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Roland is Professor of International Relations and Coordinator of the Visual Politics Research Program. His research explores how images and emotions shape political phenomena, including humanitarianism, security, peacebuilding, protest movements and the conflict in Korea. Books include Visual Global Politics (Routledge, 2018); Aesthetics and World Politics (Palgrave, 2009/2012); Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (University of Minnesota Press, 2005/2008) and Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (CUP, 2000).

Roland’s main current research project is an interdisciplinary ARC Linkage collaboration (2022-2026) on The Politics and Ethics of Visualising Humanitarian Crises. The project involves eight researchers and the World Press Photo Foundation, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Australian Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières.

Roland grew up in Zürich, Switzerland, where he was educated and worked as a lawyer. He studied international relations in Paris, Seoul, Toronto, Vancouver and Canberra. Roland also worked for two years in a Swiss diplomatic mission in the Korean DMZ and held visiting affiliations at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt, Tampere, Yonsei and Pusan National University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Further informatin can be found on Roland''s personal website:

For an in-person or zoom appointment book here: https://calendly.com/bleiker

Selection of Recent Publications

“Decolonising Affect" Cooperation and Conflict (2024)

“Un-Disciplining the International” Alternatives: Local, Global, Political (2023)

"Visualizing International Relations” Journal of Visual Political Communication, 10,(2023

"Visual Violence" Interview with Brad Evans, Los Angeles Review of Books, 3 Jan 2022.

Senior administrative and secretariat support to Director and Senior Academics, employing the University's administrative systems; strong knowledge of financial, HR, Research and Student functions and applications. Good network connections, primarily accross the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Behavioural Sciences.

Coordinating team activities and connecting internal colleagues and external partners. Extensive experience in a central co-ordinator and senior administrative position at top tier Australian universities in Brisbane, Queensland.

Currently finishing an undergraduate psychology degree.

*2025 School of Public Health Excellence Awards: Ray of Sunshine Award

Lecturer in Strategic and Political Communication at The University of Queensland’s School of Communication and Arts. PhD in Political Communication from The University of Queensland, and MSc from the London School of Economic and Political Science (LSE). Elena is currently involved in two strands of research focusing on populist communication and the the rise of disruptive, uncivil, and divisive discourses that appear to be undermining political dialogue and changing modern democracy from within. Elena is also interested in the impact of virtual and human influencers on audiences vis-à-vis traditional strategic communication, government PR, and propaganda.

Long trajectory as a journalist, media relations and public affairs executive. Main areas of interest: political communication; strategic communication; populist communication; civility/incivility in today's society; the mediatisation of politics and society; CGI/Virtual/teen influencers; pandemic communication and strategic silence.

Books

Block, E. (2015). Political Communication and Leadership Mimetisation, Hugo Chavez and the Construction of Power and Identity. New York: Routledge

Block, E. (2022). Discursive Disruption, Populist Communication and Democracy: The Cases of Hugo Chávez and Donald J. Trump (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003118602

Selected articles

Block, E. and Negrine, R. (2017). The Populist Communication Style: Toward a Critical Framework. International Journal of Communication, 11(2017), 178-197

Block, E. (2013). A Culturalist Approach to the Concept of the Mediatization of Politics: The Age of ‘‘Media Hegemony’’”, Communication Theory. 23(2013), 259-278

Block, E., & Lovegrove, R. (2021). Discordant storytelling, ‘honest fakery’, identity peddling: How uncanny CGI characters are jamming public relations and influencer practices. Public Relations Inquiry, 10(3), 265-293. https://doi.org/10.1177/2046147X211026936

Le, T. L., & Block, E. (2024). When communist propaganda meets western public relations: Examining Vietnam’s government pandemic communication. Public Relations Inquiry, 13(1), 33-67. https://doi.org/10.1177/2046147X231218310

Book chapters

Block, Elena ( in press). Populist Communication Strategies in Intergroup Relations. The Sage Handbook of Intercultural Communication. Sage: 458-471

Block, Elena (2024). The Latin American political discourse. The Routledge Handbook of Political Communication in Ibero-America. London: Routledge.49-60

Block, E. (2023). “Social Responsibility” as a Weapon?. In: Weder, F., Rademacher, L., Schmidpeter, R. (eds) CSR Communication in the Media. CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18976-0_13

Methods and applications of statistics in evolutionary biology and population ecology.

