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Dr Katelyn Melvin is a Lecturer and Researcher in Speech Pathology in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at The University of Queensland. Katelyn's qualitative and mixed-methods research focuses on collaborating with families, professionals, and communities to drive meaningful, long-term improvements in developmental outcomes for children and families. Her clinical experience as a speech pathologist working alongside families navigating social and economic disadvantage and families with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds has deeply shaped her approach to research and practice. Katelyn is committed to equity in the early years, ensuring that all children and families have access to the support they need to thrive.

Her research themes include:

1. Health promotion and prevention in the early years. Designing and implementing proactive, community- and population-level approaches to supporting children's development, with a particular focus on communication.
2. Advancing best-practice family-centred care through collaboration with families. Supporting collaborative working with families in pre-professional training through to professional practice in complex early years settings.
3. Co-design for health service innovation. Equipping clinicians and services to bring stakeholder voices together to solve real-world problems and improve service delivery.

Professor Paul Memmott is an anthropologist and architect and for some decades was the Director of the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre at the University of Queensland (School of Architecture and Institute for Social Science Research). This has now become the Aboriginal Environments Research Collaborative (AERC) within the School of Architecture, Design and Planning. The AERC has provided and continues to provide an applied research focus on a range of topics in relation to Indigenous populations, including institutional architecture, vernacular architecture, housing, crowding, governance, well-being, homelessness, family violence and social planning for communities.

Paul was the first full-time architectural-anthropological consultant in Australia, being principal of a research consultancy practice in Aboriginal projects during 1980 to 2008. His research interests encompass Aboriginal sustainable housing and settlement design, Aboriginal access to institutional architecture, Indigenous constructs of place and cultural heritage, vernacular architecture, social planning in Indigenous communities, cultural change and architectural anthropology.

Paul’s scholarly research output includes over 300 publications (including 11 books and monographs), 215 applied research reports and 40 competitive grants. He has supervised over 50 postgraduate and honours students and has won a number of prestigious teaching awards in Indigenous education (including an Australian Award for University Teaching – AAUT). One of his books, titled 'Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley: Aboriginal Architecture of Australia', received three national book awards in 2008 (Edition 1), including the prestigious Stanner Award from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, and then upon the publication of an expanded edition 2 in 2022, another three national book awards.

Paul also has extensive professional anthropological experience in Aboriginal land rights claims, Native Title claims and associated court work since 1980. He has presented evidence and been examined in a variety of Australian courts as an expert witness on a cross-section of Indigenous issues, in addition to the Native Title work.

Awards

• AIA Neville Quarry Award, 2015
• Best Exhibit, Australian Architectural Exhibit, Venice Biennale 2018 (Team led by Baracco + Wright Architects, Melbourne)

Memberships

• Life Member, Academy of Social Sciences (Australia)
• Life Fellow, Australian Institute of Architects
• Fellow, Australian Anthropological Society

Flavio Menezes is a Professor of Economics and Director of the Australian Institute for Business and Economics at the University of Queensland (UQ). He is also a part-time member of the Australian Competition Tribunal and a member of the Sydney Airport Demand Management Compliance Committee. His third and final term as Chair of the Queensland Competition Authority (QCA) concluded in September 2025, following almost a decade as a member of the Authority.

Professor Menezes was engaged by the Australian Treasury to provide independent strategic advice to the Australian and New Zealand governments on reducing regulatory barriers to the net zero transition. His report, released in September 2025, informed a joint commitment by both governments to strengthen regulatory settings, facilitate trans-Tasman trade, and improve productivity and living standards.

He served on the NDIA's Pricing Arrangements Reference Group from 2023 to 2026 and was a member of the Expert Panel for the 2022–2023 National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) Specialist Disability Accommodation Price Review. He was President of the Economic Society of Australia (Queensland) from 2016 to 2018 and served on the advisory board of the Australian Government's Deregulation Taskforce between 2019 and 2020.

Professor Menezes was Head of UQ's School of Economics from 2009 to 2015. He chaired the Economics and Commerce Research Evaluation Committee for Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) 2018 and served as a member of the same committee for ERA 2015. He was also an elected member of UQ's Academic Board and its Standing Committee from 2018 to 2021.

Before joining UQ in 2006, Professor Menezes was Professor of Economics and Professor of Regulatory Economics at the Australian National University, where he was the foundation Director of the Australian Centre for Regulatory Economics. He also served as a part-time Vice President at Charles River Associates in Canberra from 2005 to 2006.

Professor Menezes is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a Distinguished Public Policy Fellow of the Economic Society of Australia. He has previously served as Associate Editor of the Journal of Public Economic Theory and Co-editor of the Economic Record. His research focuses on competition policy, regulation, market design, and the economics of the net zero transition, with applications spanning energy, digital platforms, infrastructure, and public policy. He is regularly sought by the media and policymakers for expert commentary on Australian economic policy, competition policy, and regulation.

His engagement with government and industry has been extensive. He has advised the Australian Government, the Australian Energy Market Commission, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal of New South Wales, the Queensland Competition Authority, and the ACT and Victorian governments on competition, regulation, and market design. He has also provided expert economic advice to public and private organisations across a wide range of sectors, including telecommunications, defence, fisheries, water, gambling, natural resources, electricity markets, dairy, banking, health, transport, aged care, the NDIS, and early childhood education and care.

