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Dr Shakti Shrestha is Deputy Director of Research and Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice and Medicines Management at the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Queensland (UQ). His research program focuses on optimising medication use in older people and those with life‑limiting illness, with particular interests in deprescribing, medication safety, dementia and palliative care, quality use of medicines, and the implementation of evidence into practice.

Shakti conceived and co‑led the development of De‑TOPPLE, a deprescribing decision‑support framework designed to improve medication optimisation for older adults with limited life expectancy. He also served as a Research Fellow and Queensland site coordinator for the MRFF‑funded EMBRACE trial, evaluating strategies to enhance the implementation of evidence‑based psychotropic prescribing recommendations in Australian residential aged care. His broader research spans medicines optimisation, medication‑related quality of life, pharmacy practice, health services research, and implementation science, forming a coherent program aimed at reducing medication‑related harm and improving care outcomes for older populations, particularly those with palliative care needs.

He has published widely across ageing, medication safety, deprescribing and pharmacy practice, and received the 2025 Best Publication by an Early Career Researcher Award from the UQ School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. He supervises PhD, postgraduate and undergraduate research projects in medicines optimisation, polypharmacy, deprescribing and medication use in older populations, integrating his research expertise into teaching and research training.

Shakti’s academic and research work is informed by extensive experience across pharmacy practice, clinical research, residential aged care and higher education in Australia, the United Kingdom and Nepal. He was awarded the 2018 Australian Research Training Scholarship for his PhD in Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacy Practice at UQ and the 2022 Career Development Scholarship, through which he gained further clinical trail experience across Queensland Hospital and Health Services. He holds a Master of Science in Clinical Pharmacology with Distinction from the University of Aberdeen (UK), and Bachelor of Pharmaceutical Sciences with Distinction from Pokhara University (Nepal). During his Master's training in the UK, he gained research experience working with SITS-ISTR (Safe Implementation of Thrombolysis in Stroke-International Stroke Thrombolysis Registry) data within NHS Grampian.

Dr Kirstine Shrubsole is an NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow at the Queensland Aphasia Research Centre. She holds a Bachelor of Speech Pathology (First Class Honours) from The University of Queensland, and completed her PhD in 2018. Kirstine has a research focus on improving implementation of evidence into practice in speech pathology and multidisciplinary services, with a special interest in stroke and aphasia rehabilitation. She has demonstrated that practice change is achievable for healthcare teams working in aphasia, leading to positive outcomes for patients, clinicians, and organisations.

Kirstine has published over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles, and has been awarded over $14 million in competitive research funding. Kirstine previously worked as the Conjoint Research Fellow in Speech Pathology (Princess Alexandra Hospital and The University of Queensland), providing research capacity building and mentoring to speech pathologists and supporting multidisciplinary research. Kirstine is the co-founder and Deputy Lead of the Collaboration of Aphasia Triallists’ Implementation Science in Aphasia working group, and a research affiliate of the Centre for Research Excellence in Aphasia Rehabilitation and Recovery.

Kirstine is completing a NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellowship on the following topic:

• The Aphasia Implementation Toolkit Project: Developing an implementation intervention to improve services for stroke survivors with aphasia

She is a chief investigator on three MRFF grants, including:

• Unspoken, Unheard, Unmet: Improving Access to Preventative Health Care through Better Conversations about Care

• Bridging the Digital Divide: Building Health Self-Efficacy through Communication-Accessible Online Environments

• Enhancing utility of neuropsychological evaluation for earlier and effective diagnosis of dementia in Parkinson's disease

My research interest may be seen to lie within one or more of the following areas

· Postcolonial sociologies of education

· Critical governmentality studies

· Student mobilities.