My research involves the application and development of statistical methods in ecology, evolutionary biology, and general whole-organism biology. My two particular research foci are phylogenetic comparative methods and other uses of statistics in ecology, evolution, and systematics. I also have a strong interest in the application of Bayesian methods, and the statistical philosophy of the nature of evidence in whole-organism biology. How and why do scientists agree that certain data are evidence for or against a particular hypothesis?

I also provide a statistical consultation service for staff and students within the School of Biological Sciences

I am interested in taking graduate students at any level who are interested in quantitative methods in biology. Students in my lab will be able to (or be willing to learn) program computers in S (http://www.r-project.org), a compiled language such as C or Fortran, and/or a scripting language such as Python or Scheme in a Unix environment. Students are also encouraged to extend or develop their mathematical skills. A background in biology, statistics, mathematics, or computer science would be valuable. I can also co-supervise students who are interested in using quantitative methods for their thesis work, but for whom such methods are not a primary focus of research.

My research interests are in evolutionary quantitative genetics. Much of my research involves developing multivariate statistical approaches to the analysis of the genetic basis of complex traits, and the selection acting upon them, which are then applied to questions in statistical genetics and evolutionary biology. Many of the empirical studies I conduct use the Australian native model system Drosophila serrata.

Associate Professor Levon Blue is a member of Beausoleil First Nation in Canada and lives in Queensland, Australia. She is the HDR Coordinator at The University of Queensland in the Office of the Deputy-Vice-Chancellor Indigenous Engagement and coordinates courses within the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Major. Levon was awarded a PhD in 2016 that focused on financial literacy education practices in a First Nation community in Canada. Her research area includes financial literacy education and higher education with Indigenous peoples.

Stefan is a Staff Specialist in Neurology at the Princess Alexandra Hospital (PAH) and the Mater Centre for Neuroscience. He finished his training as neurologist in 2012.

He runs dedicated multiple sclerosis (MS) and Neuroimmunology clinics at the PAH, leading in modern MS therapies. Moreover, he has been at the forefront of advancing the field of neuroimmunology in Queensland, with establishment of dedicated neuroimmunology outpatient clinics at the RBWH and PAH, combining expertise from neurologists and immunologists in the care of this very complex group of disorders.

In addition to his busy, full-time clinical workload, Stefan has been involved as PI or CI in a range of clinical trials in the fields of MS, botulinum toxin, CIDP and Pompe’s disease. Additionally, he has performed and is involved in ongoing research projects of neuroimmunological disorders such as neuromyelitis optica, myasthenia gravis and autoimmune limbic encephalitis. He has been a member of the New Horizons study to assess prevalence of anti-neuronal antibodies in patients with new onset psychosis.

Prior to this, Stefan finished a PhD in the field of ‘Immunogenetics of Guillain-Barre Syndrome and Chronic inflammatory polyneuropathy’ at the University of Queensland in 2014. He also completed a doctoral thesis at the University of Heidelberg, Germany in 2002 in the field of T cell immunology. During this time, he has developed solid skills in bench-side immunological research.

Currently, he is neurological lead in a diverse group of clinicians and scientists investigating the role of antineuronal antibodies in neurological and psychiatric disease. He supervises 3 PhD students in the field of advanced imaging in autoimmune encephalitis and multiple sclerosis. He is currently building up a laboratory to test antineuronal antibodies using live cell assays.

Professor Antje Blumenthal combines her expertise in immunology and microbiology to lead research on molecular mechanisms that control immune responses to infection, alongside more recently developed research on new antimicrobials. The overall goal of her research is to improve our ability to treat severe bacterial infections as part of the global efforts to overcome the threat posed by antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Prof Blumenthal graduated with a major in Microbiology from the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel, Germany, pursued PhD research in Immunology at the Leibniz Research Center for Medicine and Biosciences Borstel, Germany, and undertook postdoctoral training at Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, USA. She joined The University of Queensland Diamantina Institute in 2010 where she leads the Infection & Inflammation Group, fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations with immunologists, microbiologists, chemists, clinical research teams and industry partners. Her research is enabled by major funding from international and national agencies, and has been recognised internationally and nationally by prestigious awards, speaking invitations at eminent conferences and institutions, invitations to peer-review for esteemed journals and funding agencies. Prof Blumenthal is an enthusiastic undergraduate teacher and research student advisor. She is proactive in advancing the careers of junior scientists, leads the development and implementation of initiatives that promote equity, diversity and inclusion in science, and a positive workplace culture. Through leadership roles within the University and professional societies as well as editorial roles for international journals, Prof Blumenthal actively contributes to the scientific community.

