Find an expert

Professor Maria Raciti (Kalkadoon-Thaniquith-Bwgcolman) is a social marketer dedicated to social justice and behaviour change. She co-founded and co-directs the UniSC Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre and co-leads the education and economies theme in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous Futures hosted by the University of Queensland. Maria is a member of the esteemed Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK). Her work is aligned with the United Nations SDG4 (Quality Education), SDG8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), and SDG10 (Reduced Inequalities), as well as the National Closing the Gap Targets 6 (Further Education) and 8 (Economic Participation).

Professor Radford leads the Cancer Immunotherapies Group at Mater Research Institute-UQ. Her research interests are focussed on understanding how the human immune system can be trained to recognise and fight cancer for the development of vaccines and immunotherapies.

Professor Radford’s leadership and globally-recognised expertise in the fields of human dendritic cell (DC), immuno-oncology, immunotherapy, cancer vaccines and humanised mice is evidenced by 59 publications in top journals including J Exp Med, Nat Immunol, Immunity and more than 50 invitations to speak. She has attracted >$6 million in funding as a Chief Investigator and >$5 million as a Co-Investigator. She has been recognised by awards including NHMRC CDF2 (2011-2014), Mater Medal for Outstanding Research Contribution 2015, ASI Miller Award 2018, a 2021 Fulbright Future Fellowship and Fellowship of the QLD Academy of Arts and Science.

Professor Radford’s expertise include development and clinical trial of the one of the first vaccines to use human circulating blood conventional DC (cDC) for cancer immunotherapy that was translated to a first-in-human clinical trial for metastatic prostate cancer. Her group was the first to functionally characterise the human cDC1 subset) and propose their potential as next-generation cancer vaccines, a finding described by international leaders as “a needle in the cancer vaccine haystack”. She has pioneered techniques to isolate cDC1s from human tissues, culture them from CD34 progenitors in vitro and in humanised mice in vivo and developed a suite of assays to interrogate their phenotype and function, including priming of human tumour specific immune responses. These have been applied to develop novel cancer vaccines that target human cDC1 in vivo, that are now being translated for commercialisation and clinical trial.

Professor Radford has pioneered the development of innovative models that faithfully replicate the human immune system (humanised mice). These are in high demand globally to enhance research impact and increase the speed and accuracy of immunotherapy drug development in oncology, autoimmunity, inflammatory and infectious disease. She has applied these to wide range of applications including hematopoeisis, cancer immunotherapy and autoimmune disease.

Professor Rae received her PhD in 2007 in the area of reproductive physiology and has been working in the area of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander maternal and infant health and chronic disease since that time. She began as the Group Lead for the Indigenous Health Research group at the Mater Research Institute in a role that bridges the Mater, University of QLD and is actively growing partnerships with the Aboriginal community-controlled health sector in QLD. The importance of maternal health for Indigenous communities has been identified as a critical national research priority by Indigenous communities. Her work has had a multidisciplicinary nature and while always focused on the health of Indigneous Australians she has published in areas including pregnancy and birth outcomes, nutrition, psychosocial health, growth and development during infancy, the use of arts in health education to name a few.She has a particular passion for working in partnership to co-design research projects that support improving health outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Her specific focus has primarily been to develop programs that reduce chronic diseases which afflict Aboriginal people more commonly through early detection and diagnosis, health education, and developing a thorough understanding of risk factors that impact on this community. She has mentored her team of staff and students to co-produce and co-disseminate findings from these programs of work and to build research capacity for all team members including those who identify as Indigenous and for those from rural locations of research studies.

Prior to her role at Mater Research, she was the inaugaral Director of the Gomeroi gaaynggal program (2007-2019), which had two major programs of work 1. ArtsHealth for community engagement, health education and health promotion and 2. A Health research program for understanding the development of chronic disease in the Indigenous community through the Gomeroi gaaynggal cohort. Program 1 was successful in transitioning its funding to local Aboriginal community-controlled sector in Tamworth (2019). Prior to its transition, she led a community focussed ArtsHealth program to improve health knowledge, particularly in the areas of social and emotional wellbeing in the community, with the assistance of a team of beginning Indigenous researchers. Over 100,000 hours of community education were delivered through this program. 2. The Gomeroi gaaynggal cohort work has involved the recruitment and retention of a prospective longitudinal cohort of Indigenous women from pregnancy through until the infants are 10 years of age highlighting her expertise in working with Indigenous families during their antenatal and early childhood years. The importance of maternal health for this population is a critical priority to improving the life-long health of the Indigenous communities of Australia.

