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My work focusses on activation of innate immune cells by pathogen products. Following my PhD at UQ on transcriptional regulation in macrophages I went in 1996 to the University of Cambridge on a CJ Martin Fellowship to work in a molecular parasitology laboratory. I returned to the the University of Queensland in where I focussed on immune cell responses to foreign DNA. I was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship in 2009 to move to the School of Chemistry and Molecular Bioscience, where I also lecture in immunology.

Dr Jonathan Staggs is an entrepreneurship and innovation scholar who has been published in top-tier journals such as the Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Studies, and the Cambridge Journal of Economics. Jonathan holds a BA (Hons) in Political Science/international Relations, an MBA, and PhD in Business.

Jonathan’s research has examined entrepreneurship within institutional settings and has explored the role of place in innovation processes. His post-doctoral research in the energy and health sector as well as craft and family business focusses on the actors and institutions that support and sustain entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Jonathan’s teaching practice has a strong focus on case study research that highlight the importance of stakeholder engagement in strategy. Jonathan has strong postgraduate business program leadership experience, developing teaching teams, and designing courses that are based on strong ethical foundations and processes to inform strategic practice.

Prior to his academic career, Jonathan worked in senior positions with Gaba Corporation- a Japanese education company. His roles included corporate training, recruitment, and quality management. This experience demonstrates Jonathan's business knowledge and capacity to manage and lead in diverse workplaces.

Associate Professor Stahl's research interests focus on the relationship between education and society, socio-cultural studies of education, student identities, equity/inequality, and social change. Currently, his research projects and publications encompass theoretical and empirical studies of youth, sociology of schooling in a neoliberal age, gendered subjectivities, equity and difference as well as educational reform.

To date his scholarship has focused upon:

· Social and educational inequalities

· Learner Identities

· Student mobilities

· Masculinities

· Widening participation

He holds a PhD in Education (University of Cambridge), a Masters degree in International Education (New York University) and a Bachelors Degree in Secondary Education and English (Indiana University). He is a member and former SIG Convener for the Australian Association of Researchers in Education (AARE) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

Associate Professor Stahl was awarded a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from the Australian Research Council (2017-2019) where he researched the relationship between extreme disadvantage, masculinities and widening participation (DE170100510). In 2019, he was ranked by The Australian newspaper as one of the top 40 researchers in Australia who were less than 10 years into their career. Dr. Stahl is particularly interested in qualitative research methods, visual research methods and ethnography. At the University of Queensland, Dr. Stahl's teaches at the Undergraduate, Masters and PhD levels.

Recently, he was awarded two ARC Discovery projects: Including the voice of boys and young men in their health and well-being education (DP250102623) and Investigating how boys and young men experience their digital lives (DP250104014).

His research has been published in a range of international journals, including the Pedagogy, Culture and Society, the Journal of Educational Policy and Gender and Education. His books include Identity, neoliberalism and aspiration: educating white working-class boys (2015, Routledge), Ethnography of a neoliberal school: building cultures of success (2018, Routledge), Working-class masculinities in Australian higher education: policies, pathways and progress (2021, Routledge) and Gendering the First-in-Family Experience: Transitions, Liminality, Performativity (2022, Routledge) co-authored with Sarah McDonald.

He has held leadership positions in the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE).

Prior to working as a researcher, Stahl taught in secondary schools in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Assoc Prof Andrew Staib is an internationally recognised academic leader in emergency medicine. He has led multiple large scale research and transformational projects including the analysis of over 16M episodes of emergency care, the digital transformation of emergency workflows in Queensland hospitals and the development of tools to predict emergency wait times. His work has been published in international journals and he is regularly asked to present at national and global meetings. He has established large and enduring systems to improve emergency care such as dashboards display metrics for monitoring emergency care, systems for virtual emergency care across Queensland, clincial immersion programs for UQ medical students and the application of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence to emergency care. Assoc Prof Staib is the recipient of several national awards including the national iaward for innovation for his work in emergency care data. Assoc Prof Staib is skilled at creating and maintaining high performing teams as is evidenced by his roles as Senior Director of Emergency Care for Metro South Health and Chair of the Queensland Emergency Department Advisory Panel.

