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Patrick Parkinson is an Emeritus Professor at the TC Beirne School of Law. Professor Parkinson was Dean of Law at the TC Beirne School of Law from 2018 - 2021. Professor Parkinson is a specialist in family law, child protection, law and religion and the law of equity and trusts. His books include Australian Family Law in Context (8th ed, 2023), Tradition and Change in Australian Law (5th ed, 2013), Family Law and the Indissolubility of Parenthood (2011), The Voice of a Child in Family Law Disputes (with Judy Cashmore, 2008), Child Sexual Abuse and the Churches (2nd ed, 2003) and Principles of Equity (editor, 2nd ed., 2003). Professor Parkinson served from 2004-2007 as Chairperson of the Family Law Council, an advisory body to the federal Attorney- General, and also chaired a review of the Child Support Scheme in 2004-05 which led to the enactment of major changes to the Child Support Scheme. He was President of the International Society of Family Law from 2011-14. Professor Parkinson is also well-known for his community work concerning child protection. He has been a member of the NSW Child Protection Council, and was Chairperson of a major review of the state law concerning child protection which led to the enactment of the Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act 1998. He also works with churches on child protection and religious freedom issues.

Joni is an applied anthropologist whose work examines the social impacts of resource extraction. Her research focuses on Aboriginal employment and enterprise development in the resources sector, cultural heritage, gender, agreements between Aboriginal communities and resource companies, governance, and post-mining land use. More recently, Joni has contributed to a socio-spatial analysis of Australia’s critical minerals resources and their policy implications for communities, as well as an innovative project co-designing Indigenous wellbeing metrics in mining regions.

I am a molecular virologist and ARC DECRA Fellow at the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, where I am Deputy Team Leader of the Infection and Immunity theme. My research focuses on RNA virus evolution, host immunity, and RNA technologies for vaccines and therapeutics, linking four connected themes:

• Virus discovery and evolution: identifying and characterising novel viruses across diverse hosts using metatranscriptomics, phylogenetics, and comparative genomics, with particular focus on orthoflaviviruses and orthomyxoviruses
• Host–virus interactions: understanding how innate immune and RNAi pathways shape infection outcomes in mammalian and arthropod systems
• Reverse genetics: developing CPER-based systems, reporter viruses, and replicons for mechanistic virology and rapid hypothesis testing
• RNA platforms: engineering self-amplifying RNA to tune stability, expression, and immune sensing for vaccines and therapeutics

I completed my PhD (2016–2021) at UQ's School of Biological Sciences under Prof. Sassan Asgari, where I characterised the virome of Aedes mosquitoes and their interactions with the endosymbiont Wolbachia. In 2021, I joined Prof. Alexander Khromykh's RNA Virology Laboratory at SCMB. There, I contributed to the development of the SARS-CoV-2 CPER reverse-genetics system and have worked routinely with PC3 pathogens, including West Nile virus, Japanese encephalitis virus, and SARS-CoV-2. In 2026, I commenced an ARC DECRA Fellowship to investigate how modified nucleotides shape RNA structure, immune sensing, and function in next-generation RNA technologies. My current work is funded by the ARC and NHMRC.

I provide bioinformatics and phylogenetics support within UQ and internationally, and welcome collaborations involving small RNA analysis, virus discovery and metatranscriptomics.

I served on the organising committee of MicroSeq (2023–2025), an Australasian conference promoting microbial sequencing research by early-career researchers. I am the Communications Officer for ASM Queensland (2024–) and an incoming Committee of Management member for the Australasian Virology Society (2026–).

Cameron is an Australian Research Council Industry Fellow in partnership with Micah Projects.

Cameron’s research spans three linked areas of society. The first theme examines social problems. Cameron is interested in how social problems are framed, experienced, and contribute to the alienation of people affected and social dislocation. Cameron’s second theme of enquiry engages the myriad things society does about social problems. He is interested in the link between the framing and experience of social problems and the funded and practice solutions delivered. This includes both formal human services and voluntary and ground up community actions. The third theme of Cameron’s research seeks to uncover and extend empirical, theoretical, and ethical ideas for what a society that ends and prevents social problems would look like. This body of work is interested in not only how competing ideas for social cohesion can co-exist, but also how people holding competing ideas can come together to progress social cohesion through a diversity of disagreement.

