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Michelle Smith is a Associate Professor in Physiotherapy and a Titled Sports and Exercise Physiotherapist. She is Program Director for the Masters of Sports Physiotherapy and Masters of Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy programs at UQ, Co-director of the International Ankle Consortium, Co-director of the Sports Injury Rehabilitation and Prevention for Health (SIRPH) research unit and Associate Editor of Physical Therapy and Sport.

The overarching theme of Michelle's research is lower limb joint health. Her research focuses on the prevention and management of lower limb joint injuries and pathologies across the lifespan to enable unrestricted participation in sport, physical activity and work. There are three key areas of her research:

1. To improve understanding of ankle injuries and osteoarthritis across the lifespan: Ankle sprains are the most common injury seen in emergency departments and are a primary cause of ankle osteoarthritis, which in light of its post-traumatic nature, often affects young adults. To optimise outcomes and participation for people with ankle pathologies, my research characterises impairments and participation restrictions in the continuum from ankle injury to osteoarthritis and establishes the efficacy of interventions to manage these conditions.
2. To understand the effectiveness and implementation of injury prevention strategies: While neuromuscular exercise program and taping/bracing have been shown to decrease injury risk, translation of research into practice is limited. My research investigates the implementation of injury prevention initiatives in adolescent athletes and involves stakeholders to better understand barriers and facilitators.
3. To evaluate the implementation of lower limb osteoarthritis interventions: Exercise and education for hip and knee osteoarthritis have been shown to improve quality of life and functional outcomes. My research investigates the implementation of such programs in public hospitals and private physiotherapy practices on patient outcomes and service delivery.

Michelle has presented her research and delivered keynote and invited presentations at national and international multi-disciplinary conferences. She teaches across the undergraduate and postgraduate physiotherapy curriculum in the areas of musculoskeletal health and sports injuries. She has been recognised for her high teaching quality and impact at both School and Faculty levels through receipt of Teaching Excellence Awards. She is the Chair of the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences External Engagement Committee and Deputy Chair of the Sports and Exercise Physiotherapy Group of the Austrailan Physiotherapy Association. She is a member of the Outcome Measures in Rheumatology (OMERACT) Foot and Ankle Working Group, International Foot and Ankle Osteoarthritis Consortium, and Australian Foot and Ankle Research Network.

My group works to understand and improve sleep for children and families. Sleep is a key ‘pillar of health’ alongside nutrition and activity. It is critical for healthy development, growth, learning, social and emotional functioning, and community participation.

I am the UQ Node Director for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (the Life Course Centre). The Life Course Centre is committed to understanding and overcoming the problems of disadvantage, and to helping improve the lives of disadvantaged children and families. The Centre brings together researchers across multiple disciplines in four leading Universities, and significant government and non-government agencies to address these questions.

I am also the UQ Node director for the ARC centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. The Digital Child aims to support children growing up in the rapidly changing digital world, and provide strong evidence and guidance for children, families, educators, government and other concerned with children’s wellbeing.

We collaborate 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. Our work has been supported by the ARC, NHMRC, the MRFF, the NIH, and the DSTG. We use a wide range of methods and measures, including direct physiological and behavioural measurement (inc. ECG, EEG, EMG, actigraphy, computerized tests, simulations, environmental monitoring etc.), quantitative methods (inc. experimental and secondary data approaches), and qualitative methods including co-design and co-conduct approaches.

My team has additional expertise in evaluation of health and other services for government and other agencies, the design of complex interventions, and community consultation and engagement.

https://lifecoursecentre.org.au

https://digitalchild.org.au

Dr Millicent Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Crop Physiology at The University of Queensland. Her research is focused on understanding the physiological mechanisms that underpin yield stability and quality in grain legumes. Millicent works closely with breeders, both in Australia and overseas, to develop improved knowledge on abiotic stress adaptation and tools to accelerate genetic gain. Dr Smith leads a national research project funded by the Grains Research and Development Corporation focused on deploying novel phenotyping and genomics approaches to fast-track the development of new chickpea varieties that display lower yield loss in response to high temperature. Millicent is passionate about training the next generation of plant scientists. She leads a growing research team of postdoctoral scientists, postgraduate and undergraduate research students and has been awarded for her innovative teaching approaches applied to large undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

