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I am a passionate researcher with a background in computer science and a strong commitment to leveraging technology for the betterment of society. I hold a PhD in Image Forensics and have had the privilege of conducting postdoctoral research at prestigious institutions such as SUNY Albany and Dartmouth College, where I had the opportunity to collaborate closely with Prof. Hany Farid.

During my postdoc at Dartmouth College, I focused my research efforts on addressing a critical societal issue - real-time child pornography detection. This research not only garnered recognition within the academic community but also earned praise from luminaries like Prof. Ramesh Raskar at MIT, who invited me to share my insights through a talk at MIT.

I primarily works in the area of Cyber Security, Digital Forensics, Privacy and Security Aspects, Homomorphic Encryption and Cloud Computing.

As I continue my research journey, I remain committed to making a positive impact through innovation and collaboration. I am excited about the opportunities that lie ahead and the potential for technology to create a safer and more inclusive world.

I am an early career postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Ian Frazer's laboratory. I am a self-motivated young scientist with a research focus on cell and cancer biology, genomic instability, tumour immunology, and cellular therapies. I pursued my doctoral studies under the guidance of Prof. Kum Kum Khanna in QIMR Berghofer and conferred in April 2018, from Griffith University. Prior to my PhD, I acquired a Master of Science degree in Biotechnology, awarded in August 2013 from VIT University, India. After my PhD, I perused my first postdoctoral research experience under the supervision of Prof. Rajiv Khanna at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute. Throughout my PhD studies, my research was focused on the development of novelcombinatorial therapeutic strategies against aggressive solid cancers . I have a strong interest in understanding the relationship between cancer signalling pathways and tumour microenvironment in aggressive malignancies.

Ashish Sinha, Professor of Marketing at UQ Business School and Visiting Professor of Marketing & Research Fellow at the Indian School of Business. He has previously held senior leadership positions in both industry and academia, including Academic Dean of Executive Education (ISB), Associate Dean (Research), Interim Dean and Acting Head of Economics at UTS Business School, and Professor and Head of School of Marketing at University of New South Wales (UNSW); Vice President, Analytics Insights group at IRI, Chicago, USA.

As the Academic Dean of ExecED at ISB, he led the digital transformaiton of the Executive Education culminating in the ExecED program being ranked Financial Times #38 in the world for Custom Programs. In the role of ADR and the defacto co-Internal Dean, he led the transformation of the UTS Business School into an externally-engaged research powerhouse, that culminated in the school being ranked in the top 3 Business Schools in Australia as per ERA 2018.

He currently holds or previously held visiting appointments at the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hong Kong Polytech University and University of Alberta.

His work has appeared in many academic and trade journals, including Marketing Science, the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Consumer Psychology, the Journal of Retailing, Marketing Letters, the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, the Journal of Business Research, European Marketing Journal, Industrial Marketing Management and Australasian Marketing Journal.

He is also a recipient of many academic awards including Davidson Award for Best Journal of Retailing Paper and is twice runner-up for the Gary Lilien Practice Award for the significant impact that his work has made to the practice of business. He is the winner of the 2013 ANZMAC Distinguished Researcher Award and became an ANZMAC Fellow in 2016.

He has supervised to completion 10 PhD students, several of them hold senior academic & practitioner positions, and are recipents of academic awards including, 2016 ANZMAC Layton Best Dissertation Award and a 2022 finalist for the AMA (American Marketing Association)/Howard Best Dissertation Award.

I am Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Cultures at The University of Queensland (UQ).

My research interests lie within the broad areas of pragmatics and discourse analysis, particularly, the pragmatics of social interaction (face-to-face and online), identity construction, humour, (im)politeness, getting acquainted and family talk. I have been working with different types of data, including naturally-occurring conversations, reality television discourse, qualitative interviews, corpora and social media.

Currently, I'm working on a research project entitled Family talk in multilingual Australia (AusFamTalk): for more details, see my Research on a Page.

I am Associate Editor in the Journal of Pragmatics, an Editorial Board member in Advances in (Im)politeness Studies (book series), Springer and a member of the IPrA Consultation Board.