In his first book, The Homeless Person in Contemporary Society, Cameron sought to highlight how the representation of people who are homeless as distinct informs a policy and practice agenda that he characterised as a poverty of ambition. Cameron's second book with Andrew Clarke and Francisco (Paco) Perales, Charity and Poverty in Advanced Welfare States, takes on the question how can we be just by soothing the consequences of poverty without addressing the causes of poverty.

Cameron's most recent book published by Polity Press, Homelessness, demonstrates that homelessness is a punishing, predictable, yet solvable social problem.https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=9781509554492

Professor Riitta Partanen is the Director of the Rural Clinical School. The Rural Clinical School (RCS) includes four Regional Clinical Units based in Bundaberg, Hervey Bay, Rockhampton and Toowoomba and the Rural and Remote Medicine Clinical Unit which includes over 50 communities across the southern half of Queensland. Additionally, the RCS has three Regional Training Hubs (RTH). They are the Central Queensland, Wide Bay and Southern Queensland RTHs. Prof Partanen contributed significantly to the establishment of the Central Queensland - Wide Bay Regional Medical Pathway and the Darling Downs - South West Medical Pathway enabling students to study medicine in its entirity in regional and rural Queensland.

Prof Partanen is a specialist GP and continues to be clinically active having already served the community of Maryborough, Qld since 1994.

As the inaugural Head of the Hervey Bay Regional Clinical Unit (HBRCU), she has been involved with UQ Rural Clinical School since 2005. Since then, her roles have also included: the Co-Director of Learning for the RCS, GP Academic Lead for HBRCU, Acting Head of the UQRCS, and the Academic Lead for Phase 2 (Years 3 &4) of the UQ Medical Program. She handed over the reins of the Head of the HBRCU in 2020 after 15 years, when she commenced as the Director, RCS. From January 2026 to July 2026 Prof Partanen was the Interim Dean of the Medical School.

Previously Prof Partanen has served as Board member and Chair of the Wide Bay Division of General Practice, member of RACGP Rural Medical Education Committee and is currently member of the RACGP Doctors for Women in Rural Medicine Committee and the Rural Doctor's Australia Association's Female Doctors Group. Prof Partanen is the Chair of the national FRAME (Federation of Rural Australian Medical Educators) Policy Group. Previously she was the FRAME co-delegate for the National Rural Health Alliance. She interested in contributing to policy development and innovations in medical education and training pathways so that rural communities have equitable access to health care, close to home at the time they need it.

Her research interests include rural medical workforce, rural medical education, rural training pathways and General Practice issues such as depression and liver disease. She is currently a PhD candidate exploring geographical narcissism during medical education and training and its impact on rural medical practice decisions.

Our research focuses on understanding how cells work and what goes wrong in disease. We are studying the role of cellular organelles in defence against pathogens, the molecular changes underlying muscle disease, and optimising methods to deliver therapeutics to specific cell types in whole animals.

Professor Robert Parton is an ARC Laureate Fellow, a group leader in the IMB Centre for Cell Biology of Chronic Disease, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and an Associate Member of EMBO.

I am an applied mathematcian, using mathematics to improve decision-making outcomes for biodiversity conservation and epidemics management. My primary expertise lies in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes and the Value of Information, and have research interestest in Operations Research, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.

I am in ECR Representative for the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, currently organising the weekly seminars for the centre.

I completed my PhD at the Queensland University of Technology, designing optimization approaches for biodiversity conservation using new technologies.

After completing my undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Melbourne, I had a Postdoctoral position at the University of Melbourne from 2011-2013 and held a Victorian Postdoctoral Resarch Fellowship at Kings College London (UK) from 2014-2015 and University of Melbourne in 2016. I took up an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship at Monash University from 2017-2019 and was a National Imaging Facility research fellow from 2020-2021. I joined The University of Queensland in 2022 as the Head of Radiochemistry at the Centre for Advanced Imaging.

Ralph Patrick is a researcher focussed on understanding the molecular drivers of ageing and age-associated diseases and developing new therapeutic approaches to help alleviate diseases of ageing. He is trained as a computational biologist, with a BSc (Hons) and PhD from the University of Queensland (UQ). After completion of his PhD in 2016, he worked as a postdoctoral scientist at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute (VCCRI) in Sydney for nearly six years. At the VCCRI, a major focus of his research was mapping out how the individual cells of the heart respond to a heart attack at the gene expression level and how these compare to other forms of chronic heart disease. Following the VCCRI, he joined the Ageing and Cellular Reprogramming lab at the IMB in 2022 as a postdoctoral fellow. His work at the IMB focusses on understanding the epigenetic and transcription factor drivers of the ageing process and leveraging this knowledge to develop new strategies for restoring youthful cell states. Any potential collaborators or students interested in this research area are welcome to contact him.