Delineation of osteal macrophage function in the bone microenvironment: dual roles in bone dynamics and stem cell niches.

Bone and joint diseases are a national and international health and research priority costing the Australian health system over $10 billion annually. The bony skeleton is a dynamic metabolically active tissue that is continuously remodelled and repaired to maintain calcium homeostasis and structural integrity. The microenvironment at the inner surface of long bones (endosteum), including the bone matrix and associated bone lining cells, is crucial to the dynamic processes of bone modelling and remodelling. I have recently characterized 'osteomacs' as a resident tissue macrophage population within bone lining tissues and have shown that they promote bone mineralization in vitro and are necessary for the maintenance of bone forming osteoblasts in vivo. Thus osteomacs are cellular constituents of endosteal niches and play an osteoblast-support function in this microenvironment. We are investigating the unique phenotype and expression profile (mRNA and protein) of osteomacs in order to fully delineate their functional potential in bone dynamics.

Recently it has been shown that the endosteal environment is also essential for the maintenance of mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) and haematopoietic stem cell (HSC) niches. Osteoblasts need to be present on the bone surface to ensure HSC maintenance in the endosteal niche. Therefore we hypothesised that osteomacs, as a consequence of their presence in the niche and osteoblast support-function, contribute both indirectly and directly to the generation of this stem cell nursery. We have shown that loss of osteomacs and subsequently osteoblasts occurs during G-CSF induced HSC mobilization. Importantly, in vivo depletion of osteomacs (using transgenic Mafia mice) also causes marked egress of HSC from bone marrow into the blood and spleen. These data provide compelling support that osteomacs are required for maintenance of osteoblast bone forming surfaces and provide caretaker support for the endosteal stem cell niches.

My research team has a number of projects that aim to understand the cellular architecture of the endosteal stem cell niches and the role of osteomacs in this environment. This is an essential step toward enhancing clinical HSC mobilization options in order to improve bone marrow transplantation outcomes in multiple myeloma and lymphoma and also ensuring that the promise of MSC therapy is translated into a clinical reality.

Dewan Rahman is a Senior Lecturer in Finance at UQ Business School. He teaches Asset Pricing, Finance, and Investment & Portfolio Management in the undergraduate and postgraduate programs. He finds teaching to be very rewarding and enjoys interacting with students. Dewan is also active in supervising higher degree research (PhD) students. He is currently accepting new students.

Dewan's research primarily focuses on Insider Trading, Corporate Finance, Corporate Governance, and Corporate Disclosures. He presented papers at conferences such as American Finance Association Annual Meeting, Australasian Finance & Banking Conference, AFAANZ Annual Conference, New Zealand Finance Meeting, among others. Dewan's research work has been published in academic journals, such as Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Banking and Finance, European Accounting Review, and Accounting and Business Research. He was awarded the 2020 ECR excellence in research award from UQ Business School. Dewan's research work on insider trading has received significant media attention being syndicated across 10 outlets, including Conversation, Business News Australia, and featured in UQ Business School's industry research magazine, Momentum.

Dewan holds a PhD in Finance (with Endeavour Scholarship) from the University of Queensland, MSc in Finance (with Commonwealth Scholarship) from the University of Strathclyde, and BBA (Finance) and MBA (Finance) from the University of Dhaka.

Dr Mojtaba Rajabi has over 15 years of extensive experience in crustal stress analysis, geomechanics, geomechanical-numerical modelling and petrophysics. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Earth Sciences from the University of Adelaide in 2017. Dr Rajabi has worked on the geomechanical analyses of >30 sedimentary basins from across the world including Australia, New Zealand, Middle East, Mozambique, Iceland and Western Mediterranean. Since 2012, Dr Rajabi has worked on the Australian and World Stress Map projects, and currently is the Deputy-Head of the World Stress Map project. Dr Rajabi has received over 15 prestigious awards and prizes for his research including the ARC-DECRA Award, the Australian SEG Early Achievement Award, EAGE Louis Cagniard Award, EGU TS Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award, the Royal Society of South Australia's H.G. Andrewartha Medal, and the International Lithosphere Program’s Flinn-Hart Award.

