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Professor Matthew Morell has had an extensive career over four decades characterised by his focus on conducting and leading high-quality agricultural research that delivers benefits to the agriculture and food sectors, and to consumers. In leadership, Professor Morell has a track record in developing effective teams and working with institutions and their stakeholders to deliver innovations for the future.

As Director of QAAFI, Professor Morell is highly motivated by the opportunity to lead research programs that provide research and knowledge based solutions to many of the major big challenges of our times, including enhancing both profitability and sustainability in agricultural production, providing improved nutrition, building resilience in the face of climate change, and reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture, all in ways that protect and build the livelihoods of farmers and rural communities. The mission of QAAFI in providing benefits to Queensland through working closely with producers, the food industry, the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, and other research partners and stakeholders across the state, provides a highly fertile ground for conducting and delivering research that makes a significant difference to Queensland and its people. QAAFI has an important role serving as a focal point for Queensland in engaging nationally and internationally with global efforts to find solutions to global challenges in agriculture and food production.

Over the past seven years, Professor Morell led research in an international development context at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) based in the Philippines. As IRRI’s CEO for the past five years, he led the institute’s affairs across 17 countries, set strategic direction in close consultation with its Board of Trustees, staff and stakeholders. Prior to his appointment as CEO, Professor Morell was IRRI’s Deputy Director General (Research), driving research and outreach programs across various dimensions of rice science including climate change-ready rice, healthier varieties, environmentally sustainable farming systems, and capacity development. In his leadership at IRRI, Professor Morell instilled a strong focus on both understanding and meeting the needs of stakeholders and beneficiaries, he strengthened IRRIs regional presence, particularly through the establishment of the IRRI South Asia Research Centre, and drove modernisation of the Institute's research operations to be more effective and efficient.

Before joining IRRI, Professor Morell worked for 17 years at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), where he initiated, developed, and led a research program on future grains and plant oil production. Dr Morell has extensive experience in working closely with industry and in identifying, protecting, and managing intellectual property. His work at CSIRO resulted in the formation of two spin off companies which have commercialised novel grains delivering human health benefits. He holds a PhD in agricultural chemistry from the University of Sydney; conducted postdoctoral studies at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Davis; and was a research fellow at the Australian National University. He is an Academy Fellow of the International Association of Cereal Chemists and of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering of Australia. (ATSE).

Prof Morgan was the Director of the Centre for Hypersonics since its inception in 1997 until October 2021. He lectures in mechanical and aerospace engineering within the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering.

He has a strong research record in the development of hypervelocity impulsive facilities on which the UQ Centre for Hypersonics research program is based, including the ‘X’ series of super-orbital expansion tubes, and has extensive experience in hypersonic aero-thermo-dynamics and scramjet propulsion.

Richard Morgan has been developing superorbital ground based facilities for many years, and has collaborative research program with DSTG, NASA, ESA, Oxford University, Ecole Centrale (Paris) and AOARD in radiating flows, as well as continuing ARC support in this area since 1990, including two current ARC Discovery grants in partnership with European and American partners.

He was involved as a flight team member in the 2010 airborne observation of the Japanese ‘Hayabusa’ asteroid sample return mission, for which he was a co-recipient of the NASA Ames ‘honour’ award for 2010. He regularly gives invited talks in international meetings, and gave a plenary presentation to the AIAA Hypersonic Spaceplanes Conference in San Francisco in April 2011.

Professor Richard Morgan was awarded a 2012 UQ Excellence in Research Higher Degree Supervision award for encouraging student development through international student exchanges with overseas collaborators, whilst engendering internal cooperation within the study body.

Prof Karen Moritz is internationally renowned for her work in understanding how early life perturbations contribute to an increased risk of developing cardiovascular, renal and metabolic disease in adulthood. Over the last 5-7 years, her research has focused on determining how prenatal alcohol can result in “developmental programming” of disease. Her research has identified critical windows of susceptibility to alcohol, including the period around conception and prior to implantation. In addition, her work has identified the placenta as playing a key role in the sex-specific offspring outcomes following maternal perturbations. Her research spans both preclinical and clinical domains, highlighted by her appointment as the Director of the Child Health Research Centre in 2016.

