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Matthew is a GP registrar currently undertaking an academic post in the General Practice Clinical Unit. His research is exploring the management of alcohol, tobacco and other drug addiction consults by GP registrars. Matthew is also involved in teaching, examination and creating resources for UQ medical students, particularly those completing their General Practice rotation. Matthew works part time clinically on the southside of Brisbane, and has previously worked in hospitals throughout Queensland and the Northern Territory. He also has an interest in public health, and has completed an MPH and has worked in multiple Public Health Units in Queensland.

Professor Eugeni Roura is a nutritionist with interests in digestive physiology and gut health, chemosensory science (including taste and smell) and transgenerational mechanisms relevant to chickens, pigs and humans. Eugeni holds a Veterinary and PhD degrees from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a MPhil and post-doctoral appointments at the University of California (Davis). He developed a sixteen-year career in the feed and food industries before joining The University of Queensland (2010) where he currently leads the Nutrition & Chemosensory Science Group. The main current research areas in animal science include appetite modulation in chickens and pigs, nutrition interventions to boost embryonic/foetal development (including “in ovo”), and strategies to improve sustainability of chicken meat, egg and pork production. In human nutrition the focus is around food allergies and appendicitis. In 2011, Eugeni joined the UQ School of Biomedical Sciences as an Affiliated Lecturer. Since 2010 he has graduated 20 PhD students in Australia, published more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, and has been invited as keynote speaker to more than 50 national and international scientific meetings. He is currently serving as President of the World’s Poultry Science Association (Australia branch), Director of the AgriFutures Chicken Meat Consortium, and member of the National Committee for Nutrition (Australian Academy of Sciences), R&D and Education Committees of the Australasian Pork Research Institute Ltd., and the Federation of Oceania Nutrition Societies. He was the recipient of the Nutrition Society of Australia 2024 Medal award.

Dr. Gillespie Rouse’s research focuses on writing development and instruction. Her approach to understanding writing and how to best prepare teachers to provide writing instruction has been multifaceted. She has conducted meta-analyses and systematic reviews to examine effective writing interventions for struggling writers and students with disabilities, analysed interview responses to understand students’ knowledge of the writing process and different writing genres, conducted surveys to document teachers’ use of evidence-based writing instruction, and provided professional development to assist teachers in implementing evidence-based writing instruction in their classrooms. She has also developed interventions to support primary students’ use of writing as a tool for learning in math and science. Most recently, Dr. Gillespie Rouse and her colleagues have used mixed-reality simulations to support primary pre-service teachers’ development of effective writing instruction and pedagogy.

In addition to research, Dr. Gillespie Rouse teaches courses focused on primary literacy. Prior to UQ, Dr. Gillespie Rouse was an associate professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas (USA). She earned her doctorate in Special Education, with a focus in Quantitative Methods, from Vanderbilt University, where she was an Institute of Education Sciences predoctoral fellow. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Master of Teaching in Special Education from the University of Virginia. Prior to her time in academia, Dr. Rouse was a primary special education teacher in the United States.

Her work has been published in various journals including Educational Research Review, Frontiers in Psychology, Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, and Exceptional Children. In 2020, her publication earned recognition by the National Science Teachers’ Association (USA) for being “Worth-Reading Research for Practitioners”. In 2018, one of her publications was Wiley’s top-20 most downloaded article of the year in Learning Disabilities Research and Practice.

Dr. Gillespie Rouse serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Learning Disabilities and sits on editorial boards for Exceptionality, the Journal of Educational Psychology, and Teaching Exceptional Children.

Dr. Rob Rouse is a Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Queensland. Broadly, his research focuses on supporting teachers enacting innovative and integrated hands-on instruction while making the best use of their school makerspace.

Prior to completing his Ph.D. in Learning, Teaching, and Diversity at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, Rob taught chemistry at a performing arts secondary school in New York City as a member of the New York City Teaching Fellows.

Rob has expertise in maker education and in designing integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning environments. In addition, Rob has a track record of partnering with informal and out-of-school STEM education organizations to provide pre-service and in-service teachers with a variety of learning opportunities suitable for students, educators, and families.

Rob is also the former Director of the Southern Methodist University (SMU) Maker Education Project, a project he co-founded with colleagues from SMU’s School of Engineering. The mission of the SMU Maker Education Project was to support educators implementing high-quality maker education activities in their own school makerspaces. Much of this work was supported using the project’s mobile makerspace, the MakerTruck.

Ingrid Rowlands’ research is broadly focused on women’s reproductive health, with a particular interest in adverse events and diseases including miscarriage, infertility, endometriosis and gynaecological cancer.