Emeritus Professor Mark Smithers is a surgical oncologist who specialises in surgery for oesophago-gastric diseases, melanoma, advanced skin cancer and soft tissue sarcoma. He was the Director of the Upper GI and Soft Tissue Unit at the Princess Alexandra Hospital, in Brisbane, Australia from 1998 - 2023. Commencing his academic career with the University of Queensland in 1987, he progressed to be the Mayne Chair in Surgery and head of the Academy of Surgery. He is the second University of Queensland Medical graduate to be appointed to this role. His research has been focussed on the development and assessment of outcomes from minimally invasive upper GI surgery, and trials assessing the role of perioperative multidisciplinary therapy for esophageal and gastric cancer. As well he has led, or been involved with, clinical trials from phase I to III, for all stages of melanoma through his role as the Chair of the Queensland Melanoma Project. More recently he has been involved with the assessment of access to, and outcomes from, surgery for cancer in Queensland, Australia.

He has overseen the administration and development of the surgery curriculum, and the teaching, in the Academy of Surgery, in the UQ Faculty of Medicine. He was on a number of committees relevant to the implementation of the UQ MD design course. He has held various leadership and committee roles with the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, as well as leadership roles, including the Presidency, in the Australian and New Zealand Oesophago Gastric Surgeons Association. He has also been on the committees of international organisations related to oesophageal and gastric surgery. He has published 250 articles, eight book chapters, and has been on the editorial board of a number of surgical journals.

He has been recognised for his clinical and academic roles by the award of Member of the Order of Australia (AM). The citation reads, "for service to medicine in the fields of gastro-intestinal and melanoma surgery, to medical education and to professional organisations". The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons awarded him the Sir Hugh Devine medal, for services to surgery and the community. This is the College’s highest honour. Internationally, he has been awarded an honorary fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and recently, in the United States, he was elected as an Honarary Fellow of the American Surgical Association.

Professor Heather Smyth is a flavour chemist and sensory scientist who has been working with premium food and beverage products for more than twenty years. With a background in wine flavour chemistry, her expertise is in understanding consumer enjoyment of foods and beverages in terms of both sensory properties and composition.

Smyth has a special interest in describing and articulating food quality, understanding regional flavours of locally grown Australian produce, and modelling food flavour and textural properties using instrumental measurements. Smyth also specialises in researching how human physiology and psychology can impact sensory perception and therefore food choice.

I am a senior researcher with cross-disciplinary expertise in health economics, pharmacy practice, and virtual health solutions. I am passionate about optimising healthcare outcomes by developing economically sustainable services that use technology and artificial intelligence to empower patients. My work explores the economic efficiency of implementing either virtual health or advanced-scope clinician initiatives within the Australian health system to improve patient care.

I am also a clinical pharmacist with more than a decade of experience in patient care and clinician training. I am a health economist at the UQ School of Pharmacy and Phamaceutical Sciences, and I lead the research work in the Pharmacy Department at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane.

I am an Adjunct Research Fellow who works between the UQ School of EECS and CSIRO. I am passionate about design and technology that makes a positive impact to sustainability, and building better relationships between people, their personal data and the energy they consume. My work seeks to understand the role of data visualisations in building energy literacy and balancing energy efficiency and adequate ventilation/indoor air quality (IAQ). I lead the Study Fresh program at UQ which has engaged over 650 students across 20 schools in hands-on workshops towards building IAQ monitors and learning how to identify and remedy poor IAQ in classrooms. I hold grants related to improving farmers' experience in electricity retailer switching, regional energy resilience and have run a two-year study examining longitudinal engagement with energy use feedback. My research involves mixed methods including ethnography, co-design, speculative design, in-situ monitoring and data analysis to inform the design of visualisations to improve energy literacy. I have applied these methods to case studies in the UK and Australia and completed over 200 audits as a building sustainability assessor under the Australian Government’s Green Loans scheme (2009-2012).

