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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 senior lecturer and an ARC DECRA fellow 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 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.

Stephanie is also the Co-Founder and 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 are in human connection and learning, and in understanding how to effectively mobilise insights from the Science of Learning into practice in diverse educational and workplace learning contexts, collaborating with partners to develop, implement and evaluate contextually relevant, actionable, scalable and sustainable solutions to real-world teaching, learning and training needs. Stephanie is a member of the UNESCO Science of Learning Alliance.

Her teaching and leadership in the Science of Learning have recently been recognised with a UQ Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning (2025), an Australian Council for Educational leaders (ACEL) National Excellence in Leadership Award, and the ACEL Miller-Grassie Award for Outstanding Leadership in Education (2025).

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 am an art historian and art writer. My research specialisms and interests include photography and contemporary art; artists' films and video installations; documentary practices; the visual cultures of labour; the history of illustrated magazines and Australian colonial photography. For the last ten years I have researched and taught in the fields of modern, contemporary art, and visual culture. I am particularly interested in interdisciplinary theoretical methodologies drawing from art history, sociology, and political theory.

My first monograph, Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Documentary (Columbia University Press: 2015) explores the work of contemporary artists such as Hito Steyerl, Joachim Koester, Walid Raad, Jean-Luc Moulène, and Anri Sala. I have published numerous book chapters, peer-reviewed articles and exhibition catalogue essays. My articles have been published in leading international journals such as Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, Afterall, Philosophy of Photography, Photography and Culture, Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art, and History of Photography. My writing has recenttly appeared in Labour History (2025 and 2026) and in the French open-source journal Photographica (2026).

My second monograph brings to light the forgotten histories of Australian South Sea Islanders. Between 1863 and 1907, more than 60,000 men and women from Melanesian islands were forced by trickery or fraud to work in the burgeoning sugar industry of Queensland. The history of their representation in art and visual culture has never been adequately studied. The book fills this significant gap in the scholarship. It includes a critical examination of untapped photographic archives and discusses contemporary Australian artists’ attempt to address this traumatic and often unspoken history. The monograph invigorates debates in the field of photography and visual culture studies, racial capitalism and colonial studies, Indigenous and Pacific studies, and in social and economic history.

I received a B.A. in Communication and Media and an Honours in Film Studies from the University of Bologna. I was awarded my M.A. in 2008, and my PhD in the History of Art in 2012, both from the University College London.

I welcome enquiries from potential PhD students. Research topics I would be particularly interested in supervising include: contemporary art and, in particular, documentary and screen-based practices; histories and theories of photography; histories of exhibition-making and spectatorship; colonial photography in Australia and the Asia-Pacific; the visual cultures and politics of illustrated magazines and activists' pamphlets; Marxism and the Frankfurt School thinkers; artists and curators' use of AI. Potential applicants should contact me directly to discuss their proposals.

I’m interested in modelling consumer choice to uncover the hidden patterns in our decision-making. I’m passionate about public transport, sustainable travel and tourism, mobility in cities, consumers’ use of technology, and societal wellbeing.

My research has been published in Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Tourism Management, Annals of Tourism Research, the Journal of Choice Modelling, Frontiers in Psychology, the Journal of Service Management, Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, and Physiotherapy Research International. During my PhD I developed models of complex decision-making in public transport and air travel using latent variable structural choice models, identifying patterns in consumer heterogeneity attributable to the choice context and explaining these patterns through behavioural decision theory.

Within the UQ Business School, I am the Major Convenor for Business Analytics in the Bachelor of Advanced Business (Honours) and Bachelor of Commerce programs.

I am the Programme Chair for the International Choice Modelling Conference (ICMC2026).

Dr. Gulshan Mahajan started his career in agronomy and has worked at Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), Ludhiana, India, for more than 23 years in different capacities and engaged in research, teaching and outreach activities. He also worked in matrix management at UQ, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) as well and PAU and have interacted across programs, institutes, and regions and developed and implemented programs successfully. He has guided one PhD student, four MSc students as a Principal Advisor and more than 20 students as an Associate Advisor. His interests fall within a broader area of agronomy, regenerative agriculture with particular emphasis on weed science, enhancing input-use efficiency, and developing ecologically based integrated crop management strategies for sustained production. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences, India and an Associate Editor of the Weed Science Society of America.

I am a postdoctoral researcher exploring biotechnology and computational biology to understand health and diseases. My passion lies in leveraging biotech for longevity and innovative healthcare solutions.

My current research focuses on the role of gut microbiome in type-1 diabetes. More specifically, I am interested in identifying early-life biomarkers using multi-omics approach (metagenomics, metabolomics, proteomics), with the goal of enabling early diagnosis for prevention and treatment.

Beyond academia, I am keen on research translation, believing in interdisciplinary collaboration with industry and startups to tackle biotech and AI challenges. I find true solace and inspiration in my faith which instils in me a sense of purpose and compassion for the well-being of others. I like spending time outdoors, and volunteering which keeps me grounded and inspired.

Dr Ray Maher is Director of 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.

Melanie Maher is a design lecturer, strategist, and visual communication designer whose work explores how design can be used as a tool for social justice, sustainable futures, and systems change. Her expertise sits at the intersection of visual communication design, design education, and applied social impact, with a particular focus on how strategic visual communication shapes understanding, influences decision-making, and supports collective action in complex social and environmental contexts.

Melanie’s design practice applies strategic design and visual communication to challenges across public and social infrastructure, community and disaster resilience, housing, health, and education. Working across Australia and internationally, her projects have addressed issues including cost-of-living pressures, energy equity, food security, social isolation, mental health and environmental protection. She has led and contributed to projects with government, non-government, and industry partners including the Queensland Government, Brisbane City Council, Oxfam, YMCA, ANHCA, HVEC, and Neighbourhood Centres Queensland (NCQ). As Strategic Communications Lead at NCQ, her team helped secure a record $115.8 million uplift in Queensland Government funding for the Neighbourhood Centre sector and formal recognition of NCQ as the state’s peak body.

Melanie has over a decade of experience as a lecturer and is currently an Associate Lecturer in Design in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at The University of Queensland. Before joining UQ, she coordinated, lectured in, and developed over seventeen unique University courses in design over a twelve-year period, contributing to the advancement of an innovative, interdisciplinary design curriculum. In 2023, Melanie was awarded one of the Top 30 Design Lecturers internationally in the TDK Design Awards, amongst lecturers from across the UK, USA, Australia and NZ.

Melanie’s research and research communication span peer-reviewed academic publications, practice-led research, and non-traditional research outputs, including sector impact reports, government submissions, and public-facing publications. This work has contributed to significant change—it’s informed government policy, influenced funding, grown public awareness and shaped educational programs. A 2023 Sector Impact Report identified a seven-fold increase in the median emergency food relief distributed by Centres between 2019 and 2023, which led to the government funding of the $1.3m Community Food Program as well as an increase in emergency food relief funding directly to Centres statewide. She has co-authored research in Sustainability Science (a Q1 journal) and regularly collaborates with researchers, community organisations, and practitioners to translate complex research into accessible, impactful outcomes. Her work is driven by a strong commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration.

Melanie’s extensive collaborations span state, national and international networks while leading and contributing to projects with government and industry. She currently holds a strategic leadership role at the peak body Neighbourhood Centres Queensland, an organisation funded by the Department of Communities, Housing, and Digital Economy with a membership of over 150 organisations across Queensland. She’s also a regular lead contributor to the national peak body for Neighbourhood and Community Centres and involved with the International Federation for Settlement Houses.

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.

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.