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Dr Rebecca Packer is a Senior Lecturer in Speech Pathology at the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Behavioural Sciences. Dr Packer has attracted over 2.2M in research funding and published over 40 research articles and book chapters with her main focus on the impacts of swallowing disorders in head and neck cancer on survivors and their families.

Dr Junel Padigos is a registered nurse and an early career academic. He finished his PhD from the School of Public Health at The University of Queensland in 2024. In his PhD program, Junel was a recipient of the Australian Government Research Training Program Tuition Fee Offset and Stipend Scholarship, allowing him to complete his research focusing on the role of nurses in antimicrobial optimisation in the intensive care unit. Junel currently works as a Nurse Educator in the Nursing and Midwifery Practice Development Team in the Sunshine Coast. Throughout his nursing career, he has worked in acute care specialties such as emergency, spinal, acute neurosurgery, intensive care, and coronary care. As a qualified educator and a practising nurse, Junel's research interests focus on education, health promotion, knowledge-to-practice translation, and implementation science.

Dr Antonio Padilha L. Bo completed the BEng and MSc at the University of Brasília, Brazil, in 2004 and 2007, respectively, and he was awarded the PhD from the University of Montpellier, France, in 2011. From 2011 to 2019, he has been a tenured assistant professor in electrical engineering at the University of Brasilia, Brazil, where he coordinated Project EMA (Empowering Mobility and Autonomy), which is one of the teams that took part in the Cybathlon competition in 2016 and 2020. He has co-authored over 75 peer-reviewed publications, including awards from societies such as IFAC, IFESS, and MICCAI.

Over the past ten years, Dr Bo has been engaged in research projects concerning the development of technology dedicated to healthcare, particularly in the design of systems to be directly used by a patient in rehabilitation or assistive settings. Every effort featured strong experimental work and was conducted in close collaboration with local rehabilitation centers. In his work, tools from neuroengineering, robotics, control, virtual reality, and instrumentation are often integrated to create devices and algorithms to sense and control human motion. For instance, he has used wearable sensors to segment and estimate parameters of human movement in real-time, a technique that may lead to novel rehabilitation protocols. More importantly, his work has also focused on developing closed-loop control strategies for electrical stimulation applications and prosthetic/orthotic devices. Some examples include systems based on superficial electrical stimulation to enable persons with spinal cord injury to exercise using the lower limbs (e.g. in cycling or rowing) and to attenuate the effects of pathological tremor in essential tremor and Parkinson's Disease.

His long-term research goal is to develop and evaluate the use of noninvasive technology, including electrical stimulation, robotics, virtual reality, and wearable devices, for improving rehabilitation and assistance for persons with motor disabilities.

Dr Pranesh Padmanabhan, an NHMRC Emerging Leadership (Level 2) Fellow and Senior Research Fellow, heads the Molecular and Systems Medicine Group at the School of Biomedical Sciences and Queensland Brain Institute. His group combines mathematical modelling and quantitative imaging techniques to uncover pathomechanisms of several infectious and neurodegenerative diseases, aiming to develop and optimise treatments.

Dr. Padmanabhan began his research career as a chemical engineering PhD student in Prof. Narendra Dixit’s lab at the Indian Institute of Science. He focused on hepatitis C virus infection, innate immunity, and treatment optimisation through mathematical modelling. He received the Kuloor Memorial Medal for the best PhD thesis. In 2015, he secured a competitive three-year University of Queensland postdoctoral fellowship, joining the Queensland Brain Institute to work with Profs. Geoffrey Goodhill, Frederic Meunier, and Jürgen Götz, integrating computational modelling and molecular imaging approaches to address basic and translation neuroscience problems.

Throughout his career, Dr. Padmanabhan has secured over $2.6M in grant funding as the lead chief investigator and published in top-ranking journals, including Nature Computational Science, Nature Aging, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Nature Reviews Neurology, Nature Communications, PNAS, EMBO Journal, Journal of Cell Biology, eLife, and PLoS Computational Biology.

Dr Julia Pagan heads the Targeted Protein Degradation lab.

Dr Ashley Paine is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Co-Director of the ATCH Research Centre (Architecture Theory Culture History) at the University of Queensland, Australia. His current research examines the collection, preservation, and reconstruction of buildings in museums, with a particular focus on the work of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. His broader research and teaching interests span architectural history, intersections of art and architecture, as well as historic preservation and adaptive re-use.

Paine was the lead editor of the book, Valuing Architecture: Heritage and the Economics of Culture (2020) published by Valiz as part of the “Studies in Art and Architecture” series. He has also contributed to two other books in this series, as a co-editor of Trading between Architecture and Art: Strategies and Practices of Exchange (2019) and co-author of Pavilion Propositions: Nine Points on an Architectural Phenomenon (2018). He has presented his research in conferences across Australia and New Zealand, Europe and the United States, and published extensively in international books and journals including arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, AA Files, and Future Anterior.

Paine is also a practicing architect, and co-founder of PHAB Architects: a Brisbane-based studio focused on public projects, exhibition design, residential, and heritage buildings.

Dr Anton Pak is a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for the Business and Economics of Health, The University of Queensland. Anton is an applied economist by training and his research interests focus on the behaviour of patients and their choices, utilisation of emergency department services, waiting time modelling, and the economics of digital health. Anton examines empirical questions by utilising health economics theory and concepts and by analysing large panel and cross-sectional datasets (including linked data) using classical econometrics techniques, as well as machine learning methods.