Ricardo J. Soares Magalhães is Professor of Zoonotic Disease Epidemiology and Biosecurity and Director of the Queensland Alliance for One Health Sciences. Prof. Soares Magalhaes is a European Veterinary Board Specialist in Population Medicine with extensive national and international research experience in three main areas: spatial epidemiology of zoonotic infections, outbreak response for emerging zoonoses and risk assessment of animal’s environmental health/biosecurity. A key focus of his team's current research is to develop geographical risk assessment methods to assist climate-sensitive zoonotic infectious disease prioritisation for improved surveillance and risk management in both human and animal populations.

Prof. Soares Magalhães’s team is currently leading the development of a number of epidemiological data analytics platforms including for zoonotic influenza (WHO SEARO, Word Bank), antimicrobial resistance in agribusinesses and the environment (SAAFE CRC) and veterinary clinical data (VARDC and ACARCinom).

Dr Thais Sobanski is an early-career researcher investigating the links between cellular metabolism, DNA repair, epigenetic modifications, and neurodegeneration. She completed her Master’s degree in cancer research at the Molecular Oncology Research Center, Barretos Cancer Hospital, the highest ranked cancer institute in Latin America (SCImago)—where she examined DNA hypermethylation profiles of tumour suppressor genes in colorectal cancer.In 2024, she was awarded her PhD from Queensland University of Technology (QUT), where her research focused on the nuclear translocation of metabolic proteins and their interactions with DNA repair kinases. Dr Sobanski transitioned her research focus to motor neuron diseases (MND) in 2024, motivated by her interest in how metabolism and emerging epigenetic modifications, such as protein lactylation, influence genomic stability in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). She was awarded the MND Research Australia David Deguara Early Career Research Fellowship to investigate the interplay between DNA repair, cell metabolism, and novel epigenetic pathways in ALS. As a recent PhD graduate, she has authored seven peer-reviewed publications, accumulated more than 170 citations, and achieved an h-index of 5 with a field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) of 1.75, securing over $400K in competitive funding.Currently Dr Sobanski collaborates closely with Associate Professor Shyuan Ngo at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), where her work contributes to advancing understanding of the molecular and metabolic mechanisms driving motor neuron disease.

Dr. Manu P. Sobti is a landscape historian and urban interlocutor of the Global South with research specialisations in South Asia, South East Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Within the gamut of the Global, the Islamic, and the Non-Western, his continuing work examines borderland transgressions and their intertwinement with human mobilities, indigeneities, and the narratives of passage across these liminal sites. From his perspective, ‘land-centered’ and ‘deep’ place histories replete with human actors serve as critical and de-colonizing processes that negate the top-down master-narratives wherein borders and boundaries simplistically delineate nation states and their scalar range of internal geographies. He was previously Associate Professor at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee USA (2006-16). He has a B.Dipl.Arch. from the School of Architecture-CEPT (Ahmedabad - INDIA), an SMarchS. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge - USA), and a Ph.D. from the College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta - USA).

As a recognized scholar and innovative educator, Sobti served as Director of SARUP-UWM’s India Winterim Program (2008-15). This foreign study program worked intensively with local architecture schools in Ahmedabad, Delhi and Chandigarh, allowing students and faculty to interact actively, often within the gamut of the same project. He also set up a similar, research-focused program in Uzbekistan, engaging advanced undergraduate and graduate students to undertake field research at sites, archives and cultural landscapes. In partnership with the Art History Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and SARUP colleagues, Sobti also co-coordinated the Building-Landscapes-Cultures (BLC) Concentration of SARUP-UWM’s Doctoral Program (2011-13), creating opportunities for student research in diverse areas of architectural and urban history and in multiple global settings. He served as the Chair of SARUP's PhD Committee between 2014-16, leading an area of BLC's research consortium titled Urban Histories and Contested Geographies.