Dr Rowlands' current program of work is conducted in partnership with community and focuses on:

• Multidisciplinary care needs of people with endometriosis - QENDOCare
• Supportive care interventions in cancer - PROMISE trial
• Co-designed, integrated, person-centred models of care for people with innate variations of sex characteristics - Interconnect Health Research

Dr Rowlands is a mixed methods researcher and combines her training in health psychology with her epidemiological skills to understand people's health and wellbeing. Her previous research has focused on:

• The causes and consequences of endometriosis in Australia - GELLES
• Women’s quality of life following a diagnosis of endometrial (uterine) cancer ANECS. In this role, she also led a qualitative study exploring young women’s fertility concerns following a diagnosis of gynaecological cancer.

Women’s adjustment to miscarriage using data from more than 14,000 young women participating in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health - Coping with miscarriage study.

I currently have a number of research interests, both in Biomedical and well as in Teaching-Focussed Research.

Biomedical projects have traditionally been done with collaborators, and some of the projects have included:

• mechanisms of action of animal venoms and toxins, and we have used the organ bath laboratory and pharmacologoical techniques as bioassays
• study of bitter tasting compounds on pig digestive processes, to better understand activation of bitter taste receptors in vivo

Teaching-focussed interested are around university student behaviour with regard to learning activities and engagement. Universities around the world are grappling with shifts in effective and engaging educational strategies, as well as student expectations, in their delivery of content. In an age where students can do on-line courses at universities far from Australia, academics are carefully considering student engagement and success here at UQ.

• Lecture slots currently have the bulk of contact hours in most courses, with ~39 lectures per course across a semester. These are largely recorded and used as a teaching resource. Student attendance to the traditional lecture spaces has decreased significantly across all campuses, with a UQ average of ~60% across all courses. This type of analysis has recently led to UQ offering smaller venues for larger courses in which there have been patterns of partial attendance.
• My work seeks to better understand what motivates students to attend these spaces in their traditional sense and in the transition to an increasing number of flipped classroom models and blended learning, where the academics are less on the stage, and are instead facilitating activities for learning, while students will be engaged in learning content largely outside the lecture slots.
• "Embracing the Unknown" Experience in third year science courses is also an interest, in which research work and its associated uncertainties cause varying levels of anxiety in some students. Best understanding this process and supporting students through it is also an interest of mine.

Professor Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop’s research interests are in the fields of atom optics, laser micromanipulation, nano optics, quantum computing and biophotonics.

She has long standing experience with lasers, linear and nonlinear high-resolution spectroscopy, laser micromanipulation, and atom cooling and trapping. She was one of the originators of the widely used laser enhanced ionisation spectroscopy technique and is well known for her recent work in laser micromanipulation. She has been also working (Nanotechnology Laboratory, Göteborg, Sweden) in the field of nano- and microfabrication in order to produce the microstructures needed for optically driven micromachines and tips for the scanning force microscopy with optically trapped stylus. Recently she led the team that observed dynamical tunnelling in quantum chaotic system. Additionally Prof. Rubinsztein-Dunlop has led the new effort into development of new nano-structured quantum dots for quantum computing and other advanced device related applications.

Biography:

Tom Rufford is an Associate Professor in the UQ School of Chemical Engineering and chief investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Green Electrochemical Transformation of CO2 (GETCO2). Tom completed his BE and PhD degrees in Chemical Engineering at the University of Queensland in 2000 and 2009, respectively. Tom’s PhD thesis investigated the use of porous carbon materials derived from waste coffee grounds for energy storage via hydrogen or supercapacitors on board electric vehicles. From 2001 to 2005 he worked as a process engineer and technologist on the crude distillation columns, naptha reformers and hydrogen purification plant at Shell’s Geelong Oil Refinery. From 2010 to late 2012, Tom was a research fellow at the University of Western Australia working on natural gas processing and LNG production research projects with the UWA’s Chevron Chair in Gas Process Engineering, Prof. Eric May. He returned to UQ as a teaching and research academic in December 2012.

Dr Rufford is a chartered member of the IChemE and Engineers Australia (chemical engineering).

Dr Rufford has published more than 80 scientific papers in international journals and an edited book on carbon materials. He has been a visiting researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, and an Endeavour Research Fellow visiting the Institute of Metals Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenyang, China.

Research:

Associate Professor Rufford conducts research on gas processing and purification for cleaner energy production and utilization. His research interests include electrochemical processes including energy storage and CO2 reduction, natural gas process engineering, porous carbons, and solid-fluid interactions in coal seam gas reservoirs. Current and recent projects include studies on electrochemical CO2 reduction, development of gas diffusion electrode materials, helium recovery and nitrogen rejection from natural gas, low permeability coals, and the capture of methane emissions from liquefied natural gas (LNG) production plants.

Teaching and Learning:

Tom teaches into the BE and BE/ME chemical engineering programs at UQ. He's taught core chemical engineering courses such as heat and mass transfer, unit operations, and the capstone design project courses CHEE4001 and CHEE7103. In 2024 he is teaching into CHEE3004 Unit Operations in Semester 1 and CHEE7103 BE/ME Design Project in Semester 2.

I am a Cosmologist studying the properties of the Universe on the largest scales.

