Eric Tan is a Senior Lecturer in Finance at the UQ Business School. He holds a PhD in Finance from the University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Commerce (First Class Honours) from Monash University.
Eric’s research focuses on investments and fund management, with particular emphasis on institutional investors such as mutual funds and hedge funds. In recent years, his interests have expanded to corporate finance and banking. His work has been presented at leading international conferences, including the American Finance Association (AFA) and the European Finance Association (EFA). He has received numerous research grants from AFAANZ and industry partners, and his research has been recognised with multiple Best Paper awards at the UWA Accounting and Finance Research Forum (2018), FIRN Annual Conference (2017), and New Zealand Finance Colloquium (2016). His publications appear in internationally peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (FT50), Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, European Journal of Operational Research, and the Journal of Portfolio Management. He also serves as a regular referee for leading academic and practitioner journals, including The Review of Financial Studies, The British Accounting Review, and the Financial Analysts Journal.
Eric is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) (Advance HE) and an award-winning educator. In 2024, he received two major teaching awards: Enhancing the First-Year Experience and Excellence in MBA Education. He teaches across undergraduate, postgraduate, and MBA programs with a strong commitment to inclusive, student-centred, and practice-oriented learning that connects academic theory with real-world applications in finance.
Eric also contributes actively to the academic and professional community through leadership and service. He is the chair of the FIRN Asset Management Meeting, convenor of the Student Managed Investment Fund (SMIF), Health and Safety Representative for UQ Business School, and a member of the BEL Faculty’s Lower Risk Ethics Review Panel. From 2020 to 2025, he also served as Finance PhD Coordinator. Through these roles, he fosters research collaboration, supports student engagement, and strengthens the School and Faculty’s academic environment. Eric is also a member of the UQ Business School's Digital Finance Research Hub.
Dr Tan is an Associate Professor in Finance at the UQ Business School.
Dr Tan has earned a reputation as a researcher with expertise in capital structure and corporate finance. His work has been published in leading academic and practitioner journals, such as Organization Science (Financial Times Top-50 (FT-50) Journal list, and UTD-24), Research Policy (FT-50), Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Nature Portfolio - Scientific Reports. Six of his papers have also been named as the Best Papers at the following five conferences: (1) the Asian Finance Association Conference, (2) the European Real Estate Society Conference, (3) the Western Risk and Insurance Conference; (4) the 6th Behavioural Finance Conference; and (5) the 4th International Conferences on Advances in Business & Law. In addition, he was recently awarded the 2016Early Career Researcher Excellence in ResearchAward by the UQ Faculty of Business, Economics and Law, and the 2017 and 2024 Award for Excellence in Research by the UQ Business School.
Dr Tan teaches FINM3403 International Financial Management and FINM7402 Corporate Finance at UQ Business School, and was recently awarded the Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2013 and the Commendation for Postgraduate Teaching in 2017. Besides being an inspiring teaching instructor, Dr Tan is also a great research mentor for junior faculty and Ph.D. students. Dr Tan is particularly proud of all of his Ph.D. students, because all of them had at least one chapter of their theses published in an A* journal (ABDC ranked) and/or received at least a research award before their Ph.D. graduation. In addition, his current first-year PhD students have also been awarded a few numerous best paper awards at various prestigious international conferences. In recognition of his contribution to research supervision, he was awarded two research supervision awards in 2020: (1) the UQ Business School Award for Excellence in PhD Supervision; and (2) the Faculty of Business, Economics and Law (BEL) Award for Excellence in Higher Degree Research (HDR) Supervision.
His research has been featured in UQ News and more than 100 media outlets worldwide, including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, 7News, ABC Radio, Harvard Business Review, Yahoo News, International Business Times, and MedicalXpress. By June 2022, it ranked in the top 0.2% of over 21 million research outputs tracked by Altmetric. In recognition of his cross-disciplinary contributions, he received the UQ Business School Cross-Disciplinary Research Award in 2022. Beyond academia, his work has informed policy discussions and has been cited by the World Bank, Bank of Korea, Bank of Finland, Office for National Statistics, Australian Centre for Financial Studies, and Africa CDC.