I study aspects of reproductive physiology that impact fertility in cattle, early embryonic development, and precision animal agriculture technologies that can improve animal health and performance. The goal of my research program is to apply research-based knowledge to refine current and develop new bio-technologies that can be readily adopted by cattlemen.

My research program is centered on three focus areas:

1. To investigate reproductive physiology and advance reproductive efficiency of beef cattle through the development of reliable bio-technologies that can be quickly implemented;
2. To maintain collaborative research that focuses on investigating early embryonic development in cattle;
3. To develop reliable, efficient, and profitable management strategies and technologies that can enhance the productivity of beef production systems.

Professor Tim Mercer is Founding Director of the BASE mRNA Facility at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), The University of Queensland, and an NHMRC Leadership Fellow.

BASE is a national NCRIS-supported facility that designs, manufactures and tests mRNA-LNP medicines. Its production facility at the Translational Research Institute supplies mRNA-LNPs to around 120 research laboratories across Australia, and its new clinical manufacturing suites will enable clinical-grade mRNA production. Tim's team develops new methods for mRNA design, manufacture and quality control, including the mRNArchitect design software, a single-step isothermal mRNA synthesis reaction, and nanopore sequencing for mRNA quality control.

Tim trained in computational biology and genomics, and his early work contributed to the discovery of long non-coding RNAs. He has held positions at the Broad Institute, the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona and the Garvan Institute. He has translated his research into clinical tools, including targeted RNA sequencing, now a first-line diagnostic for cancer fusion genes, and synthetic RNA and DNA controls for clinical genome sequencing.

Tim serves on the Executive Board of the Alliance for mRNA Medicines and chairs its Asia-Pacific Committee.

My research and teaching interests include development, applied microeconometrics, agriculture, poverty, and the environment. I am particularly interested in using new data sources and new empirical methods to improve our understanding of a wide range of outcomes, especially the SDGs.

My current work focuses on three separate strands of literature: labor allocation, poverty, and methodologies to improve estimates of statistics of interest to economists and policymakers. Ongoing work studies how households allocate their labor in developing countries, especially across sectors. I work on the effects of pollution on agricultural productivity as well as how a changing environment affects labor allocation decisions. I also have ongoing work studying poverty and the best ways to improve poverty estimates, whether across time or across space. Relatedly, in work with regular collaborators, we are studying the best options to estimate different statistics – including poverty and labor force statistics – in developing countries, where data infrastructure may not allow the types of methods used in developed countries. For example, we are studying whether small area estimation methods or machine learning methods offer more accurate predictions of different outcomes and at different levels of aggregation. As part of my small area estimation and poverty work, I take part in capacity building with the United Nations Statistics Division and the World Bank to improve the understanding of small area estimation across the world. Current work revolves around disseminating working guidelines as well as in-person workshops for officials from national statistics offices.

I lead the Carbon & Climate Change Group in the Centre for Environmental Responsibility in Mining.

My research to date has focused on:

• The role of weathering of serpentinites and other ultramafic rocks in the global carbon cycle
• Development of carbon offset projects for mining companies, including reforestation, enhanced rock weathering, and carbon mineralisation projects
• Sourcing feedstocks for reaction with carbon dioxide
• Carbon accounting at mine sites, with a focus on accounting for land-use change emissions
• Environmental impacts of nickel mining, particularly laterite deposits
• Exploration and mining of marine placer deposits, including diamond, gold, and platinum‑group‑element deposits
• Geochemical and mineralogical tools for mineral exploration, for both traditional commodities and feedstocks for reaction with carbon dioxide

I joined the Sustainable Minerals Institute in 2026 after 14 years working in the mining industry in both geology and sustainability roles, including working as a Climate Change Specialist for the De Beers Group and a Carbon Mitigation Principal for Anglo American.

I have worked on mining and mineral exploration projects on four continents: North America, South America, Africa, and Australia. During my Ph.D. studies, I conducted fieldwork in the Sultanate of Oman in the Middle East.

In addition to my academic research, I am a writer and enjoy writing about science for a general audience. I wrote a geology blog for the American Geophysical Union for several years, and my book Rocks & Minerals: An Illustrated Field Guide was published by Cider Mill Press (an imprint of HarperCollins) in 2023.

Professor Frederic Meunier obtained his Masters degree in Neurophysiology at the Paris XI University, France in 1992 and completed his Ph.D in Neurobiology at the CNRS in Gif-sur-Yvette, France in 1996. He was the recipient of a European Biotechnology Fellowship and went on to postgraduate work at the Department of Biochemistry at Imperial College (1997-1999) and at Cancer Research UK (2000-2002) in London, UK. After a short sabbatical at the LMB-MRC in Cambridge (UK), he became a group leader at the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Queensland (Australia) in 2003. He joined the Queensland Brain Institute of the University of Queensland in 2007 and obtained an NHMRC senior research fellowship in 2009 renewed in 2014 with promotion. He became Professor in 2014 at the Queensland Brain Institute and is currently part of the Centre for Ageing Dementia Research.