I regularly review grant applications and I am a member of:

• College of Experts, European Science Foundation (from 2021)
• Review College, FWO (Research Foundation – Flanders) (2024-2027)

I've always loved languages, maybe because I've always been surrounded by a variety of them. I grew up speaking Lithuanian (lietuvių) and Russian (русский). Then I spent many years studying and then also teaching English and I also have a certificate for teaching Spanish as a foreign language (español como lengua extranjera ELE). Due to my study/research relocations, I can also communicate (sometimes extremely poorly) in Dutch (nederlands), French (français) and Portuguese (português), and at the moment I'm struggling with Modern Greek (ελληνικά) and Japanese (日本語)!

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Programme contribution (current)

Convenor of Master of Applied Linguistics programme

Convenor of Discourse Discussion Group (DDG): Data analysis sessions and Pragmatics & Interaction reading group

• 2026: Fridays, 12 pm - 2 pm & 2 pm - 4 pm;
• Interested in joining or would like to find out more? Fill in the EoI form or contact me via email.

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Course contribution/Teaching areas:

UQ (undergraduate):

• Digital Discourse and Social Media (SLAT3030)

UQ (postgraduate):

• Language, Culture and Communication (SLAT7899)
• Structure of Language (SLAT7705)

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Supervision (MA & PhD):

PhD (current)

• Chilmeg Elden (associate supervisor; with Prof Michael Haugh): The establishment and management of interpersonal relationships in early encounters between Australian and Japanese language exchange partners
• Zhiyi Liu (principal supervisor; with Dr Wei-Lin Melody Chang and Prof Ping Chen): The pragmatics of caring: Relating practices in Chinese-speaking families
• Chantima Wangsomchok (associate supervisor; with Prof Michael Haugh): Conversational humour in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) workplaces

PhD (completed)

• (2026) Andrea Rodriguez (principal supervisor; with Prof Michael Haugh): Relational accountability: Insights from categorial work in accounting practices (Transnational family talk in Spanish)
• (2025) Nicholas Hugman (associate supervisor; with Prof Michael Haugh): Towards a (micro)theory of conversational humour: The interactional accomplishment of incongruity
• (2023) Amir Sheikhan (associate supervisor; with Prof Michael Haugh and Dr Wei-Lin Melody Chang): Conversational humour in intercultural initial interactions in English

MA (current)

• (2026) Danie Wang: Membership categorisation analysis of pedagogical sequences in parent-child interaction

MA (completed)

• (2025) Sidonie Evans: “That’s what being a dad’s all about”: The construction of the father category and fatherhood in male advice podcasts
• (2025) Marlene Valdés Fuentes: “Mamá, por favor, ¿me dejas que me ponga ahí?: A multimodal analysis of a toddler’s requests in Spanish family interactions
• (2023) Yeisy Vanessa Maldonado Ramirez: Reporting offence to friends in Spanish: A pragmatic analysis of moral grounds and impolite behaviour
• (2023) Shea-Lea Wheeler: A discourse study of fictional self-presentation in Dungeons & Dragons gameplay
• (2021) Zhiyi Liu: Constructing identities of a mother and an older sister/adult child: Membership categorization analysis of Chinese-Australian family talk
• (2021) Maria Nagao: English teachers of young learners in Japan: A discourse analytical study on identity construction
• (2021) Shupei Ni: Relational work in video game live-streaming interactions: Case studies of jocular abuse and joint fantasizing
• (2021) Andrea Rodriguez: “Ay no, I do feel exhausted”: Interactional co-construction and interpersonal management of complaints in Spanish phone conversations between friends and relatives
• (2020) Duyen Hong Ngoc Luong: Teaching English as a foreign language in Vietnam: Teachers’ and students’ perceptions of the English-only approach and code-switching in the classroom

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Forthcoming publications:

Journal articles

• Sinkeviciute, Valeria (2026). The ‘parent’ category as an interactional resource in a sibling dispute over sharing. Discourse Studies 28(4).

Special Issues

• Sinkeviciute, Valeria and Andrea Rodriguez (eds). (2026). Rules of engagement: Relationships and socialisation practices in family discourse. Discourse Studies 28(4).

