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Dr Asmita Manchha is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Unspoken, Unheard, Unmet: Improving Access to Preventative Health Care through Better Conversations about Care team (UQ School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences) and an Early Career Researcher. She was awarded a PhD from the University of Queensland (UQ) in 2022, which examined the nature and consequences of the stigma of working in aged care. Asmita also has a first-class Bachelor of Business Management Honours’ degree from the UQ and Bachelor of Commerce from the Australian National University.

At the heart of Asmita’s research is her passion for developing practical, evidence-based resources to empower people who receive and provide aged care services. Her research themes include: (a) Understanding approaches to challenge stigma (i.e, negative attitudes, stereotypes) associated with aged care to promote a greater recognition of the aged care sector, (b) Development of a fit-for-purpose communication screening tool and resources for aged care workers to help older Australians have better conversations about aged care, (c) Exploration of interventions to support the recruitment and retention of people working in aged care with a strengths-based focus on career development, and (d) Application of language-based methods and frameworks from Systemic Functional Linguistics to examine complex social issues in the field of gerontology.

Asmita has vast experience in conducting qualitative and mixed-methods research pertaining to reframing negative perceptions about working in aged care, which have been published in The Gerontologist and Journal of Applied Gerontology. She is actively involved in the gerontology research community including the Australian Association of Gerontology (AAG), where she is the QLD Divisional Secretary.

I have an engineering background, earning my mechanical engineering degree from UQ and beginning my career in the mining and telecommunication sectors, before starting new ventures in technology, agri-tech & workplace training domains. I leverage this background in my teaching for courses covering entrepreneurship, innovation and strategy. I have built online courses covering corporate innovation, service innovation culture, innovation strategy for quantum technology and navigating the demands of 21st century workskills: some purposed towards scale (attracting large learner enrolments) and others towards geographic dispersion (gaining access to learners who I would never come into contact with). I have a particular interest in the impact strategies for new ventures & new technologies to craft sustainable value frameworks, so welcome entrepreneurial research opportunities that target emerging economies, fast-evolving technology domains and design thinking pedagogy for new generations of innovators.

I am an Associate Investigator for EQUS (Engineered Quantum Systems), an ARC Centre of Excellence anchored at UQ with 5 research nodes (UQ, ANU, USyd, Macquarie, UWA). I also serve as a co-investogator with the UQ Critical Thinking Project and incorporate those analytical paradigms into my teaching & research projects.

I am appointed as the academic-in-residence at UQ Ventures where I engage with their array of entrepreneurial programs to measure & strengthen new venture impact across UQ and into industry. I am a member of the UQ Business School's Digial Finance Research Hub pursuing my particular interest in quantum finance.

Dwayne Mann is an early career researcher, having recently submitted his PhD thesis in Biomedical Engineering. His thesis developed non-invasive methods to objectively describe the severity of airway obstruction on a breath-by-breath basis. His work bridges the gap between highly interventional physiology sleep studies and the clinical sleep environment and helps to characterise obstructive sleep apnoea patient phenotype, which could ultimately be used to direct patient treatment. When he isn’t writing MATLAB code, he spends most of his time running around after his children.

I research animal skeletal remains at archaeological sites to reconstruct patterns in past diet to understand how people responded to large-scale climate, environmental and cultural change.

I completed my BSc in archaeology and zoology in 1997 at James Cook University, followed with honours in archaeology in 1998. My honours project focused on the animal remains from the Pleistocene- and Holocene-aged of Noala Cave, a rockshelter on the Montebello Islands off the Pilbara coast in Western Australia. Following this, I moved to North America and completed a MSc in marine geology at the University of Miami (2003) and a PhD in anthropology (archaeology) at the University of Arizona (2010). My PhD research focused on reconstructing past diet of peoples occupying the Upper Palaeolithic site of Vale Boi in southern Portugal. In 2012 I returned to Australia and Australian archaeology. My main research project seeks to understand the motivations behind the initial colonisation of northern Australia and New Guinea and the manner in which people subsequently navigated large-scale shifts in climate and local environment.

Wen is a lecturer in the marking discipline. His research interest centres on behavioural decision making, consumer psychology, and individual differences.

