use of standardisation and abstraction in the operation of regulatory regimes.

Professor Emma Mace’s research interest is in developing and applying innovative genomics approaches to support sorghum improvement activities.

In Professor Mace’s current role leading sorghum genomics research components of research projects funded by the Grains Research Development Corporation (GRDC), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the Australian Research Council (ARC),her work focuses on generating significant innovative outcomes across a range of applications, from basic through to applied, specifically in using technologies to bridge the gene to phenotype gap, and to elucidate the genetic basis of quantitative and qualitative traits.

Dr Kim Machan is a video and media arts specialist, curator, writer and founding director of the not-for-profit arts organisation MAAP-Media Art Asia Pacific. She has researched, curated, developed, produced, and commissioned media arts projects in Australia and the Asia regions through this organisation since 1998. Machan has pioneered collaborative cultural partnerships with arts organizations and governments throughout the Asia regions to produce and curate major exhibitions, festivals, public art programs and innovative art projects. She has negotiated complex projects working with museums, galleries, contemporary art spaces, universities and non-traditional art settings in Australia and the Asia Pacific regions working with institutions such as the China Millennium Monument Art Museum, the National Art Museum of China, and the National Library of China in Beijing; the Shanghai Library; Queensland Art Gallery; National Art School Gallery, Sydney; Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane; OCAT Shanghai; the Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou; the Singapore Art Museum; Nam June Paik Art Centre, and Art Sonje Art Center, Seoul amongst others. In 2002, she curated (with Fan Di'an) 'MAAP in Beijing: MOIST’, the first museum new media art exhibition presented in China. In 2008, she was curatorial advisor to ‘Synthetic Times: Media Art China 2008’ at the National Art Museum of China, which was a Beijing Olympics Cultural Project and 'Thingworld' 2014 also at the National Art Museum of China both led by artistic director Zhang Ga. Other projects include ‘Light from Light’ that won the highly distinguished Australian Arts in Asia Award for Visual Arts in 2013 and ‘LANDSEASKY: Revisiting Spatiality in Video Art’ that toured major museums and galleries in Seoul, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Sydney and Brisbane through 2014-2015. In 2016-2017, curator of ‘Zhang Peili: from painting to video’ with Olivier Krischer at the Australian Centre for China in the World, Canberra. Her PhD research concerning the rise of video art in East Asia titled 'Refocusing on the Medium: the Rise of East Asia Video Art' was also an exhibition presented in China at OCAT Shanghai contemporary art museum from 27 December 2020 to 21 March 2021 and at the Beijing Minsheng Art Museum from 5 March to 8 May 2022. Machan has lectured in curatorial masterclasses, contemporary Asian art, in universities and art schools in Australia, China and Singapore. Details of these and other projects can be found along with edited publications at www.maap.org.au

Dr Macionis is a Senior Lecturer in Tourism, and is the Program Leader of the Bachelor of Tourism, Hotel and Event Management Program at UQ Business School. Niki is a Teaching-Focused academic with over twenty-five years experience in tertairy education. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and currently co-chairs the Teaching and Learning Special Interest Group within the Council of Australasian University Tourism and Hospitality Educators (CAUTHE). Niki teaches both undergraduate and post-graduate courses in Service Management and Leadership and Principles of the International Tourism System. Her research interests are in student experiences, career paths of teaching focused academics and innovative teaching practices (such as gamification).

I am interested in ways to promote recovery in the brain following neurological injury, with specific expertise in the field of exercise and its impact on neurotrophic factors, including brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). My experience includes the physiological bases of exercise, exercise prescrition and clinical physiotherapy practice in the field of neurological recovery including people post stroke.

Professor MacKenzie works in the fields of environmental economics, environmental policy design, and political economics. He joined the University of Queensland in September 2012, after more than five years at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He has published research articles on the economics of pollution markets, environmental auctions, and contests in outlets such as the Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Oxford Economic Papers, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Public Choice, Environmental and Resource Economics. His work has won the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Award for outstanding publication in the journal Environmental and Resource Economics. He is a Co-editor of Resource and Energy Economics and his current research focuses on environmental offsets, resource conflict, and the political economy of environmental regulation.

His passion is understanding how environmental markets operate. He has led numerous interdisciplinary teams in investigating environmental markets in collaboration with policymakers at the council, state, and federal level. His funding has been supported by the ARC (Discovery Project), Agrifutures, Rural Economies Centre of Excellence, Department of Environment and Science, Queensland Government, and the Australian Federal Government’s $5bn Future Drought Fund (Regional Drought Resilience Plan).

His teaching has connected students’ learned knowledge with real-world (and interdisciplinary) policy outcomes, with impact recognised by an Australian Awards for University Teaching (2021), UQ Citation (2020) and Commendation (2019) for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning, BEL Excellence in Education Award, and 10 School of Economics Teaching Awards. He has been recognised because of his creative leadership in pedagogy: in the way he teaches and supports learning. He leads a transformation in how students engage in class and are inspired to learn by using novel learning techniques that include: storytelling and unusual contextualisation; adopting multiple strategies to expand students’ deep learning capabilities; and creating scenarios where learning is applied authentically. In doing so his students become critical and deep thinkers capable of transferring their knowledge beyond the classroom to help address society’s problems. He is the Director of Teaching and Learning within the School of Economics.

He was appointed to the Multisector Reference Group Committee, Queensland Government, (2021-) to advise the Queensland Government on revisions to the Biodiversity Offset Framework and has co-authored on the Australia Academy of Science response to the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) on the Independent Review of Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs). He often speaks at industry-government-academic events regarding environmental markets and has a strong media presence of his own research and expert advice on environmental markets.