· Studies of globalization and transnationalism in relation to education institutions, policies and practices

· International higher education governance

· Development and education

These interests probably have something to do with my personal biography. I am a first generation ‘education migrant’ whose parents migrated to Australia at the tail end of the 1970s, their postcolonial dream unraveled by the cultural politics of new nationhood. We came to live in Western Australia at the end of one mining boom (this one was Japan driven), and the start of a major economic restructuring project that would transform the Australia economy, and the lifestyles and livelihoods of many of its citizens. I finished high school and then majored in Microbiology at the University of Western Australia, before working for two years in a genetics laboratory on the molecular aspects of change in anaerobic bacteria. I subsequently moved disciplines to the social sciences, completed a degree in Social Work, and worked for a decade in a number of areas ranging from child protection and juvenile justice to ‘educational development assistance’, multicultural counselling, refugee settlement and international student advising. In 1999, I commenced my PhD studies. My thesis investigated the workings of the education export industry using postcolonial and poststructuralist frameworks. It critically appraised the concept of globalisation and its use to govern international education. Through this work, I developed an interest in the different actors in the cast of globalization - international students, transnational scientists, and refugees and asylum seekers.

My more recent research has focused on emerging education hubs in Singapore and Malaysia and the transnational mobilities of ‘knowledge workers’ recruited to these emerging knowledge spatialities. I am also investigating the temporal reach and recontextualisation of colonial knowledges and practices on assembling ‘postcolonial’ subjectivities in the context of Southeast Asia. I have a strong interest in empirical work and welcome enquires from students who are interested in deep and substantive engagement with theoretical frameworks. Being a cultural, professional and disciplinary hybrid, I am keen to work across disciplines.

I am actively involved in three research projects at present, all concerned variously with investigations of mobility:

• Globalising Universities and International Student Mobilities in East Asia, Funded by the Ministry of Education, Government of Singapore
• Transnational Knowledge Workers in the Life-and Technosciences, Funded by the University of Queensland
• Inbound and Outbound Student Mobility, Funded by the University of Queensland.

Dr Thomas Sigler is an Associate Professor of Human Geography, with a focus on urban and economic geography. He holds a PhD and MSc from the Pennsylvania State University, and a BA from the University of Southern California. He is Director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute's (AHURI) UQ Research Centre. Dr Sigler has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers on topics relating to urban growth and development, economic connectivity, urban planning, and the sharing economy with collaborators in Asia, Europe, Australia and North America. These publications appear in a wide range of academic journals, including Urban Geography, Environment and Planning A, Economic Geography, PLoS One, Urban Studies, Regional Studies, Journal of Geography, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), and the Bulletin of Latin American Research. Dr Sigler is an editorial board member of Urban Geography, Finance & Space, Global Networks and Geographical Research.

Dr Anelise Silveira is a physiotherapist and early career researcher specializing in musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions, particularly upper extremity disorders. She has a strong interest in non-pharmacological randomized controlled trials (RCTs), systematic reviews (including meta-analysis and network meta-analysis), and co-designing research protocols with people with lived experience to ensure relevance and impact.

Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Clinical Trials at the STARS Education and Research Alliance and the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, The University of Queensland. Anelise is also affiliated with the Centre for Innovation in Pain and Health Research (CIPHeR), the ANZMUSC Clinical Trials Network, the Queensland Orthopaedic Physiotherapy Network (QOPN), and the Canadian Physiotherapy Association (CPA).

She has contributed to 12 successful grant applications securing over AUD$688,000 and published 19 peer-reviewed papers. She has mentored 10 orthopaedic surgery residents in completing research projects, 4 physical therapists in conducting systematic reviews, 2 physiotherapists in clinical skill development, and numerous research personnel in data collection, RCT procedures, and project management. She previously served as Research Director for the College of Health Sciences at the University of Alberta in Canada, where she also completed her PhD in Epidemiology in 2024. Her doctoral work focused on improving care and return-to-work outcomes for workers with shoulder injuries. Anelise relocated to Australia in March 2025 to begin her fellowship and is welcoming PhD and Master’s students interested in upper-extremity MSK research.

