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Dr Kath Benfer is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Queensland Cerebral Palsy and Rehabilitation Research Centre, The University of Queensland. Her Post-Doctoral work focuses on community-based early detection and intervention for infants at high risk of cerebral palsy in low-resource countries (India and Bangladesh). She was awarded the prestigious Endeavour Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Scholarship through the Australian Commonwealth Government to conduct the study. Kath’s PhD explored oropharyngeal dysphagia, gross motor function, growth and nutrition in preschool children with cerebral palsy, in both Australia and Bangladesh. Her work arising from her doctoral studies has been published in 10 peer-reviewed publications and presented widely at international conferences. Dr Benfer has over 12 years of experience as a speech pathologist within paediatric disability, with community-based child and family support services. Kath also has an interest in cross-cultural issues in child health, having worked in Bangladesh for over 2 years both as an AusAid volunteer teaching on the country’s first Bachelor of Speech Therapy degree, as well as conducting research in this context. She has completed her Master of Public Health at La Trobe University in Melbourne within the research and international health streams.

Dr Claudia Benham is an environmental social scientist working on coastal and marine ecosystems. Her research examines the intersections between environmental change, resource development, human wellbeing and governance in coastal regions of northern Australia and the Pacific. As part of this, her work examines the processes and outcomes of environmental governance in these settings, including deliberative and community-based approaches. Claudia has an interdisciplinary background in the social and ecological sciences, and brings this perspective to bear on her work. She previously worked for the UQ Global Change Institute and the Australian Department of Environment.

Keywords: Public policy; Seagrasses; Gender; Unconventional gas; Great Barrier Reef

Associate Professor Sarah Bennett is the Program Director, Bachelor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Queensland. Her research interests include evidence-based policing and practice, procedural justice and legitimacy, experimental criminology, and organisational practice. These interests are interwoven within three research aims to 1) advance the role of police and police training in improving outcomes for survivors, offenders and communities, 2) innovate and apply rigorous research methods in real world settings to inform policy and practice and 3) advance organisational facilitators and theories for effective practice. Sarah has significant and internationally unique expertise in delivering complex research projects with translational benefits to improve policing practice in the UK and Australia. Sarah is a Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology (AEC). Sarah is invested in strong partnerships to facilitate measurable and meaningful research outcomes.

Lily is a movement ecologist and Research Fellow. She is interested in how and where highly mobile predators travel, what their journeys can teach us about their evolutionary histories, and how to translate research findings into effective conservation policies. She is also a Deputy Director of the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science. She received her BSc (Hons) from the University of Queensland, studying the thermal physiology and behaviour of wild saltwater crocodiles. In her PhD, at the University of Cambridge, she investigated the foraging ecology of albatrosses and petrels across the Southern Ocean. She is currently working on using animal tracking data and network models to understand migratory connectivity in the oceans, and is the UQ lead of a multi-institution partnership tracking tropical seabirds in the Great Barrier Reef.

Dr Laura Bentley is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Child Health Research Centre at The University of Queensland. Laura has a background in developmental psychology and her PhD explored the impact of music on early cognition and self-regulation skills. Laura is currently working on a MRFF funded project (AusCP MSK) which aims to identify the early biomarkers of musculoskeletal complications in children with moderate-severe cerebral palsy (GMCS III-V).

Dr Laura Desha (Bergade) is a post doctoral research fellow in the Division of Occupational Therapy, in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, working with Professor Jenny Ziviani and an international team of researchers who are developing a suite of measures to assess client engagement in paediatric rehabililtation (the PRIME tools).

Laura's research has explored the concept of healthy lifestyles for children and their families, with a focuss on the ways that people use their time. She has a particular interest in the impact that family routines and time use choices have on children’s emotional and physical wellbeing, and how families can adapt their routines to foster healthier lifestyles when managing conditions such as overweight, depression and diabetes. Laura's research involves interrogation of large national and international datasets, as well as smaller targeted qualitative and quantitative studies.

