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Dr Junel Padigos is a registered nurse 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 registered nurse and a nursing academic in Far North Queensland. 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 clinical education, health promotion, knowledge-to-practice translation, and implementation science.

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 experimental, mathematical modelling and quantitative imaging approaches 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 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 integrate computational modelling and molecular imaging approaches and to address basic and translational 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, Journal of Controlled Release, 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 health economist and Senior Research Fellow at The University of Queensland. He leads applied research and evaluation to inform healthcare investment, improve service delivery and assess the value of clinical and digital health innovations.

His research spans three connected areas: economic evaluation of healthcare interventions and clinical trials; digital health and clinical decision support; and the evaluation of health services and alternative models of care. He combines economic evaluation, decision modelling and applied econometrics with linked health data and machine learning to examine healthcare costs, outcomes, access and performance.

Anton works with clinicians, health service leaders, government and industry partners to turn practical questions into research and evaluation projects. His leadership experience includes developing partnerships and proposals, supervising research staff, coordinating multidisciplinary teams, and managing project resources and delivery. He works with partners throughout the research process, from defining priorities and designing studies to interpreting findings and communicating recommendations to decision-makers.

Anton also builds capability through postgraduate teaching, professional education and research supervision. He has co-developed courses in UQ’s Clinical Informatics and Digital Health program and has served as HDR Chair for the Centre for the Business and Economics of Health.

He is affiliated with the Centre for the Business and Economics of Health and the Queensland Digital Health Centre. He holds a PhD in Economics from UQ and previously worked as a Research Fellow in Applied Economics and Data Science at James Cook University. He welcomes research partnerships and supervision enquiries in health economics, digital health evaluation and health services research.

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 200+ 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. His resilience interventions are being used internationally to make a difference in the lives of people with serious health conditions. 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.

I am a Research Platform Fellow whose work bridges cognitive psychology, human factors, and organisational psychology. I develop computational models and research platforms that support rigorous investigation of human performance in complex, safety-critical environments.

Examples of my practical areas of research include modelling decision-making in high workload environments; improving the safety and efficiency of unmanned aerial systems operations; understanding the drivers of team resilience; supporting tactical decision-making in military contexts; designing AI tools grounded in cognitive theory; and assessing cognitive training interventions for operational performance.

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.

Professor Nathan Palpant is a cardiovascular scientist whose research integrates human genetics, computational genomics, stem-cell biology and drug discovery to understand the mechanisms of cardiovascular disease and translate these discoveries into new diagnostics and therapies.

His research focuses on why individuals differ in their susceptibility to heart disease, severity of myocardial injury and response to treatment. His laboratory studies inherited and environmental determinants of cardiovascular disease using population-scale genomics, human pluripotent stem-cell models and experimental models of cardiac injury. Major areas of research include myocardial infarction and cardioprotection, heart failure, inherited cardiovascular disease, cardiometabolic disease, complex-disease subtyping and precision medicine.

His research aims to connect fundamental discovery with clinical and commercial translation. His laboratory identified ASIC1a as a therapeutic target for myocardial injury, leading to first-in-class cardioprotective therapeutics now undergoing clinical development through Infensa Bioscience. He has also established Rosella Therapeutics to develop a new class of macrocyclic peptide therapeutics targeting cardiac muscle function to treat heart failure.

His broader research program develops genomic approaches for resolving biological subtypes of complex disease, functional genomics approaches for interpreting rare cardiovascular disease variants, and human stem-cell platforms for understanding genetic and environmental determinants of disease and drug response.

Dr Preeti Pandey is a highly enthusiastic and motivated formulation scientist with over 10 years of substantial experience across pharmaceutical science, as well as academia. She has strong educational, academic and research background in pharmaceutical science and pharmacology, with broad range of transferable and diverse skill set also comprising pharmaceutical formulation-medical device pairing and translation expertise. Her research work focuses on development of safe, effective and translational drug delivery system. Preeti completed her Bachelor in pharmacy and Master in pharmaceutics degree from India. Under the supervision of Dr Harendra Parekh she got awarded her PhD degree (2018) in pharmaceutical sciences from the School of Pharmacy, The University of Queensland, Australia. Her PhD research project involves "Formulation development and functional Evaluation of thermoresponsive soluble gels for sustained therapeutic intranasal delivery". Preeti has multiple years of experience of development of functional thermoresponsive sol-gels for controlled/sustained therapeutic delivery for a range of hydrophilic/hydrophobic/ bioactives to nasal/vaginal/oromucosal/otic delivery. Her expertise is also focusing on solubility and bioavailability enhancement of BCS Class II and IV drugs and formulation development for poorly water soluble compounds for various routes of adminitration.

Since graduating with a PhD, she has been working on multiple industry projects spanning the MTP sector, each with stringent deliverables, timelines and budgets. Given the high risk reward nature of the projects, which led to the creation of a spin-off company in Q1 2021 (for which she is a co-inventor of the platform drug delivery).

Prof Ben Panizza is the Chairman of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery for Metro South and Director of the Queensland Head and Neck Cancer Centre. He has been active in head and neck cancer management for 27 years. He has created innovative approaches in dealing with malignancies extending to the skull base one of the most anatomically complex regions of the body. He is recognised as a world leader in cutaneous malignancy extending to the temporal bone and perineurial spread of keratinocyte skin cancers, being regularly invited overseas to present. Prof Panizza is active in integrating new treatments with surgery to change treatment paradigms and improve outcomes for patients. He is a professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Queensland and works collaboratively with basic scientist and has supervised to completion 28 research higher degrees over the last 12 years. He has established an in department clinical trials unit to run clinical trials from proof of principle to phase 3 clinical trials enabling access and rapid translation for his scientific partners at the Princess Alexandra Hospital which has one of Australia's largest head and neck clinics. Prof Panizza is a clinical consultant and advisor to industry (Merck, Sanofi, QBiotics, Decibel Therapeutics) and sits on the governing bodies of both the International Federation of Head and Neck Oncological Societies and The World Federation of Skull Base Societies. He has been the President of the Australian and New Zealand Head and Neck Cancer Society and was the Foundation president of the Australian and New Zealand Skull Base Society. He is active in publishing and sits on the editorial boards of the major head and neck journals (Head Neck, Oral Oncology, Skull Base, ANZ Journal of Surgery).