Dr Joshua Simmich is a physiotherapist and digital health researcher at UQ’s RECOVER Injury Research Centre. His work focuses on technology-enabled rehabilitation: how tools such as telerehabilitation, mobile health, wearable sensors, virtual reality, serious games and artificial intelligence can make rehabilitation more accessible, engaging and effective.

Joshua’s research spans remote and hybrid models of physiotherapy care, patient preferences for telerehabilitation, the safety and effectiveness of video-based rehabilitation and exercise, and the evaluation of digital tools for pain monitoring and clinical decision-making. His PhD examined how active video games and wearable sensors could support physical activity in people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

He works with clinical and research teams to design, evaluate and translate digital health innovations for rehabilitation. Current and recent projects include virtual reality for driving anxiety, personalised motorised wheelchair trials using simulation, AI-supported navigation of the Australian healthcare system, GPS-based functional assessment for people with persistent pain, and serious games for physiotherapy education.

Joshua is available to supervise students interested in digital health, telerehabilitation, technology-enabled rehabilitation, AI in healthcare, virtual reality, wearable sensors, physical activity and rehabilitation service delivery.

Peter Simpson is a recognised expert in the molecular and pathological characterisation of breast and lung cancers. His research is based at the UQ Centre for Clinical Research (UQCCR), where he is the Head of the Cancer Theme and is a Research Group Leader in Cancer Genomics. He has published >150 articles (>12,000 citations, H-index 52; Scopus, May2025) including in Nature, Nature Medicine, Annals of Oncology and the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. He co-manages the Brisbane Breast Bank (BBB), a tissue bank created to facilitate clinical breast cancer research, and the Debutant lung cancer Program.

Pete also holds a teaching appointment in UQ, where he is passionate about the science and clinical applications of Pathology. He teaches into the UQ Medical Program (Year 1 and 2), as well as to undergraduates. He has co-authored a chapter ‘Breast Diseases’ in the latest edition (11th) of the internationally acclaimed Medical text book Robbins and Cotran Pathologic Basis of Disease.

Outside UQ, Pete is a Fellow of the Faculty of Science in the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia (FFSc RCPA), a member of the kConFab Executive (https://www.kconfab.org/), a member of the Lobular Breast Cancer Alliance Scientific Advisory Board (https://lobularbreastcancer.org/), and a member of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (Breast Cancer group).

Pete enjoys supervising students at all levels in their careers and collaborating within multidisciplinary teams spanning clinical (e.g. pathology, oncology) and science teams (e.g. in ‘omics, bioinformatics and machine learning).

PLEASE NOTE THAT ANY AUTHORSHIP ALTERATIONS LISTING ME AS SIMPSON-FRASER BELOW ARE INCORRECT. ALL PUBLICATIONS ARE FIONA SIMPSON. MY PROFESSIONAL NAME IS FIONA SIMPSON.

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/the-tricky-business-of-cancer-research/9498246

Our laboratory is involved in cross-discipline research studying endocytosis, cancer, pharmacology and immunology to improve therapies used in cancer treatment.

Dr Laura Simpson Reeves is a Research Fellow in the School of Nursing, Midwifery, and Social Work at The University of Queensland. Her program of research explores how structural and cultural forces shape experiences of inequality and disadvantage, working at the intersection of culture, community, and care. Her work seeks to contribute to positive outcomes for children and families through strengthening evidence-based practice.

Laura's research is grounded in a deep commitment to social justice, equity, and inclusion, with a strong interdisciplinary focus that spans sociology, community and international development, communication studies, and social work. Her work is characterised by applied, impact-driven practice and methodological rigor, especially in qualitative and visual/arts-based methods, with a sustained focus on vulnerable and marginalised populations. She is passionate about translating research into practice and amplifying voices of those with lived/living experience.

In addition to her research, Laura is passionate about creating safe and inclusive spaces in which research and teaching can be grounded and learning shared. She has a strong history of service and mentoring with students and early career academics, especially those returning to study or coming from non-traditional or marginalised backgrounds.