Edited volume

• Sinkeviciute, Valeria, Andrea Rodriguez and Zhiyi Liu (eds). (under contract). Relating, normativity and culture-in-action in family interaction: 'Doing family’ across languages and spaces. Routledge

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Projects (current):

• 2022-present: "Family talk in multilingual Australia"
  • 2025 (February-April): "‘Who we are’ in multilingual Australia: Language and identity construction in family talk" funded by a Fellowship at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (IDS), Mannheim, Germany
  • 2023: "Talking families into being: Analysing family interactions in Australian multilingual context" funded by Research Fund, School of Languages and Cultures (UQ)
  • 2022: "‘Who we are’ in multilingual Brisbane: Family talk in Spanish and Russian speech communities" funded by HASS Enabler Funding Scheme (HASS EFS), Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (UQ)

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Forthcoming conference presentations/talks:

• 23-29 June 2026: Doing ‘being siblings’: The multimodal accomplishment of with and against practices at ICCA2026, Edmonton, Canada

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Edited special issues/volumes:

• Sinkeviciute, Valeria (ed). 2024. Advances in the study of social action in online interaction. Internet Pragmatics https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.7.1
• Haugh, Michael and Valeria Sinkeviciute (eds.). 2021. The pragmatics of initial interactions: Cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives. Journal of Pragmatics. https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-pragmatics/special-issue/10DB1P3LJJ8
• Sinkeviciute, Valeria (ed.). 2019. The interplay between humour and identity construction. Journal of Pragmatics 152. https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-pragmatics/vol/152/suppl/C
• Dynel, Marta and Valeria Sinkeviciute (eds.). 2017. Conversational humour: Spotlight on languages and cultures. Language & Communication 55. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02715309/55?sdc=1

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Reviews of my monograph "Conversational humour and (im)politeness: A pragmatics analysis of social interaction":

• Yang, N. (2022). Book review: Sinkeviciute, Valeria.2019. Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Journal of Politeness Research 18(2): 451-455. https://doi.org/10.1515/pr-2020-0015
• Tsami, V. & Saloustrou, V. (2021). Book review: Sinkeviciute, Valeria.(2018). Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. The European Journal of Humour Research 9(3): 179-183. https://europeanjournalofhumour.org/ejhr/article/view/544/556
• Murphy, J. (2021). Review of Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness: A Pragmatic Analysis of Social Interaction, Valeria Sinkeviciute. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia (2019). 274 pp. ISBN 9789027262110 (e-book). Journal of Pragmatics 183: 105-106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.07.010
• Krendel, A. (2020). Review of Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness. Valeria Sinkeviciute, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2019 (e-book), ISBN: 9789027262110. Corpus Pragmatics 4: 479–483.https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41701-020-00086-w

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Panel organisation (since 2020):

• 23-29 June 2026 (with Zhiyi Liu and Andrea Rodriguez) - ‘Doing family’ in talk-in-interaction: Diversity across languages, at the International Conference on Conversation Analysis (ICCA2026), Edmonton, Canada
• 22-27 June 2025 (with Andrea Rodriguez) - (Cross-)linguistic studies on relationships and socialisation practices in family discourse, at the 19th International Pragmatics Conference, IPrA2025, Brisbane, Australia
• 9-14 July 2023 (with Andrea Rodriguez) - Membership categorisation and interpersonal relationships in social interaction, at the 18th International Pragmatics Conference, IPrA2023, Brussels, Belgium

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Invited research talks/lectures (since 2020):

• 12 September 2025 - A pragmatic and categorial analysis of a sibling dispute. Talk at Research Seminar Series at Western Sydney University
• 11 December 2024 - “Tú quieres que yo te dé un premio?”: Acción social y categorías en las conversaciones familiares. Talk at Seminario Permanente de Análisis de la Conversación (SPAC)
• 11-13 October 2024 - Online interaction as multimodal accomplishment of the social order. Plenary talk at the 3rd Interactional Conference on Discourse Pragmatics (ICDP-3)
• 21 January 2021 - Social interaction and identity construction. Guest lecture for postgraduate students at University of Maribor, Slovenia
• 20 January 2021 - Pragmatics and social action. Guest lecture for undergraduate students at University of Maribor, Slovenia