Dr Cassandra Pattinson research centres around exploring the effects of sleep and circadian rhythms on health, wellbeing, and recovery across the lifespan. Dr Pattinson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Child Health Research Centre (CHRC), an ARC Discovery Early Career Award (DECRA) Fellow, and a Senior Research Fellow as part of the the ARC centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. Her work has been supported by the ARC, NHMRC, NIH and the DSTG, as well as the Australian Federal Government and Queensland Government.

Her research has involved a range of populations from children and adolescents, through to military personnel and athletes. Dr Pattinson's research spans a range of study designs and methodologies, including longitudinal studies tracking large child cohorts (>2000 children), standard observation techniques, survey and individualised standard child assessment, as well as studies employing physiological (actigraphy, spectrometry) and biological (hormones, proteomic, genomic) designs. Dr Pattinson also has a strong track record in research translation, these have included manuscripts in top scientific journals, reports for government and non-government organisations, development of professional development programs, as well as designing and presenting vodcasts and resources (e.g. fact sheets, workshops) to parent groups, young adults, government departments and the early childhood sector.

At CHRC Dr Pattinson is a part of the Community Sleep Health Group. This group collaborates with many other groups around broader issues of sleep and technology, sleep and the environment (including disasters), mental health and wellbeing, pain, disability, and new technologies and approaches.

• Director, Department of Nuclear Medicine & PET Services, Royal Brisbane & Women’s Hospital
• Theranostics Lead, Department of Nuclear Medicine & Specialised PET Services, Royal Brisbane & Women's Hospital
• Co-Director of Training, Department of Nuclear Medicine & Specialised PET Services, Royal Brisbane & Women’s Hospital
• Professor, School of Medicine, University of Queensland

David underwent dual specialty training in both Endocrinology and Nuclear Medicine at Royal Melbourne Hospital, Austin Hospital and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne. He was appointed a staff specialist at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre at the completion of his training, where he continued to gain experience in a quaternary referral centre for theranostics treating patients from across south-east Australia and New Zealand. In 2016 he moved to Royal Brisbane & Women’s Hospital where he is currently the Director of Department of Nuclear Medicine & PET Services and nuclear medicine lead for the RBWH radionuclide therapy service.

Julie’s research is mainly focussed on gas-water-rock core reactivity at reservoir conditions using experimental, field, and geochemical modelling techniques. Recent projects have been in the application of carbon dioxide geological storage in which CO2 is captured and stored in formations generally contained by low permeability cap-rock. The safe containment of the injected CO2 and the potential changes to rock porosity, permeability, and water quality should be determined. Recent and current projects with a focus on a demonstration site in the Surat Basin (Precipice Sandstone) include the impacts of impurity or acid gases present in industrial CO2 streams (collaboration with D. Kirste, SFU), inducing carbonate precipitation (in collaboration with S. Golding), and understanding dissolved metal sources and fate. Julie has also worked closely with the CO2CRC, CTSCo, Glencore, SEAL, the NSW government, CI-NSW, and ANLEC R&D, and provided expert opinion to the Queensland Government, and input to Environmental Impacts Assessments.

Julie is currently working with landholders, the QLD regional government, RDMW, councils and industry to understand the sources of methane in aquifers of the Great Artesian Basin, especailly those overlying coal seam gas reservoirs (CSG) (with Arrow Energy, SANTOS, APLNG, H. Hoffman, K, Baublys).

Other projects include gas-water-rock or acid-rock reactivity that modify nano-porosity and gas flow in gas or oil bearing shales.

Julie Pearce graduated with an MCHEM (Hons) degree in Chemistry from the University of York, UK. She then moved to the University of Bristol to complete a Ph.D. in 2007 focusing on laser spectroscopic studies to understand the detailed reaction dynamics of atmospheric processes. From 2007 – 2009 she accepted a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, hosted at Nagoya University, Japan. There she measured delta 13C and delta 18O isotopic signatures of CO2 simultaneously in real time in the atmosphere using a laser spectroscopic technique to understand anthropogenic and biogenic sources of CO2. After taking a career break to travel in 15 countries in Asia, she moved to Brisbane in 2010 where she is enjoying the surrounding natural beauty of Queensland.