Dr Tan is actively engaged in service and leadership within the UQ Business School (UQBS). He currently serves as Co-Lead of the Sustainable Business Research Hub, Honours Program Leader, and a member of the UQBS Education Committee. Dr Tan is also a member of the UQ Business School's Digital Finance Research Hub. He previously held the role of Postgraduate Coordinator for the Finance PhD program from 2017 to 2020.
Outside UQBS, Dr Tan serves as a Vice President (membership) and a board member for the Asian Finance Association, which is one of the top finance associations in Asia. Dr Tan is currently serving as a Deputy Editor at the Accounting and Finance Journal (ABDC "A" ranked Journal), an Associate Editor at the International Review of Financial Analysis, Editorial Board Member at the British Accounting Review (A*), and a Guest Editor for Pacific-Basin Finance Journal (A) and Accounting and Finance (A).
His research interests focus on corporate finance, capital structure, and labor economics.
Affiliate of Centre for Advanced Materials Processing and Manufacturing (AMPAM)
Centre for Advanced Materials Processing and Manufacturing
Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology
ARC Early Career Industry Fellow
School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering
Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology
Availability:
Available for supervision
Dr. Xin Fu Tan is a Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering and an ARC Early Career Industry Fellow (2025-2027). Their research interests encompass the areas of electronics manufacturing, hydrogen storage materials, synchrotron radiation techniques, and electron microscopy. Prior to this, Dr. Tan was employed as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Queensland, working on an ARC Discovery Project titled "Intermetallic compounds for high-reliability electronic interconnections" (2020-2024). Additionally, Dr. Tan held a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) International Research Fellowship at Kyushu University, contributing to the project "Improving Metal Hydrides to Diversify Energy Storage and Transportation" (2022-2024), as nominated by the Australian Academy of Science (AAS).
Dr. Tan completed their PhD thesis at The University of Queensland in 2020, focusing on the development of novel anode materials for lithium-ion batteries. Between 2010 and 2016, Dr. Tan worked as a Material Scientist at Hydrexia Pty. Ltd., a start-up company specialising in commercialising solid-state hydrogen storage systems based on lab-developed technology from The University of Queensland. They earned a Bachelor's degree (1st class honours) in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at The University of Melbourne and a Master's degree in Advanced Engineering Materials at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. These experiences have endowed Dr. Tan with unique research expertise across various Materials Engineering fields, encompassing both academic and industrial settings.
Affiliate of Centre for Advanced Materials Processing and Manufacturing (AMPAM)
Centre for Advanced Materials Processing and Manufacturing
Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology
Research Fellow
School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering
Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology
Availability:
Available for supervision
Dr Qiyang Tan obtained his Bachelor of Materials Science and Engineering in 2014 from South China University of Technology, China. In 2018, he was awarded his PhD degree by The University of Queensland.
Dr Qiyang Tan's research expertise are in the additive manufacturing of metals and MAX phases, high-temperature oxidation of metals, alloy development, thin film characterization, mechanical properties of metals, grain refinement and crystallography. Dr Tan has proposed the Oxide Reinforcement Model, a novel oxidation resistance model to understand the protection capability of the surface oxide layers on metals. Recently, Dr Tan involved in the research of additive manufacturing of metallic and ceramic materials. He has successfully applied the E2EM crystallographic model to identify new grain refiners for various additively manufactured materials including Al, Ti, Cu alloys, steels and γ-TiAl intermetallic alloy. Dr Tan's research hopes are to further apply his fundamental research on grain refinement to develop new refiners for ceramic and metallic-ceramic materials and to improve their processability in additive manufacturing. His research outcomes will also offer materials scientists and engineers a totally new way to fabricated advanced materials using additive manufacturing, therefore to significantly promote the wider application of this cutting-edge manufacturing technology.