Dr Marathe is a congenital cardiac surgeon at Queensland Children's Hospital. He has trained in India, Sydney and Brisbane in Australia and Boston Children's Hospital/Harvard Medical School in the USA. He joined the team in Brisbane as a surgeon-scientist. He is an early career researcher and research administrator. As a research administrator, he is responsible for the organization of the academic and teaching program. He also supports and guides medical students, fellows and nursing staff conducting research projects apart from recruiting and mentoring medical students from UQ.

Joemer’s main research area is on adolescent health epidemiology and program evaluation.

Joemer focuses on pragmatic approaches in epidemiology to identify social determinants and mental health risks in adolescents including young mothers. Apart from applications of modelling techniques on cross-sectional and panel data, he has expertise in conducting evidence synthesis including meta-analytic methodologies.

Joemer also has an extensive experience in monitoring and evaluation of health and social programs. He previously worked as a research fellow and health systems consultant in government agencies and international NGOs focused on adolescent health and reproductive health services at local and national contexts. Now, he is involved with evaluation of programs targeting young people with complex mental health issues and those who are victims of domestic and family violence.

Joemer has strong research interests on contextualizing adolescent reproductive health through mental health risks, and mental health integration in primary care in low resource settings.

I oversee the production and quality assurance of bioactive heparan sulfates (HS) used across various collaborative projects. In this role, I specialise in the selection and evaluation of pro-angiogenic HS through in vitro testing, their integration into biomaterials, and their subsequent assessment in preclinical animal models. My expertise encompasses a diverse range of skills, including biomaterial substrate fabrication (hydrogels, sponges, nano/micropatterned surfaces), structural and compositional characterisation, drug delivery systems, tissue processing (cell isolation, decellularisation, anastomosis), and cell-material interface analysis with a focus on signalling pathways (mechanotransduction and topographical cues). Collectively, I have contributed to multiple translational tissue engineering projects aimed at advancing regenerative medicine strategies for cardiovascular, dermal, bone and neural tissues. These multidisciplinary initiatives required close collaboration with program managers, scientists, and clinicians to ensure rigorous, high-quality research—from the in vitro characterisation of cellularised biomaterials to their successful implementation for in vivo studies.

We use computer based modelling techniques to understand and predict the the structural and dynamic properties of (bio)molecules including proteins and lipid aggregates.

Born in 1961, I obtained a BSc (Hon 1) at the University of Sydney in 1982. I obtained my PhD in 1986 from the John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University (ANU), on the "Binding Responses Associated with Self-Interacting Ligands: Studies on the Self-Association and Receptor binding of Insulin”. After holding postdoctoral positions at the ANU, University of Groningen, The Netherlands and the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland I was appointed Professor of Biophysical Chemistry (Molecular Simulation) University of Groningen, in 1998. In 1998 I also received the Swiss Ruzicka Prize for research in Chemistry for work on simulating peptide folding. In 2004 I was awarded an ARC Federation Fellowship and in February 2005 an honorary chair (Bijzonder Hoogleraar) at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. I have given over 90 invited lectures at conferences and academic Institutions around the world as well as at a range of summer and winter schools on advanced simulation techniques.

In my research I have performed pioneering simulations of a variety of important biological phenomena, including some of the first atomic simulations of protein unfolding and the first simulations of reversible peptide folding in a realistic environment. In recent years my group performed some of the first atomic and near atomic simulations of the spontaneous aggregation of surfactant and lipid systems into micelles, bilayers and vesicles. These have enabled us, amongst other things, to elucidate the mechanism by which pores are induced within biological membranes in unprecedented detail. Over the last decade I have been intimately involved in the development of the GROMOS force field which is specifically tuned for protein and peptide folding simulations and as well as the development of models for a range of solvents including methanol and trifluoroethanol. I have also been responsible for the development of methodology for the calculations of the thermodynamic properties of biomolecular systems such as free energies of binding and hydration, as well as estimating entropic effects from simulations. Most recently, I have been responsible for the development of novel approaches to promote structure formation in protein folding simulations that can be used for the refinement of protein structures generated by ab initio or by homology methods. Finally, I am associated with two, internationally recognised, (bio)molecular simulation packages the GROningen Molecular Simulation library (GROMOS) and the GROningen Machine for Chemical Simulations (GROMACS).