Zoe Staines is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Science at The University of Queensland. Her research is deeply interdisciplinary, critically examining social policy, gender and work, welfare conditionality, coloniality, and rural/remote crime and governance, with a central focus on addressing structural injustice. Before entering academia, she held senior research and policy roles in government and the not-for-profit sector. She is currently Co-Editor-In-Chief of leading interdisciplinary journal, the Australian Journal of Social Issues (Q1).

I'm a quantitative community ecologist with broad experience across terrestrial and marine systems, modern and geological time, local and global scales with both theoretical and practical focus. I'm driven by discovery, interested in myriad topics on how communities form and function, but particularly how we measure and make comparisons between communities.

• Translating anomaly detection to ecology: In a world experiencing climate change, biodiversity loss and other human impacts, detecting anomalous ecological systems accurately and early potentially offers vast benefits to conservation and ecosystem management. Anomaly detection is a fast-moving area of research applied in fields as varied as banking fraud detection, cybersecurity and cancer diagnosis. These fields deal with data as complex and incomplete as ecology, but we haven't plumbed this expertise for benefits to ecology. This is the primary focus of my DECRA.
• Grounding ecological novelty for practical use: Ecologists have been talking about novel systems for twenty years, and related topics (such as "no-analog systems") for even longer. Despite well-cited work on how "novel" can be a useful label for ecological restoration, there's a mismatch between management frameworks, which often use ad-hoc qualitative criteria, and quantitative novelty research, which has been mostly performed at global scales. Understanding how to measure novelty, how analytic choices affect measurements, and how to downscale our inferences to be practicable, has been a focus for me and my colleagues.
• The linguistic evolution of programming languages: The use of scientific programming languages like R, Python and Julia are becoming not only popular, but mandatory skills for researchers. The utility of these languages has been improved by new versions and a plethora of community-created addon packages. This approximates features of natural language evolution, where lexicon changes over time. Understanding the speed and direction of how programming languages evolve can give us a unique insight into how humans learn and alter languages, and how we might ensure they remain understandable into the future. I am currently using GitHub as a vast repository of time-stamped programming “texts”, ripe for linguistic analysis.
• Community ecology through the lens of functional traits: It doesn’t matter who you are, it matters what you do. That applies to organisms too. Despite decades of research into how physiology and life history strategy, often proxied through easy-to-measure “functional traits”, functional ecology is still more niche than it should be. Currently my colleagues and I are exploring how a functional lens alters ecological novelty, but I am always thinking about ecology in the light of how organisms live.

Alastair is a public policy scholar, a crisis management expert and has an ongoing interest in the institutionalization of participatory modes of governance. His current policy research examines the role that institutional amnesia plays in the policy process, his crisis management research has been focused upon the relationship between public inquiries and lesson-learning, and in relation to participatory governance, he is currently examining the validity of different forms of deliberative democracy in the context of Australian environmental policy. Alastair has published widely in high-ranking international journals and is the recipient of the Mayer Prize (best paper in the Australian Journal of Political Science) and the Lasswell Prize (best paper in Policy Sciences). He has authored three books, won three large-scale Australian Research Council Discovery grants and is always looking for outstanding students who may be interested in completing PhDs in relation to the topics outlined above.

Associate Professor Mitchell Stark is a molecular biologist and Group Leader (Principal Research Fellow) from the Dermatology Research Centre (DRC) based at the Frazer Institute, The University of Queensland (UQ; Brisbane, Australia). He leads the pre-melanoma genomics program at the Frazer Institute and his group has extensive experience in the use of next-generation sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, bioinformatics, and functional analysis for a variety of applications. The Stark Lab’s major research streams include: miRNA biomarkers for melanoma progression and the development a Genomics Atlas of pre-skin cancer lesions, which aim to provide to greater understand melanoma progression from naevi and early invasive melanoma, with a goal to discover novel predictive biomarkers that offer increased precision to the clinical management of patients.