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Community workshops

• 30 September 2025 - Peer-review training for PhD and ECRs (UQ Graduate School)
• 2 September 2025 - Workshop on cultural competency (invited by UQ Vice-Chancellor Scholars Enrichment Program)
• 16 October 2024 - Intercultural conversations: Am I being nice or rude? (invited by Student Affairs Division, UQ)
• 21 March 2024 - Harmony in conversation (invited by Mental Health Champions Network, UQ)
• 28 August 2023 - Intercultural conversations: How (not) to handle a conversation (invited by Multicultural Queensland Month)

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Journal Referee

Journal of Pragmatics / Pragmatics / Journal of Politeness Research / Discourse Studies / Lingua / Language & Communication / Research on Language and Social Interaction / Internet Pragmatics / Discourse, Context & Media / Contrastive Pragmatics / Pragmatics and Society / Gender, Work & Organization / Sociolinguistic Studies / Pragmatics & Cognition / Journal of English for Academic Purposes / The Sociological Review

Charles currently works as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Queensland Centre for Population Research, the University of Queensland. His current research projects investigate patterns of internal migration in Australia. He finished his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Melbourne last December 2022. In his PhD, he used administrative datasets from the Philippines and Canada to investigate the following questions: (i) how do non-partisan alliances in developing countries function as political organizations? and (ii) what is the role of lobbyists in politics in advanced democracies?

Before starting his Ph.D., Charles worked as an economic research associate at the Asian Institute of Management-Rizalino S. Navarro Policy Center for Competitiveness and the Philippine Human Development Network, and as an instructor at the Ateneo De Manila University in the Philippines.

Prof Siskind trained as a psychiatrist in Australia and the United States. He graduated from medicine at the University of Queensland in 1998. After working with Doctors Without Borders in Chechnya in 2000, he became interested in psychiatry. He moved to Boston in 2002, where he did his psychiatry residency at Boston University and a Master of Public Health at Harvard University. He returned to Brisbane in June 2008 as a clinical academic psychiatrist at the Metro South Addiction and Mental Health Service. He completed his Ph.D in Feb 2014. His research interests include clozapine and treatment refractory schizophrenia, the physical health of people with severe and persistent mental illness, supported accommodation, assertive community treatment and mental health services research. He was awarded an NHMRC Investigator Grant as an Emerging Leadership Fellow (2021-2025) and an NHMRC Early Career Fellowship (2016-2019). He has a current CIA MRFF RCRDUN grant looking at treatments to reduce cardiometabolic morbidity among people with schizophrenia. He has over 300 peer reviewed publications, including first author in the highly ranked Lancet, World Psychiatry, Lancet Psychiatry, BJPsych, ANZJP, & Schizophrenia Bulletin. He is a named investigator on over $60 million in competitive research grants, with over $7 million as CIA.

Dr Eloise Skinner is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the ODeSI research group at UQ and holds a Bachelor of Science (Zoology & Ecology majors), a Masters of Wild Animal Biology and a PhD in Epidemiology.

Dr Skinner has a background in research on the environmental and climate factors driving the transmission of environmentally mediated diseases across different spatial and temporal scales. She is particularly interested in investigating the dynamics, relative importance and impacts of land-use change, species interactions and climate change on infectious disease dynamics. Her main study system of interest is vector-borne diseases which can have diverse and unexpected outbreaks following environmental changes. Eloise's research applies spatial epidemiology, mathematical modelling and fieldwork methods to untangle the interactions between vectors, hosts and their environment across populations and landscapes.

Dr Skinner has worked with local and international governments and research institutions to identify the greatest challenges for managing vector-borne diseases. Her reserach is highly regarded in her field and she has been awarded around $350,000 of research funding since 2018.

Tina is a quantitative marine and coral reef ecologist focused on understanding the drivers of reef community dynamics, from food-web structure and energy flow to habitat connectivity and population processes. She integrates field ecology, laboratory analyses, and big-data modelling to answer applied questions for conservation, with particular expertise in stable isotope ecology and ecosystem modelling.

​​Based at the University of Queensland and affiliated with the Centre for Marine Science and the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, she currently models Crown-of-Thorns Starfish outbreak dynamics on the Great Barrier Reef to identify strategies that maximise the effectiveness of limited manual control resources. This work contributes directly to management through the COTS Control Innovation Program with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and national partners.

She has over a decade of international experience leading cross-sector collaborations with governments, NGOs, research institutions, Indigenous peoples, and local communities across Australia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean, and is committed to translating complex biodiversity data into decisions that benefit both people and nature. She is also passionate about communicating science to diverse audiences and engaging the next generation in marine research.