My research seeks creative macromolecular solutions to challenges at the interface of chemistry, materials science, and biology. The overarching goal is to develop new methodologies for the programmable assembly of functional polymeric materials across multiple length scales. This research aims to result in advanced materials with enhanced properties, suitable for a broad range of applications. Using the tools of organic synthesis, synthetic polymer chemistry, photochemistry, and materials science, I design and synthesise monomers, polymers, and crosslinkers with tailored functional groups that allow them to adopt unique pathways of self-assembly. Ultimately, by employing polymer library synthesis, conducting function-based screening, and implementing design optimisation, two main outcomes are achieved: a fundamental understanding of the structure-function relationships for materials in specific applications, and the development of innovative materials-based technologies that surpass existing alternatives.

Lisa Bode lectures in Film and Television Studies at the University of Queensland. She is the author of Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2017), which historicizes screen performance within the context of visual and special effects cinema and technological change in Hollywood filmmaking, through the silent, early sound, and current digital eras, in order to shed light on the ways that digital filmmaking processes such as motion capture, digital face-replacement, and green-screen acting are impacting screen acting and stardom. She has published work in edited collections and journals on the implications of digital filmmaking technologies for synthetic media; screen acting and stardom, the cultural reception of the synthespian, mock documentary performance, and the processes through which dead Hollywood stars are remembered, forgotten, or re-animated. She co-edited the August 2021 special issue of Convergence on Digital Faces and Deepfakes on screen, and is currently writing a monograph for Rutgers University Press called Deepfakes and Digital Bodies.

She is on the editorial board for the series Animation: Key Films / Filmmakers (Bloomsbury Academic, and Animation Studies, the open-access peer-reviewed journal for The Society for Animation Studies. In 2020 she co-founded the Visual Effects Research Network with Associate Professor Leon Gurevitch

Human-centred design of digital technology

Marie is an Interaction Design researcher and educator in the School of IT & Electrical Engineering. Her main research interest is in social robotics and design of technology to support teaching and learning. Marie’s research focus is on how we can design technology to support and improve our everyday activities involving teaching and learning. With over 10 years of expertise on design of technology for teaching and learning, Marie collaborates closely with users in co-design and participatory design projects. She works with both quantitative and qualitative methods such as observational and immersive field studies, interviews, iterative design and prototyping. Triangulating results from different methods with the aim of producing design that will impact the users positively and for the long-term. Her research has been recognized with a Digital Disrupter award by Australian Computer Society in 2017. Marie’s expertise on the Technologies Curriculum is also acknowledges by the Department of Education Queensland who invited her for talks and expert advice on new Technology curriculum content.

Marie is a member of ITEE’s External Engagement committee. Marie is very invested in external engagement with industry and schools, she has over 10 ten years of experience from organising outreach programs for primary and high school students in STEM subjects. Marie’s work in the outreach work was awarded in 2011 with a Rising Star by Women in Technology and a Highly commended award for Best Higher Education Program for Ladies by Australian Women in Security in 2020.

Mikael Bodén has a PhD in Computer Science and statistical machine learning from the University of Exeter (UK) but has spent the last decade and a half in biological research environments, including the Institute for Molecular Bioscience/ARC Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics and the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, where he is currently located. He is the director of UQ’s postgraduate program in bioinformatics. Mikael Bodén has supervised 7 postdocs from funding he received from both ARC and NHMRC; he has been the primary advisor for 11 PhD and 3 MPhil graduates; he is currently supervising another 6 PhD students in bioinformatics and computational biology. Mikael Bodén collaborates with researchers in neuroscience, developmental biology, protein engineering and bioeconomy to mention but a few, and contributes expertise in the processing, analysis and integration of biological data; this is exemplified by recent publications in Science, Nature Catalysis, Nature Communications, Cell Systems, Nucleic Acids Research and Bioinformatics.

Dr. Gry Boe-Hansen graduated with a DVM in 2001 and a PhD in Veterinary Reproduction in 2005 from The Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University (KVL) Denmark. She took up a position as Assistant Professor at the department of Veterinary Reproduction and Obstetrics at KVL. In 2007 she was appointed at UQ as Lecturer in Veterinary Reproduction at School of Veterinary Sciences. Her overall research theme is causes of and methods to improve suboptimal reproduction in livestock. She is particularly interested in andrology, including venereal disease, with emphasis on genetic and environmental factors affecting reproduction and has published particularly in the field of sperm and semen quality, and biomarkers in relation to fertility. This has involved implementation of reliable, precise and accurate semen quality assays into conventional semen analysis, in both domestic animal semen laboratories and human clinics.