Anton is currently co-leading an Emergency Medicine Foundation funded project “ED waiting time predictions in real-time: development of data acquisition system and performance evaluation of advanced statistical models.”, which is being undertaken in partnership with Princess Alexandra Hospital. Anton has worked extensively on interdisciplinary research with statisticians, mathematical modellers, clinicians, epidemiologists, and public health experts.

Prior to joining the Centre, Anton worked as a Research Fellow in Applied Economics and Data Scientist at James Cook University. His previous experience also includes working as a management consultant and university lecturer.

Anton has a PhD (Economics) from The University of Queensland.

Kenneth Pakenham, PhD, is an Emeritus Professor of clinical and health psychology in the School of Psychology at The University of Queensland, Australia. His research and clinical practice in psychology spans 40 years. Inspired by the resilience of some people with serious illnesses, he has committed much of his career to investigating the processes that foster personal growth in the context of health adversities, and to translating his findings into interventions that help people live fully with illness. This passion has driven his empirical, theoretical and translational research, curriculum development, and clinical training and supervision. Importantly, his work has included not only the person with chronic illness, but also his or her network, particularly the carer. Through his 180+ publications, over 80 conference presentations, 3 research awards, and more than 3 million dollars of competitive grant funding, he has become a leader in the application of positive health frameworks to several chronic illnesses, and to caregiving in these contexts. His research has helped to inform government policies, particularly those related to carers, and establish interventions and assessment protocols within government and community services. The “living fully with illness” theme integrates his early research in stress/coping theory, his mid-career shift to incorporate the rise of positive psychology, and his current and future focus on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Using ACT to extend his research on living fully with illness has also invigorated his teaching. He developed the first ACT university course in Australia. This course integrates training in therapist competencies and self-care skills and shows published empirical evidence of fostering competent and resilient clinicians. Through peer reviewed publications, conference and keynote presentations, and three teaching awards, he has become a leader in integrating training in therapist and self-care competencies into clinical psychology curricula using an ACT framework. He has six teaching awards including two national teaching awards. He has supervised the postgraduate research of 53 students. He has served in many influential professional roles including: Chair of the Registration Committee of the Psychologists Board of Queensland for over 10 years, Director of The University of Queensland Psychology Clinic for 7 years, Honours Convenor for 3 years, and member of the editorial boards for six international journals.

His career-long commitment to ‘practice what you teach’ is epitomised in his recently published memoir The Trauma Banquet: Eating Pain – Feasting on Life.

Chiara is Professor in Veterinary Pathology at the School of Veterinary Science (SVS) of the University of Queensland (UQ). She is a board certified specialist veterinary pathologist (Diplomate of the European College of Veterinary Pathology), graduated with a DVM from the University of Teramo (Italy) in 2002 and a PhD in Ultrastructural Pathology in 2006. Before joining UQ in 2012, she has been working as an Assistant Professor in Veterinary Pathology at the University of Teramo (Italy). She has a specific research interest is small animal oncology, in particular canine prostate cancer, and veterinary oncoepidemiology. She is Chair of the canine prostate cancer subgroup at the Oncology Pathology Working Group (OPWG), co-coordinator of the Global Initiative for Veterinary Cancer Surveillance (GIVCS) committee for the establishment of international standards of veterinary cancer registration and team leader of the comparative oncology theme of the Queensland Alliance of One Health Science. She is also member of the board of the Veterinary Cancer Guidelines and Protocols (VCGP) group, member of the Oncology Committee of the World Small Animal Veterinary Association (WSAVA) and chair of the ESVP/ECVP DEI task force. She is past President of the Australian Society for Veterinary Pathology and, within UQ SVS, she has been postgraduate coursework coordinator (2014-2017), HDR coordinator (2017-2019) and Director of Research (2019-2021). She is now coordinator of the UQ SVS veterinary pathology postgraduate training program. She has received several academic awards, including SVS awards for research excellence (2017, 2021), best lecturer (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), and UQ award for excellence in HDR supervision (2020). She has published more than 120 papers on international journals, 3 book chapters and numerous abstracts in proceedings of national and international conferences. She has > 15 years expertise in veterinary diagnostic pathology, histopathology, IHC and TEM in multiple species. Since her first academic appointment in 2005, she mentored several postgraduate and undergraduate students in diagnostic investigation of animal cancer and research in canine oncology. Although outside the field of comparative oncology, she also a unique expertise in avian pathology and transmission electron microscopy.

Career Summary: 2009: PhD, University of Michigan, USA with training in cardiac physiology, modelling myocardial ischemia in vivo and in vitro, and development of therapeutic approaches for myocardial ischemia; 2009–2015: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Washington, Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, USA with training in stem cell biology, genomics, genome editing, and cell therapeutics for ischemic heart disease; 2015–current: Group Leader, University of Queensland (UQ), Institute for Molecular Bioscience; 2022-current: Associate Professor, UQ; 2018–2021 and 2023-2026: National Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellow. Dr. Palpant’s research team has expertise in human stem cell biology, computational genomics, and cardiac physiology, which enables them to translate outcomes from cell biology and genomics to disease modelling, drug discovery, and preclinical modelling.