I am currently a lecturer at the University of Queensland, where I conduct research in the field of Information Retrieval. My research focuses on efficient and effective representations for large-scale search engines, including indexing, compression, and retrieval. I am also interested in understanding how to measure improvements in the end-to-end search pipeline, including system-oriented effectiveness measurements and user behaviour analysis. I have a broad interest in empirical experimentation, operating systems, data structures, and algorithms.

Previous Positions

• From February 2020 to January 2022 I worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on an ARC discovery project with Professor Alistair Moffat at the University of Melbourne.
• I completed my PhD at RMIT University under the guidance of Professor J. Shane Culpepper and Professor Falk Scholer.

Dr Stephanie MacMahon is a Senior Lecturer in the Science of Learning and in Arts Education, teaching in both the ITE and post-graduate programs in the School of Education at The University of Queensland, and is the program coordinator for the newly established Science of Learning Field of Study. She has over 20 years’ experience as a P-12 educator and school leader, and draws on this experience to support her students in understanding how research can be used meaningfully in educational practice. Her constructivist philosophy underpinning her teaching also informs her approach to research, with two key focus areas that involve learning with and from others: human connection and learning, and knowledge mobilisation (translation) of research into practice.

Stephanie is also the Program Director of the UQ Learning Lab: a group of multi-disciplinary researchers, educators, and industry partners who collaborate to transform learning, teaching and training in diverse school and post-school contexts through the science of learning. Her research within the UQ Learning Lab aims to better understand the barriers and enablers to effective knowledge mobilisation in real-world teaching, learning and training contexts. This insight is then used to work with industry partners to develop, implement and evaluate contextually relevant, actionable, scalable and sustainable solutions to industry-identified teaching, learning and training needs.

Stephanie collaborates widely with multi-disciplinary researchers on science of learning projects using a range of methodologies.

Harrison is a medicinal chemist with a research focus on bioactive peptides as therapeutics and molecular tools. He completed his Honours and PhD at UQ in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences where he developed synthetic peptide-based vaccine candidates against a range of targets including Group A Streptococcus and small molecule substances of abuse in the laboratory of Professor Istvan Toth. He is now a postdoctoral research fellow in the Muttenthaler group at IMB where he is involved in several programs of peptide-based drug discovery and pharmacological probe development.

Dr Barbara Maenhaut's research interests are in combinatorial design theory and graph theory.

She received her PhD from the University of Queensland in 1999. Her current research projects are in the fields of:

• Graph decompositions
• Latin squares and perfect one-factorisations

I completed my MA and PhD in Art History at University College London in 2012, and moved to Australia in 2015 to take up my position at UQ. I am an art historian with expertise in the history of photography, artists’ cinema and video. I have written widely on modern and contemporary art and his articles have appeared in Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, Afterall, Philosophy of Photography, Photography and Culture. I am also the author of Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Documentary (2015). I am in favour of a broader approach to image culture, one which crosses traditional boundaries between disciplines such as art history, media studies, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. My research interests are contemporary artists’ use of images for the production of history and memory, and the aesthetics and politics of documentary. I am interested in the history of Australian photography and the role that lens-based images and visual culture have played in advancing social and environmental justice movements in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.

I'm interested in modelling consumer choice to uncover the hidden patterns in our decision making. I am passionate about public transport, sustainable travel/tourism, mobility in cities, consumers use of technology and societal wellbeing. I've published in the Journal of Choice Modelling, Frontiers in Psychology, and the Annals of Tourism Research, as well as presented at international conferences in Japan, USA and Australia. In my PhD I studied complex decision making in public transport and air travel by using latent variable structural choice models to find patterns in consumer heterogeneity attributable to the choice context and account for these patterns using behavioural decision theory. After graduating I worked at the Japanese International Cooperation Agency Research Institute (JICA-RI) in Tokyo, Japan as a behavioural economist. I have since returned to the UQ Business Schools where I am now focussed on developing the new business analytics major as part of the new Bachelor of Advanced Business (Honours) program.

Renuka is an applied economist and Asia-Pacific expert who specialises in a broad range of topics from trade wars (specifically the US-China trade war) to the sharing economy (AirBnb, Uber DiDi etc). Her areas of interest and expertise also extend to empirical and policy analysis in development and agricultural economics, tourism economics, international trade, and productivity growth analysis, using econometrics and macroeconomic models

Associate Professor Christopher Maher is a tertiary-referral Urogynaecologist at the Wesley & Mater Private Hospitals and Royal Brisbane Women’s Hospital and active researcher and teacher at the University of Queensland. His long-term commitment to research and evidence based medicine has been rewarded with over 100 peer-review publications and many presentations at National and International conferences. He is the past president of the Queensland CFA (Continence Foundation of Australia), former Secretary of AGES, Chairman of IUGA Scientific Committee, Chair of Urogynaecology committee RANZCOG and is currently lead author of the Cochrane Review and International Collaboration on Incontinence on the surgical management of prolapse. Associate Professor Christopher Maher is the current Chairman of the Urogynaecological Society of Australia.

Dr Ray Maher is Deputy Director (Research) at the School of Architecture Design and Planning at the University of Queensland. Ray collaborates broadly across institutions while leading research and capacity-building projects with government and industry. His work focuses on sustainable development strategy, urban development and design, Sustainable Development Goals, decision-support tools, circular economy, and addressing ‘wicked’ problems using systems, design, and futures thinking. Ray’s research is engagement-focused, interdisciplinary, and applied, which builds the capacity of stakeholders.

Ray is Lead Chief Investigator on research funding totalling over $1m, and a Chief Investigator on research funding totalling over $5m. He has 32 traditional and non-traditional research outputs with state, national, and regional impact.

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.