Fiona Bogossian is currently Professor of Practice Education in Health at the University of the Sunshine Coast.

Fiona is a Registered Nurse and Midwife with clinical, policy, education and research experience in midwifery and neonatal nursing. She has professional qualifications in education, public health and epidemiology, and a strong track record in teaching and research academic mentorship. Fiona is a Churchill Fellow, a Fellow of the Australian College of Midwives and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

As a foundation academic in the UQ School of Nursing & Midwifery (2005-2018), Fiona held leadership roles including Program Director, Director of Research and Director of Research Higher Degrees. Teaching highlights include implementation of the ground-breaking UQ Bachelor of Nursing curriculum, pioneering the first Bachelor of Midwifery program in Queensland and design and implementation of UQ's first practice based electronic portfolio system. Fiona held strategic responsibility for the School research direction, training and performance contributing to Above World Class Ranking of 5 for the field of research ‘nursing’ in 2012 and 2015.

Fiona’s research addresses better perinatal health outcomes and workforce education & development. She has expertise in clinical, health services and education research in particular epidemiology, longitudinal cohort studies, randomised trials, qualitative approaches and mixed methods. She has been Chief and Associate Investigator on $2.9 million of Cat 1 and Cat 4 grants since 2009, and has over 90 peer reviewed publications.

Fiona’s disciplinary research and education leadership is demonstrated at local, state, national and international levels through a long history of ministerial appointments, membership of research foundation grants committees, chairing program accreditation panels, as Sub-Editor for Women & Birth, and more recently as a panel member for the ERA Impact and Engagement Pilot (2107), and the discipline representative on the Universitas 21 Health Sciences Group Executive (2013-2016).

I am a Research Fellow within the Systems Neuroengineering group at the Queensland Brain Institute. I was awarded a PhD in Neuroscience from Macquarie University in 2016 and have undertaken a postdoctoral appointment abroad (2016-2023) at the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Germany.

I am a neurophysiologist with interests in understanding sensory processing. My research focuses on the different stations along the neuraxis from the periphery to the brain; the initial site of information acquisition and encoding (the dorsal root ganglia), the relay and modulatory center (thalamus) and the penultimate site for sensory perception (the cortex). My goal is to characterise how somatosensory information is routed and transformed within these areas and to understand how this information is altered following disease and dysfunction (e.g. autism, chronic pain).

Dr Steffen Bollmann joined UQ’s School of Electrical Imaging and Computer Science in 2020 where he leads the Computational Imaging Group. The Group is developing computational methods to extract clinical and biological insights from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. The aim is to make cutting-edge algorithms and tools available to a wide range of clinicians and researchers. This will enable better images, faster reconstruction times and the efficient extraction of clinical information to ensure a better understanding of a range of diseases. Dr Bollmann was appointed Artificial Intelligence (AI) lead for imaging at UQ’s Queensland Digital Health Centre (QDHeC) in 2023.

His research expertise is in quantitative susceptibility mapping, image segmentation and software applications to help researchers and clinicians access data and algorithms.

Dr Bollmann completed his PhD on multimodal imaging at the University Children’s Hospital and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland.

In 2014 he joined the Centre for Advanced Imaging at UQ as a National Imaging Facility Fellow, where he pioneered the application of deep learning methods for quantitative imaging techniques, in particular Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping.

In 2019 he joined the Siemens Healthineers collaborations team at the MGH Martinos Center in Boston on a one-year industry exchange where he worked on the translation of fast imaging techniques into clinical applications.

I obtained my M.Sc. ETH in Biomedical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in 2013, where I utilized concurrent magnetic field monitoring to improve image quality and temporal stability of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). I then moved to Brisbane in 2014, to pursue a PhD at the Centre for Advanced Imaging, The University of Queensland under the supervision of Prof. Markus Barth. I investigated contrast mechanisms and signal properties of fMRI focusing on ultra-high field applications. In 2019, I joined A/Prof. Jonathan Polimeni at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Engineering, Massachusetts General Hospital, where I employed ultra-high field MRI to image the blood vessels of the human brain, and better understand their contribution to the fMRI signal. I returned to Brisbane in 2020 and I am currently a Research Fellow at the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology. I am devloping new contrast mechanisms for funtional MRI and I am investigating the effect of the vasculature on the fMRI signal.