Dr Lin Mi is a Senior Lecturer in Finance at the UQ Business School. Lin's research interests include corporate finance and real estate finance. Her work has been published in well-regarded international journals including Journal of Banking and Finance, British Accounting Review, Economic Modelling, International Review of Finance, Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, and Accounting and Finance.

Dr Silvia Micheli (BArch Politecnico di Milano; PhD, IUAV, Venice) is Associate Professor and Program Convener of the Bachelor of Architectural Design. She joined The University of Queensland in 2012 after 5-year of teaching and research at the Politecnico di Milano. Dr Micheli works across design and history of architecture.

Her design research is cross-disciplinary, focusing on the notion of ‘productive city’ and how small-scale projects can enhance liveability and resilience in our communities. Her forthcoming co-authored book, House, Precinct and Territory: Design Strategies for the Productive City (ORO, 2024) discusses concrete scenarios for urban production. Dr Micheli is concurrently investigating strategies to enhance urban horticulture and farming practices through design to increase food security in the urban environment.

Dr Micheli is an accomplished scholar with a strong track record in contemporary architectural studies and a wide range of outputs, including exhibitions, NTROs and publications. She is co-curator of the forthcoming exhibition on the work of AIA gold medallist Enrico Taglietti, in partnership with the Canberra Museum and Gallery (CMAG). She co-designed the Blue Bower Pavilion, recipient of the Crossroads Prize at the 2021 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, as a manifesto of urban resilience during COVID19. In 2018, Silvia's co-designed the multi-awarded residential building One Room Tower, a demonstration project for the densification of the city.

Amongst Dr Micheli’s publications, there is her co-authored critical book on the mechanism of cultural production in late 20th century, Paolo Portoghesi: Architecture between History, Politics and Media (Bloomsbury, 2023); the co-edited volume Italy/Australia: Postmodern Architecture in Translation (URO, 2018), that reflects on the influence of Italian design culture on Australian architecture; the co-edited book Aalto beyond Finland: Buildings, Projects and Network (Helsinki, 2018), which explores the global reach of the work of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and her contribution to the travelling exhibition catalogue Alvar Aalto: Second Nature, (Vitra Design Musem, 2014), with an essay on the impact of Italian urban culture on Aalto’s design approach.

Contextually, Silvia has also co-authored the book Storia dell’architettura italiana 1985–2015 (Turin, 2013), which reflects on the mechanisms of architectural production in contemporary Italy; co-edited the volume Italia 60/70. Una stagione dell’architettura (Padua, 2010); solo-authored the volume Erik Bryggman 1891–1955. Architettura Moderna in Finlandia (Rome, 2009). Her first co-authored book, Lo spettacolo dell'Architettura: Profilo dell'ArchistarÓ, looks at the power of media in the making of design culture.

Dr Micheli has a range of international collaborations with cultural institutions, such as the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Triennale di Milano, Centre Pompidou, MAXXI Museum, Alvar Aalto Foundation and Vitra Design Museum. She has also liaised with prestigious academic institutions, including Seoul National University, Berlage Institute, Politecnico di Milano and University of Manchester. In 2019, Dr Micheli was Visiting Professor at the School of Art and Design at the Guangdong University of Technology, China.

Since 2016, Dr Micheli has assisted to secure DFAT funding to foster UQ students mobility in the Asia Pacific Region, liaising with international academic and industry partners in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Singapore, Hong Kong and Seoul.

Dr Silvia Micheli is a registered architect (Board of Architects, Lecco, Italy) and member of the editorial board of the Springer book series Transnational Histories of Design Cultures and Production.

Dr Renée Mickelburgh is a communication scholar at the University of Queensland (UQ). With over two decades of experience in communication — from journalism and political communication, through to civil society and now academia — Renée lectures and coordinates courses in media strategies and strategic communication. Her research considers how emotions circulate in the communication of wicked problems: specifically, gender violence and environmental justice. She is also concerned with how emerging technologies — particularly artificial intelligence — are reshaping strategic communication, advocacy, and public discourse.

Renée is the author of The ecofeminist storyteller: environmental communication through women's digital garden stories and has co-authored book chapters and journal articles focussed on the communicaiton of sexual consent among young adults. She has worked as a research fellow for UQ’s Sexual and Gender Violence Research Network and is now deputy lead of the School of Communication and Arts AI working Party. The AI Working Party aims to connect teachers, researchers and industry experts across disciplines including strategic communication, creative writing, literary studies, drama, digital media, and museum studies and provide a coordinated response to the opportunities and risks posed by AI. As an affiliate of UQ’s Centre for Communication and Social Change, she contributes to discussions on AI for public good and AI's impact on women.

Renée follows the transformative approaches of leading feminist writers and scholars by engaging with creative methods of inquiry in her teaching and research.

Renée is open to supervision and welcomes inquires from potential post-graduate students in the following areas:

• Feminist environmental communication
• Gender violence
• Feminist media studies
• Participatory research methods
• Affective and creative methodologies
• Strategic communication and advocacy
• Digital intimacies