He has been engaged in melanoma and nevus research for 25+ years (with 9-years post PhD) and over this time he has been working towards understanding the aetiology of melanoma, studying gene dysregulation during tumor progression along with predisposition to melanoma in families with high risk for melanoma development. Dr Stark has a total of 97 career publications including 1 book chapter, 83 journal articles, 12 reviews/perspectives and 1 patent (WO/2016/029260) which have been cited a total of 7,053/10,208 times (Scopus/Google; h-index: 38/42) and has published in respected journals such as Nature, Nature Genetics, Cancer Research, and Journal of Investigative Dermatology. He has been awarded a career total of ~$10M as an Investigator (PI/co-PI/co-Investigator) including a prestigious NHMRC Peter Doherty Early Career Research Fellowship (2016-2019) and a recent NHMRC Investigator award (2025-2029), along with several research grants as Principal Investigator (e.g., Advance QLD Innovation Partnership, Department of Defence CDMRP – Melanoma Research Program).

Dr Hana Starobova is a pharmacist and NHMRC research fellow at the Sensory Neuropharmacology Group at the University of Queensland (UQ). She works under the mentorship of Prof. Vetter, and as an early career researcher, she is working toward an independent research career as a group leader. She obtained her PhD in 2020 from the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, UQ, and continued here to conduct studies as a Children Hospital Foundation Fellow (2021-2023) in the areas of cancer therapy-induced adverse and late effects with the main focus on neuropathies. Over the past four years, she has developed a research program focusing on the understanding of cancer therapy-induced adverse and late effects with a special interest in children, and established innovative transcriptomic and microscopy pipelines, in vitro assays, adult and juvenile models of adverse and late effects following mono- and combination chemotherapy and radiotherapy, assays for the assessment of adverse effects including cognition and neuropathies, as well as cancer models. Knowledge impact arising from her research program has been disseminated in 18 peer-reviewed publications, having together attracted >1,100 citations (h-index 15, i10-index 18, Google Scholar, May 2024).

Dr Sally Staton is a Senior Research Fellow in the Science of Learning Research Centre at the Queensland Brain Institute, UQ. Dr Staton has a strong commitment to research that can inform and ensure positive early life experience for all children. Her research focuses on the role of early education and care settings in supporting young children’s immediate and on-going social-emotional, cognitive and physical development. Dr Staton’s research spans a range of study designs and methodologies, including evaluation studies in educational settings (applying randomised control trial and quasi-experimental designs), longitudinal studies tracking large child cohorts (>2000 children), standard observation techniques (in vivo and video), survey and individualised standard child assessment (using educational and psychological measures), as well as studies employing physiological (cortisol, actigraphy, heart rate variability) and qualitative (child, educator and parent interviews, socio-metric) designs. She has a particular expertise in the development, application and interpretation of observational measurement for educational practices and teacher-child interactions in education contexts, including early childhood settings. Dr Staton has a strong track record in research translation and community engagement, including delivery of reports for government and non-government organisations, professional development packages for early childhood professionals and teachers, presentations, workshops, videos and articles for parents, government regulatory officers and the early childhood sector. In 2016, she was named among Queensland’s Young Tall Poppy Scientists for her contribution to science translation and engagement. In 2019 her succesful research partnerships with industry and government was acknowledged in a Partners in Research Excellence Award from UQ.

I completed my Bachelor of Pharmacy at Kings College London, followed by pre-registration and subsequent employment as a pharmacist with Boots the Chemists in Central London. With a PhD in plant biochemistry with Royal Holloway College, University of London, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, I moved first to Cornell University, USA and then The University of Western Australia for postdoctoral research. I moved to the School of Pharmacy at The University of Queensland in 2007.