Current projects are:

• Periconceptional alcohol exposure: Programming long-term health in offspring (with Dr Lisa Akison and Dr James Cuffe)

• Emerging therapies for diabetes and complications: Effects on metabolic, cardiovascular and renal function (with Dr Linda Gallo)

• Effect of prenatal insults on the developing placenta (with Dr Marloes Nitert Dekker, Prof Vicki Clifton [Mater], Dr David Simmons and Dr James Cuffe)

• Effect of prenatal insults on the developing kidney and implications for adult disease (with Dr Peter Trnka [QLD Children's Hospital])

• Impact of maternal cannabis and alcohol around conception on development and long-term health of offspring (with Dr David Simmons and Dr Lisa Akison)

Prof Moritz maintains a strong commitment to teaching of students, including lectures and research student supervision in undergraduate programs, supervision of Honours students and supervision of higher degree research students.

Dr Morley is an epidemiologist by background who works in health policy and health services research. Her broad areas of research interest are the intersections between healthcare provision and non-health sectors (e.g. the criminal justice system, transport infrastructure), particularly in relation to mental health and substance use. She is also interested in the evaluation of complex interventions using mixed-methods approaches involving administrative data.

Prior to joining UQ, Dr Morley was a Senior Research Leader and Deputy Director of the Health and Wellbeing Research Group at RAND Europe, a not-for-profit policy research organisation based in the UK. In this role she led two major research projects investigating government policy: an evaluation of the UK government investment in drug and alcohol treatment and recovery systems (NIHR205228), and an assessment of the mental health impact of a major high-speed rail infrastructure project on surrounding communities (NIHR132761). She is a co-investigator for the Birmingham, RAND and Cambridge Rapid Evaluation Centre, one of five UK rapid evaluation centres funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR156533). She has also conducted research for the European Commission, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the UK Department for Health and Social Care.

Before working at RAND Europe, Dr Morley was a Senior Lecturer at the King's College London Institute for Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IOPPN), based at the National Addiction Centre. While at the IOPPN, she led research focused on using electronic health records to understand the unmet physical and mental health needs of people who use alcohol and other drugs and taught research methods and statistics on MSc programmes. Before this she held positions at University College London, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Melbourne.

Dr Kylie Morphett completed her PhD in November 2016 and has since worked as a Research Fellow at the UQ School of Public Health. Prior to beginning her PhD, she worked in a number of non-profit health promotion project management roles. Her PhD research investigated how smokers understand the neuroscience of nicotine addiction and how this influences their sense of self-efficacy and choice of cessation methods. It also explored barriers to the use of best practice smoking cessation pharmacotherapies.

Dr Morphett's current research is focused on health communication related to tobacco and nicotine products. She has a strong interest in tobacco control policy and regulatory science, and is an investigator on a $5M NHMRC Synergy grant, where she leads the workstream on stakeholder support for tobacco endgame policies. She also has a strong interest in environmental health communication, and is an investigator on an NHMRC funded grant exploring the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) exposome, leading the risk communication component of the project. She has expertise in mixed methods research, including systematic reviews, qualitative data design and analysis and the development and analysis of cross-sectional surveys.

Kit Morrell is a Roman historian specialising in the history, law, and politics of the late Roman republic (the age of Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, and Cicero). Her current research focuses on the idea and practice of reform in the Roman republic.

Kit joined the University of Queensland in July 2020 as Susan Blake Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History. She has held previous positions as ARC DECRA fellow at the University of Melbourne and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam, investigating the impact of the Augustan marriage legislation on Roman women’s legal and property rights as part of the OIKOS Anchoring Innovation project. She has also taught at the University of Sydney, where she completed her PhD in 2014.

Kit’s publications include a monograph, Pompey, Cato, and the Governance of the Roman Empire, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, and The Alternative Augustan Age (OUP, 2019), co-edited with Josiah Osgood and Kathryn Welch. She is currently working on a monograph based on her DECRA project, 'Reforming the Roman Republic', and a coedited volume on The Rule of Law in Ancient Rome (to be published by OUP).