Mariusz Skwarczynski completed his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1999 at Wroclaw University of Technology (Poland). His postdoctoral training began at Tokushima Bunri University (Japan) under the direction of late Professor M. Nishizawa, where he studied the biomimetic total synthesis of anticancer agent paclitaxel. He then joined the laboratory of Professor Yoshiaki Kiso at Kyoto Pharmaceutical University (Japan) to study prodrugs of paclitaxel. In 2004 he was awarded with Japanese fellowship (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellowship) and research grant to conduct further research on paclitaxel. He developed novel classes of paclitaxel prodrugs: isotaxoids and phototaxels. He also co-developed an epimerization-free method for the synthesis of novel building blocks (isodipeptides) for solid phase peptide synthesis and these units have been commercialized by Merck-Novabiochem.

In 2008 he joined Professor Istvan Toth group at University of Queensland (Australia) to work on vaccine delivery strategies. Since then, he research is mainly focused on nanotechnology-based peptide vaccine delivery approaches. In 2010 he was awarded with University of Queensland Strategic Fund Research Fellowship. In Australia, he is involved in a wide range of collaborative research projects, both nationally and internationally, to develop vaccines against GAS, HIV, hookworm infections, malaria and cancer, along with antibiotics against multidrug resistant bacteria.

Associate Professor Christine Slade PhD GCProfLearning BA (Com Plan & Devt) PFHEA ATCL

Assessment, Academic Integrity and GenAI

In my role as Associate Professor in Higher Education, in the Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation (ITaLI) I contribute to the UQ strategic priorities, with leadership responsibilities in assessment, academic integrity and generative artificial intelligence. My purpose is to empower institutions, educators, and students to navigate the complexities of generative AI with confidence and ethical competence. I aim to foster a culture of integrity that enables students to thrive as critical thinkers and ethical leaders, committed to serving the common good in a rapidly evolving educational landscape.

Sergeja Slapničar is Associate Professor of Accounting and Co-lead of Digital Finance Research Hub. Her research is at the intersection of auditing, risk management, cyber security, and AI governance. She investigates how organisations financially quantify and audit cyber risk, coordinate the lines of defence in cyber security, and manage cyber and AI risks effectively. Sergeja disseminates her research findings to professional and regulatory audiences through policy engagement, practitioner journals, and by presenting at national and international industry events. She is a member of the Editorial Boards of Journal of Management Control, International Journal of Auditing, and Behavioral Research in Accounting. Sergeja is a passionate educator whose work-integrated approach, connecting students with real startups, has earned multiple awards, including faculty, university, and national citations for outstanding contribution to student learning.

She has extensive Board experience by having served as a non-executive Director in a systemic bank in Eurozone; in a multinational pharmaceutical corporation, on the Board of the Slovenian Agency for Public Oversight of Auditing, as a Chair of the settlement committee in owners' disputes (Slovenia) and as an independent member in audit and remuneration committees of various public interest entities (the Slovenian Bad Bank among others). She has trained over 1,000 executive and non-executive directors in accounting, finance and cyber security risk management at the Slovenian Directors Association, and advised organisations on risk management. Prior to her employment at the UQ Business School, Sergeja was a Professor at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is a member of ISACA; serves on the Education Committee of the Institute of Internal Auditors Australia and on the Auditing, Assurance, and Ethics Standards Committee at the European Accounting Association.

Virginia Slaughter is Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia, where she founded the Early Cognitive Development Centre. Her research focuses on social and cognitive development in infants and young children, with particular emphasis on social behaviour in infancy, theory-of-mind development and the acquisition of peer interaction skills. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

Dr Slaughter is a teaching focused academic in the Tourism discipline of UQ Business School. Her knowledge of tourism management is supported by substantial study in the area.

After travelling extensively, Lee returned to Australia to pursue tourism studies at The University of Queensland. In 2000 Lee was awarded her doctorate which focused on backpacker tourism. She continued researching in the area of tourism management, particularly as it relates to backpacker tourism. More recently Lee has moved to a teaching focused position and uses her previous experience to enhance her teaching at both undergraduate and masters levels.