Following a number of years in plant research, my current research interests generally link back to plants in some way. Many of my projects develop in response to requests for help from healthcare professionals, and so I have a strong focus on answering clinical questions using pharmaceutical science methods. See my research interests for more information.

I teach into the Bachelor of Pharmacy (Honours) in the areas of pharmaceutics, compounding and complementary medicines. I also teach the clinical drug development course for our Master of Pharmaceutical Industry Practice. I am currently the Director of Teaching, Learning and Student Experience for the School of Pharmacy. I have supervised 28 PhD students to completion, and over 60 undergraduate and masters independent research project students.

My research is in the discipline of higher education and focuses on university teacher beliefs, thinking and practices in relation to the use of educational technologies in teaching & learning. I am also interested in learning designs to support authentic learning approaches using new and emerging technologies such as Web 2.0/3.0 technologies, mobile technologies and 3D immersive environments.

Caroline Steel’s research is in the use of current and emerging educational technologies primarily in university and more recently as applied to the field of Technology-Enhanced Language Learning. She is President and Executive Member of ascilite (Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education). Her research into educational technologies draws on teacher and learner beliefs and affordance theories to investigate learner and teacher preferences and current uses of technology in education. She was lead researcher on a large multi-university research project that investigated the transitional experiences, motivational factors, technology preferences and uses of language students across 3 universities.

Caroline has worked in education-related fields for nearly 20 years as a language teacher, curriculum designer, university teacher educator and now research fellow. Caroline's PhD investigated university teachers' pedagogical beliefs, beliefs about web technologies and how these are enacted in practice. In her research she draws on a number of qualitative research approaches and methods including stimulated recall and concept mapping. Caroline teaches the Masters of Education course ‘Creating classrooms of the future with educational technology' and an undergraduate course in ‘Languages and Technology’.

Biography:

1992 - 1995. B.E. (Hons), Bachelor of Engineering (Chemical). The University of Melbourne.

1996 - 1999. Ph.D. (Engineering), Department of Chemical Engineering, The University of Melbourne.

2000 - 2008. Research Fellow then Lecturer. Nottingham Fuel and Energy Centre, School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, The University of Nottingham, UK.

2009 - 2018. Lecturer then Senior Lecturer, School of Chemical Engineering, The University of Queensland.

2019 - present. Associate Professor, School of Chemical Engineering, The University of Queensland.

My research interests are in energy and resources, including coal science, gas recovery, and sustainable mineral processing with a strong interest in developing new technologies to solve major issues. I develop new experimental/analytical capabilities and innovative approaches to provide new knowledge and novel insights that can help Australian industries maintain and extend their competitiveness in world markets. I also develop novel process schemes by manipulating solution equilibria and are currently focused on developing new mineral processes that include CO2 sequestration.

Main themes:

Metallurgical Coal Carbonisation and Biocoke Production

I have pioneered the use of high temperature oscillatory shear rheometry to characterise the microstructure of coal during pyrolysis/carbonisation as it transforms into coke (an essential porous carbon material used for steel-making). I obtained real mechanical properties of the plastic phase that forms and studied viscoelastic thresholds for bubble nucleation, growth and coalescence which enabled me to develop a hypothesis for a process problem known as high oven wall pressure. The knowledge base created from this research has paved the way for better models to predict oven wall pressure and elucidated clever ways to control pressure through blending.

This led to an ambitious new focus to develop a mechanistic model for coke strength that would reveal why some coals are not well predicted and how the value of a coal could be improved through blending. I combine rheometry and X-ray micro-CT analysis to reveal the physical mechanisms by which the pore structure of coke forms and how its features contribute to coke strength.

More recently, I have turned my attention to examining how coal can be replaced by biomass in steel production given that 7% of the world’s CO2 emissions come from producing steel. This involves examining the pyrolysis behaviour of biomass and finding ways to replicate the mechanisms that give rise to strong coke. Initial work has involved sugar can bagasse, an agricultural waste, and therefore involves examining the behaviour of grasses.