After receiving a PhD on immune regulation from La Sorbonne Universitas in France, Anne-Sophie joined Prof. Ian Frazer’s lab in Australia in 2010 where she led a highly successful and independent research program on the mechanisms of immune tolerance in human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated lesions in mice. She then joined the field of autoimmune diseases with Prof. Ranjeny Thomas in 2016. In Type 1 Diabetes (2016-2018), her pre-clinical data showed the feasibility of an antigen-specific liposome targeted immunotherapy in pre-diabetic mice and led to the first-in-human clinical trial using liposome nanoparticles.

Since 2019, her research program investigates how immune cells and microbes at mucosal barrier sites contribute to autoimmune and infection-associated disease in inflammatory arthritis, like Spondyloarthritis.

Her pre-clinical work has advanced the concept that the gut microbiome can influence autoimmune diseases affecting tissues outside the gut, including joints in inflammatory arthritis. Following up on this, her ongoing work aims to further understand how 1) gut bacteria-derived nanovesicles or BEVs may contribute to disease development, and 2) what pattern is presented to T cells and why T cells become pathogenic

Working towards translational research, her team is also establishing a humanised mouse model of psoriatic arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis to test alternative drugs, vehicles and biologics to treat arthritis in the context of human immune cells.

She is also working as a principal investigator in a pilot cohort study in synergy with Sanofi TSH at TRI, and clinicians at the Gold Coast precincts, to identify key immune biomarkers of Pelvic Inflammation Disease (PID) in individuals infected with Chlamydia trachomatis. This work aims to understand links between infection, pelvic inflammation disease and dysregulated immunity.

Ethan Beringen is a Lecturer at the School of Law at the University of Queensland. He was previously a Yong Pung How Research Fellow at the Centre for Commercial Law in Asia at Singapore Management University and completed his PhD within the Centre for Environmental Law at Macquarie University in Sydney. He has also been a guest PhD Researcher at the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea at UiT the Arctic University of Norway. Ethan’s research is focused on international environmental law, the law of the sea and international relations. Specifically, he is interested in the protection of marine biodiversity and the prevention of marine plastic pollution. He has published research on topics such as the negotiations for new biodiversity conservation and pollution prevention treaties, international fisheries law, Australia’s ocean governance, regime interaction and middle power theory.

Dr Michael Bermingham’s research is primarily concerned with advanced manufacturing of metal materials. This also involves metal alloy development including understanding how the manufacturing process influences the structure and behaviour of the material and how alloy design can be optimised for the process. He has research expertise in solidification processing (including casting, welding, soldering and additive manufacturing) as well as subtractive metal machining technologies.

Michael was awarded his PhD from the University of Queensland in 2010 with a Dean’s award for Outstanding Higher Degree Theses. From 2010-2015 he completed a post-doctoral appointment sponsored by the then Defence Materials Research Centre (now DMTC Ltd) working with Australian manufacturers in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter supply chain. This work principally centred on developing advanced machining technologies for titanium fabrication. The impact of this work was assessed and awarded the highest rating of “A: Outstanding impacts in terms of reach and significance” in the 2012 ATN Go8 EIA National Report. During this time Michael also completed a post-doctoral appointment investigating new materials and design solutions for implantable medical devices in collaboration with a multinational medical device manufacturer.

Michael became a Lecturer in the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering in 2016 and has been a Senior Lecturer since 2020. He teaches into undergraduate and postgraduate courses in materials, manufacturing and design and has won a number of teaching awards including a 2020 Australian Award for University Teaching (AAUT) Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning. In 2023 he became an ARC Future Fellow seeking to improve the quality of 3D printed metals.

Michael has been successful in obtaining competitive grant funding including over $9.2m in ARC projects (1x ARC Future Fellowship, 1x ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, 2 x ARC Discovery Projects, 1 x ARC Linkage Project, 1 x ARC Research Hub) as well as $0.75m in funding across multiple internal schemes and direct industry sponsored/contract research projects.