Kit’s research interests reflect her training in both ancient history and law. Her research expertise includes Roman republican history and politics (especially the late republic); Roman law; Roman women; ethics and exemplarity in the Roman world; and ancient historiography of the republic and early empire. She is happy to discuss potential Honours and postgraduate supervision on these and related topics.

Patricia (Tisha) Morrell has had a diverse teaching background, starting as a high school science teacher in a large, urban, private school in Brooklyn, New York then moving to be a middle and high school science and mathematics teacher in a small, public school district in rural Scio, Oregon. She spent over twenty years working with preservice and inservice teachers at the University of Portland where she also created and directed the University’s STEM Education and Outreach Centre. The mission of the Centre was to assist in strengthening STEM education for the university students, K-12 students, and community teachers. She has worked with state and federal agencies to advance the teaching of science. As a past President of the Association for Science Teacher Education, she works to advance the mission of ASTE which is “to promote excellence in science teacher education world-wide through scholarship and innovation.” She chaired the joint committee of ASTE and The National Science Teachers Association that wrote the current set of standards for science teacher preparation programs. Tisha maintains her teaching certification in biology and basic mathematics. Her research focuses on best practices for science teacher preparation, with an emphasis on professional development, but she also is involved in evaluation and curriculum development.

Todd Morris is a Lecturer in the School of Economics. He obtained his PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2020 and had postdoctoral research positions at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy from 2019 to 2021 and HEC Montréal from 2022 to 2023. He is an empirical economist with research interests in public economics, labor economics, health economics and the economics of ageing. A unifying theme to his research is the causal evaluation of government policies, often related to retirement and older households. His research uses high-quality administrative data and has been published in leading economics journals, including the Journal of Public Economics and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.

Associate Professor David Morrison's primary academic interests are in revenue law, corporate and insolvency law and economic analysis.

Associate Professor Morrison is an interdisciplinary researcher whose interests lie at the intersection of taxation law, corporate and insolvency law, bankruptcy, finance law and financial literacy as those interests apply to finance, the economy, social and policy framework and climate change. Associate Professor Morrison researches around law and finance especially as it applies to literacy and support for generational change. The recipient of three ARC research grants and a UQ Vice-Chancellors Research Excellence award, Associate Professor Morrison has held over 20 research grants and has published extensively including papers, conferences and as co-author of Voluntary Administration Thomson service. Associate Professor Morrison holds the degrees of BCom, LLB, MFM, LLM, GCEd and PhD (Qld), he holds the professional qualifications of Barrister-at-law, Chartered Accountant (CA), Fellow of the Financial Services Institute of Australia (FFin), and is a Chartered Tax Advisor of The Taxation Institute (CTA).

Dr Ben Mos obtained his BSc (Hons) in Marine Science and Management from the University of New England, Armidale and his PhD from Southern Cross University, Coffs Harbour. Ben is an Aboriginal man of Turrbal descent. Ben completed a 3-year postdoctoral position at the National Marine Science Centre, Coffs Harbour, refining technologies he developed during his PhD to grow sea urchins as seafood, supporting Australia’s nascent export industry. He was appointed as a lecturer in marine sciences at Southern Cross University in 2019 where Ben worked in the School of Environmental Sciences for 3 years before continuing his academic career at The University of Queensland.

Currently in the School of the Environment, Ben teaches into the Marine Biology major and undertakes research to understand how we (humans) are altering waterways and oceans and impacting the organisms that live there through climate change, pollution, and catching too many fish, and figures out ways we can solve these problems using Indigenous and international science approaches. Ben is based at Moreton Bay Research Station (MBRS) on beautiful Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) where he leads a marine lab with custom seawater systems, located near a unique group of globally important marine and freshwater habitats, ranging from coral reefs, mangroves, and freshwater swamps, and collaborates with First Nations Peoples, industry, government, other researchers, and students from Australia and overseas.