Dr. Foad Raji is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Chemical Engineering, The University of Queensland (UQ). Within UQ’s Minerals and Energy Resources Processing group, he focuses on improving mineral and gold recovery in flotation processes. His research explores solution chemistry, surface interactions, and electrochemistry to develop eco-friendly biopolymer depressants, enhancing copper-gold ore extraction efficiency. Using first-principles tools like Density Functional Theory (DFT), he investigates interfacial phenomena at the molecular level, advancing sustainable technologies for mineral processing and environmental remediation.

Aleksandar D. Rakić leads the Photonics and Microwave Engineering group at The University of Queensland focusing on the development of technologies for sensing and imaging across the electromagnetic spectrum including microwave, terahertz wave and optical systems.

Professor Rakić’s research focuses on the principles of laser feedback interferometry with semiconductor lasers, and on the application of these principles to imaging and sensing. Rakić group pioneered the development of several world’s first laser-feedback interferometric sensors including systems based on monolithic Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser arrays (VCSELs), blue-green lasers, terahertz quantum cascade lasers and mid-infrared interband cascade lasers.

His current focus is on the development of sensing and imaging systems exploiting the THz spectrum for applications from security and defence to in vivo biomedical imaging. His other principal contributions relate to the design and characterization of surface-emitting optoelectronic devices (VCSELs and light emitting diodes) and modelling of optical materials.

Professor Ralph obtained a BSc Hons from Macquarie University in 1989 and a PhD in Physics from The Australian National University in 1993. He has held three Australian Research Council Fellowships - Postdoctoral, QEII and Professorial. He is currently Node Director for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of Queensland.

Dr Prabhakar Ramachandran is the Director of Medical Physics at the Princess Alexandra Hospital (Ipswich Road). He has post-graduate degrees in Medical Physics, Electronics Engineering, and Computer Science. He earned his PhD from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. He holds accreditation in Radiotherapy QA from the Australasian College of Physical Scientists and Engineers in Medicine (ACPSEM) and in Radiation Safety from the Australasian Radiation Protection Society Inc (ARPS). He is also board certified by the American Board of Radiology. His research interests include real-time dosimetry, treatment planning, 4D-imaging, radiation dosimetry, and developing deep learning models for Gamma Knife radiotherapy.

Dr Ramanan is a Specialist in Intensive Care Medicine. His main research interests are in critical care epidemiology, long-term outcomes of critical illness, methodological aspects of clinical research and database/registry research.

Dr. Markus Rambach's research interests are in the field of quantum optics, especially on single photon sources to create photonic qubits and qudits.

Markus was born and raised in a small alpine town in Austria, before doing his BSc and MSc at the University of Innsbruck (Austria). He did his undergrad in Physics, before completing an MSc in experimental quantum physics in the prestigious group of Pro. Rainer Blatt. Here, is where he met a young renegade Brit who had just completed his PhD in the research group of Prof. Andrew White at the University of Queensland. Inspired by the stories, Markus decided to have a look for himself and moved to Brisbane, where he completed his PhD with Andrew in 2017. After a short intermezzo for a Postdoc in Scotland, he moved back to Brisbane 2019 and has been a research fellow at UQ ever since. Markus' research interests are in the weird but beautiful world of quantum physics, where he is investigating ways to make the upcoming quantum internet a reality. Over the years he has worked with verious single photon platforms and used them for quantum information experiments. Recently he changed gear and is now investigating the infinitely-sized space of higher-dimensional quantum systems, so-called qudits.

Markus enjoys community engagement, be it as chair of the SMP Early and Mid-Career Academics Committee or as a member of the EQUS Public Engagement Committee. He particular likes the sparks in people's eyes when they start to understand a concept or idea.

Research interests include: applied econometrics, time series econometrics, state-space models and spatial time series models. Has published in journals that include the Journal of Econometrics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Applied Econometrics.

Current research projects are in: spatial time series models with applications to modelling housing and land prices, transport demand, international comparisons and sectoral productivity