By mapping the positions of millions of galaxies, I investigate the unknown physics of the dark energy which drives the evolution of the Universe today, and the physics just after the Big Bang, when the ripples which grew under gravity to become galaxies were created.

I am actively participating in the key experiments designed to understand dark energy and gravity. I am co-chair of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) lensing working group, and an active member of the Vera Rubin Observatory (LSST) and the Dark Energy Survey (DES). In the past, I had led science with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, one of the major quests of contemporary physics that has spurred advancement in answering a range of fundamental questions about the origins of the universe.

I am passionate about communicating top-level research ideas to audiences outside our immediate academic sub-community. I have experience on a variety of media, including radio, public talks and lectures to local schools, science festivals and amateur astronomy groups, outreach activities at Stargazing Live events, as well as through written pieces.

I am an advocate for making STEM field accessible to everyone. During my career, I took part into different initiatives aiming to reduce structural barriers faced by different minorities in academia and inspire the next generation of STEM careers. I am part of the Women in Science Association with the aim to foster a community for young women in STEM, within and beyond the academic community. I worked and volunteered at N.G.O. centres, in Italy and Australia supporting young students to overcome educational inequality caused by poverty and other conditions.

Since 2021 I am on the Early Career Chapter committee for the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) to promote and assist the career development of early and mid-career researchers in the Australian astronomy community. I am also part of the Wellbeing ambassador program at University of Queensland, to promote and assist the career development of early and mid-career researchers in the Australian astronomy community.

Dr Lisa Ruhanen (PhD, GCEd, BBusHons) is a Professor in Tourism and the Deputy Head of School (Graduate Education, Tourism and Marketing) with the The University of Queensland Business School. She has undertaken more than 35 academic and consultancy research projects in Australia and overseas in the areas of Indigenous tourism, sustainable tourism and policy, planning and governance. Lisa has more than 150 academic publications and in 2017 she and colleagues co-edited a book on Indigenous Tourism: Cases from Australia and New Zealand.

Lisa jas taught in the areas of sustainable and responsible tourism, ethics, and tourism in developing countries. For more than a decade, she has worked closely with United Nations Tourism on a variety of research projects and undertook a secondment to the organisation's headquarters in Madrid. She is currently an Advisory Board member and auditor for the UN Tourism TedQual accreditation program. Lisa is actively engaged with a range of start-up Indigenous tourism businesses and tourism organisations in Australia using her research expertise to explore visitor demand, market opportunities and product development strategies and has led research and consultancy studies for the Federal and State governments in Australia on Indigenous tourism, including the inaugural ‘Queensland Indigenous Tourism Strategy’. She is currently the co-lead for the First Nations Tourism Research Hub, an initiative of the Queensland First Nations Tourism Council.

Trevor Russell is a Professor of Physiotherapy and the Director of the RECOVER Injury Research Centre where he leads a stream of research on Technology Enabled Rehabilitation. He is also co-director of both the Centre for Research in Telerehabilitation and the Telerehabilitation Clinic at the University of Queensland. His research focusses on the use of digital technologies for the remote delivery of health services with a particular focus on telerehabilitation technologies. Specifically his research aims to develop innovative computer based hardware and software solutions to enable the provision of rehabilitation services remotely via the Internet; to further the evidence base of technology enabled rehabilitation through controlled clinical trials; to evaluate the treatment efficacy of specific technology enabled interventions; investigate cost-benefit factors related to technology enabled services; and develop best practice guidelines for the implementation of technology enabled services in the rehabilitation sciences. His work is amongst the earliest and most extensive in this field.

Dr Zoe Rutherford is an experienced and successful leader, with an established teaching, research and consultancy track record spanning >17 years. Her professional and academic expertise in translational research stems from her drive for developing new and effective ways of improving people’s health, particularly those who are deemed ‘hard to reach’ and therefore miss out on services. Zoe achieves this through building deep and trusted relationships with stakeholders at all levels to 1) develop improved methodologies for how evidence-based interventions can be implemented in the real-world in a feasible, acceptable, inclusive, and efficacious way; and 2) develop research projects that are co-designed, using frameworks and methods that are valid, reliable, acceptable and feasible in the field.

As the lead of the Mental Health Evaluation Research Stream at the Qld Centre for Mental Health Research, Qld’s premier mental health research organisation, Dr Rutherford supervises a team of 10 evaluation specialists, using mixed methodologies to conduct evaluation research that is informing the way that community and clinically based mental health services support Queenslanders with treating, managing and recovering from mental ill-health. Having secured >$4M in funding to lead several successful statewide, mixed methods evaluations of Queensland community health services, Zoe has fast become Qld Health’s go to person for mental health implementation and evaluation research and expert advice. This has enabled her to secure $1.1M/yr in long-term funding from Qld Health’s Mental Health, Alcohol and Other Drugs Branch to sustain the Mental Health Evaluation Research Stream, with a program of > 7 statewide mental health service evaluations slated for completion over the next 3yrs.