Significance: Coal is the 2nd biggest export earner for Australia, whereby the majority is metallurgical (met) coal used to make coke, and Australia is currently the largest exporter of met coal in the world. My research is used to ensure Australia remains at the forefront by enabling better predictions on the behaviour of different coals and providing new opportunities for the marketing of Australian coals.

Main collaborators: ACARP, BHP, Anglo American, Rio Tinto, Peabody, Vale, The University of Newcastle (Aus), CSIRO, School of Earth Sciences (UQ).

Novel Technologies for Increasing Gas Recovery from Coal Seams and Predicting Gas Production Rates.

Methane is a ‘cleaner’ fuel than coal because it is hydrogen-rich and can be burned in high efficiency combined cycles. Coal deposits in eastern Australia have enormous amounts of adsorbed methane (known as coal seam gas or coalbed methane) which has given rise to a fast growing industry whereby the methane is extracted, liquefied (LNG), and exported overseas. Extraction depends on the permeability of the coal seam. The most commonly used technology for increasing permeability is hydraulic fracturing, which originates from the conventional oil/gas industry where sandstone is the usual source rock. The structural properties dictating permeability for coal is different, whereby coal is already highly cleated due to the shrinkage process that occurs during formation. Instead of creating a new fracture network, our research has shown that it is possible to increase gas productivity by working with the existing cleat network, enhancing flow by dissolving the minerals within the cleats and etching cleat surfaces.

I have developed new laboratory and analytical capabilities to study the chemical and physical effects caused during chemical injection, including X-ray micro-CT analysis combined with pore characterisation and flow simulation (using GEODICT) to explain the permeability changes observed in laboratory injection tests.

I have also recently developed a new tool that enables the cleats to be examined as methane is desorbed (using high pressure cells and X-ray CT analysis). We aim to relate our observations to the structural properties of the coal and provide industry with a new capability to predict gas production rates for a given well over its life. Approaches taken are also applicable to predicting flow and adsorption behaviour of CO2 for sequestration considerations. Once coal seams become depleted of methane, the same pore space that held the methane is available for long-term CO2 storage

Significance: Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is the 3rd biggest export earner for Australia. Industry is currently targeting regions where gas is easy to extract, and the challenge is to develop new technologies for increasing permeability in other regions and to predict gas production levels as a well depletes. My research supports industry by providing new technologies and new capabilities that helps them maintain and extend their position in the world market.

Main collaborators: Santos, Origin Energy, Arrow Energy, QGC, UQ Centre for Natural Gas, School of Earth Sciences (UQ).

Sequestration of CO2 as Stable Mineral Carbonates

Mineral carbonates are known to be stable for millions of years and so conversion of CO2 emissions to solid carbonate is an attractive solution. My background in manipulating solution equilibria to achieve desired effects led me to establish novel chemical routes for making Mg-carbonates from CO2 and either Mg-silicates or Mg-rich tailings. Given that Mg-silicates can contain Ni the process can be aligned with the current process for Ni recovery. Furthermore, the process can extract CO2 from the atmosphere and can therefore offset the release of CO2 elsewhere.

Significance: Technologies to mitigate against CO2 emissions are of unparalled importance. One of the major challenges is keeping the cost low. Using clever chemistry and combining CO2 sequestration with existing mineral processing operations that produce valuable commodities could enable it to work commercially.

Julian A. Steele received his Ph.D. in physics from The Institute for Superconducting and Electronic Materials (ISEM), University of Wollongong, before undertaking postdoctoral work at KU Leuven (Belgium) and UC Berkeley (USA). From 2023, he began a DECRA Fellowship at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), The University of Queensland, working on a range of condensed matter topics, within which phase transition phenomena in metal halide perovskite semiconductors feature heavily.