Sobti's research has been supported by multiple funding bodies, including the Graham Foundation of the Arts (USA), the Architectural Association (UK), the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (USA), the French Institute of Central Asian Studies (UZBEKISTAN), the US Department of State Fulbright Foundation (USA), the Aga Khan Foundation (SWITZERLAND), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (USA), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), the Centre for 21st Century Studies University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (USA), the Institute for Research in the Humanities University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), Stanford University (USA), in addition to city governments in New Delhi/Chandigarh/Ahmedabad (INDIA), Samarqand/Bukhara (UZBEKISTAN), Erzurum (TURKEY) and New Orleans (USA). He has also served as a United States Department of State Fulbright Senior Specialist Scholar and received 7 Research Fellowships at important institutions worldwide. He is a nominated Expert Member of the ICOMOS-ICIP (Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites) International Committee, responsible for debate and stewardship on contentious cultural heritage issues globally.

After graduation from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2007, Albert did an internship at the University of Guelph, Canada followed by a private practice internship at Rood and Riddle Equine Hospital in Kentucky. Albert moved to the University of California, Davis for his surgical training where he stayed and worked as an Equine Surgical Specialist for a further two years. One of Albert’s projects during his time at UC Davis was the development of a new technique to deliver stem cells in the equine limb using regional limb perfusion.

Albert moved to Australia in 2014 and worked at Camden Equine Centre, University of Sydney for almost 3 years before joining the University of Queensland.

Albert is a specialist in equine surgery and he became board certified by the American College of Veterinary Surgeons (www.acvs.org)in February 2013. Albert enjoys all aspects of soft tissue and orthopedic surgery. He has a particular interest in managing performance problems in endurance horses and minimally invasive surgery.

My main research interests are in observational cosmology, Large Scale Structure, and galaxy formation and evolution. I am currently working mainly on the most fundamental questions about the universe such as: What is the present-day expansion rate of the universe (the Hubble constant)? Why the universe is dominated by dark energy? What is the implicit distribution of dark matter in the universe? Why Einstein’s general theory of relativity breaks down on some cosmological scales?

I am a member of DESI, Taipan, WALLABY, 4HS galaxy surveys.

In 2017 I was named the 2017 winner of the IAU and Gruber Foundation Fellowship after receiving my PhD from the University of Cape Town with THREE A's on my PhD examiners reports. This additional grant of 50,000 USD is awarded annually to an extremely promising, young astrophysicist to promote the science of cosmology.

Personal website here

I am an Honorary Research Fellow in Philosophy at the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry. I work as a Senior Faculty Admistrator at the University Adminstration of Uppsala University, Sweden. I also hold the title of Docent (Adjunct Professor) in Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

I work mainly in existential philosophy, broadly construed, with a particular interest in Ludwig Wittgenstein and in his student Rush Rhees.

David Solnet is a Professor of Service Management and Service Work in the UQ Business School. He is recognized internationally for his research, teaching and consulting, all focused on managing and leading service organizations, with particular emphasis on managing the employee-customer interface. His research focuses on frontline employees and the relationships between management practices, employee attitudes and firm performance. He is currently leading a new strategic initiative, creating UQ's first fully online Master's degree through a UQ partnership with edX, Master of Leadership and Innovation.

David is a sought after advisor to industry and government, specializing on business improvement, financial analysis, service quality and management development programs. He comes from a restaurant background, with over 18 years of experience including senior management roles in the USA (Brinker International, El Chico Group, Bennigan’s Restaurants and Olive Garden) and Australia (including six years as general manager of Bretts Wharf in Brisbane). He has consulted to many organizations, including Merlo Coffee, Cactus Jacks Restaurant Group, Aromas Noosa, Ricky’s River Bar, Locale Ristaurante, Pier Nine Restaurant and Oyster Bar, Mitchell Ogilvie Menswear and Baguette Restaurant.

David coleads the workforce research team in the tourism group at the UQ Business School and has been a principal investigator on a number of state and national projects including two ‘tourism employment plans’ as part of the Australian Commonwealth Government initiative to address employment challenges in regional areas in Australia; and has worked with Service Skills Australia on a number of projects centred around workforce development.

Professor Solnet has published over 50 academic journal articles, and his work consistently appears in the top journals in his field, such as the Journal of Service Management, Managing Service Quality (Journal of Service Theory and Practice), Annals of Tourism Research, International Journal of Hospitality Management, Journal of Travel Research and the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research.

Professor Solnet is currently an academic partner seconded to the Division of Student Affairs, developing initiatives centered around improving student experience.