Aude is a demographer/population geographer at the Queensland Centre for Population Research at the University of Queensland. Her research focuses on understanding internal migration processes and their consequences for individuals, regions and nations. Her contributions to formal demography include the development of measurement and estimation techniques that facilitate large-scale international comparisons of migration levels, patterns and selectivity. Building on the life-course perspective, her theoretical contributions include the concept of migration capital and the intergenerational transmission of migration.

She leads a group of PhD students and post-doctoral fellows who work on internal migration in partnership with international organisations, federal and state government departments on a range of the methodological and applied issues. Aude's current projects include:

- Microsimulation population projections for migration policy

- The long-term consequences of childhood migration

- The impact of climate change on internal migration

She is currently Chief Investigator on two Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects and a Linkage Project in partnership with the University of Melbourne, the University of New England, Shanghai University, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Treasury’s Centre for Population.

She co-edits of the Journal of Population Research, co-chairs the IUSSP Scientific Panel on Lifetime Migration and sits on the Commonwealth's Treasury experts panel on population.

After completing my undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Newcastle, I held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Basel (Switzerland) from 1990-2. I returned to Australia in 1993 to take up an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Australian National University (Canberra) from 1993-4. I joined The University of Queensland in 1994.

Professor Debra Bernhardt is internationally recognised for her contributions to the development of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and thermodynamics including far-from-equilibrium fluids and confined fluids. She is a Fellow of Australian Academy of Science and the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and an ARC Australian Laureate Fellow. Professor Bernhardt has held appointments at the University of Basel, Switzerland; the Australian National University; and Griffith University, where she was founding director of the Queensland Micro- and Nanotechnology Centre. Professor Bernhardt's research interests focus on the use of a range of theoretical and computational approaches to develop a fundamental understanding of the behaviour of matter, and application of these approaches to a wide range of problems including transport in nanopores, fluctuation phenomena, design of materials, gas separation, energy storage and conversion.

Stephany Berrio is a robotics researcher specialising in perception, mapping, and safety for autonomous vehicles, working at the intersection of machine learning and real-world deployment. Her research helps self-driving systems understand complex, changing urban environments and operate safely alongside people. Her current focus areas include:

• Multimodal perception and sensor fusion — developing algorithms that fuse camera, LiDAR, and radar data for robust scene understanding, semantic occupancy prediction, HD mapping, domain adaptation, and anomaly detection in intelligent transportation systems.
• Long-term mapping and localisation — enabling vehicles to maintain accurate position estimates as cities change over time.
• Open datasets and benchmarks — building publicly available multimodal datasets for anomaly segmentation, V2X collaboration, and driving in challenging conditions such as rain and rural roads.

Stephany completed her PhD at the University of Sydney's Australian Centre for Field Robotics on scene understanding and map maintenance for autonomous vehicles.

Dr François-René Bertin (DVM, MS, PhD, dipl.ACVIM (LAIM)) is an equine internist with expertise in clinical endocrinology.

François-René completed a Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine (University of Nantes, France), an American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (ACVIM) residency in equine internal medicine (Purdue University, USA) and a PhD in physiology (McGill University, Canada). He moved to the School of Veterinary Science at UQ in 2016.

François-René’s research interests lie in the pathophysiology of hyperinsulinaemia-associated laminitis and the disorders of the equine hypothalamo-pituitary adrenocortical axis. Some of his current projects examine the regulators of pancreatic b-cell activity and the mechanisms of pituitary gland senescence. François-René has received awards from the School of Veterinary Science and the Faculty of Science for his contribution to Research and HDR student supervision.

François-René teaches equine internal medicine into the veterinary science and veterinary technology programs and coordinates the Equine Clinical Studies course. He has received Teaching and Learning Faculty Awards.

Dr. Karl Bertling has made significant contributions to pioneering imaging and sensing via laser feedback interferometry, spanning diverse laser technologies including sensors based on visible lasers, infrared surface-emitting lasers, mid-infrared inter-band cascade lasers, and terahertz quantum cascade lasers. His current research focus includes leveraging terahertz quantum cascade laser feedback interferometry for early melanoma detection and agri-photonics, as well as near-field terahertz and mid-infrared imaging of nanomaterials and nanostructures.