Affiliate of Centre for the Business and Economics of Health
Centre for the Business and Economics of Health
Faculty of Business, Economics and Law
Professor
School of Economics
Faculty of Business, Economics and Law
Availability:
Available for supervision
Main research interests include development and health economics. Current research topics include mental health, health inequality, income insecurity, inequality in opportunity, mortality uncertainty.
Faculty of Health, Medicine and Behavioural Sciences
Availability:
Available for supervision
Media expert
I'm a Professor of Cognitive Science at The University of Queensland, originally hailing from Alberta, Canada. I received my BASc in Philosophy and Psychology from The University of Lethbridge, my PhD in Psychology from McMaster University, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at UNSW before joining UQ in 2006.
Much of our work is at the intersection of cognitive science and artificial intelligence, exploring how generative AI can enhance learning and cognition. We're excited about the potential for these tools to provide personalised feedback, correct misconceptions, and create more engaging educational experiences.
But we’re not just focused on AI. We also explore the quirks of human thinking, particularly the biases that shape our judgments in contexts ranging from daily life to high-stakes decision-making. By unraveling these mental shortcuts, we aim to develop strategies that enable clearer thinking, more effective reasoning, and ultimately, wiser choices in the face of complexity and uncertainty.
I've been lucky to work with some truly brilliant students and collaborators over the years. It's a pleasure to come to the lab every day and tackle these fascinating questions together.
Ken Tann is an in-house linguist at the UQ Business School. He specializes in applying linguistic and semiotic techniques to interdisciplinary research, and helps industry professionals add value to their professions through effective communication. His analytical framework has been applied across media, forensic, education and workplace contexts. He is currently supervising PhD research in marketing, finance and aged care.
Quantum computers provide a fundamentally different model of computation that lends itself to naturally to a collection of problems that are expected to be infeasible or prohibitively inefficient to solve on classical computers. In my research, I focus on identifying such problems and formulating quantum computational solutions with the goal of reducing the computational resources required to solve the problems.
On one hand, I consider the efficacy of quantum optimisation methods for the purposes of solving optimisation problems that require evaluating a cost function across an exponentially large space of possible solutions, with the aim of speeding up the procedure of identifying optimal solutions.
On the other hand, I work with quantum machine learning techniques for the purposes of learning on datasets that involve high-dimensional or otherwise unknown underlying structures, a regime in which quantum computers are expected to work well owing to the fact that they inherently operate in high-dimensional "Hilbert spaces".
At UQ, my research focuses predominantly on the former, where I aim to utilise quantum optimisation methods for the purposes of solving integer linear programs or Hamiltonian simulation problems. However I am also greatly interested in identifying inherently quantum learning problems for which substantial empirical or provable improvements in learning performance over classical machine learning methods can be derived.
Affiliate of ARC COE for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture
ARC COE for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture
Faculty of Science
Associate Professor in Genetics
School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences
Faculty of Science
Availability:
Available for supervision
Media expert
My research interests are at the intersection of plant developmental genetics, functional genomics, and molecular and systems biology, following my doctoral and postdoctoral training in the USA. The research effort in my group is focused on harnessing transformative genomics technology to understand the genetics of plant development, and to discover regulatory mechanisms coordinating plant growth and development. We utilize a variety of plant species in our research, from the model plant organism Arabidopsis to grain and horticultural crops like wheat, mango, avocado and macadamia. We employ a range of techniques based on high throughout DNA sequencing to explore gene expression, chromatin accessibility and chromatin modifications from single cell to whole plant levels, bioinformatics and computational biology tools to infer genetic components of gene regulatory networks, as well as gene editing technology to evaluate phenotypic consequences of perturbations in gene regulatory networks.
Faculty of Health, Medicine and Behavioural Sciences
Availability:
Available for supervision
Tim is a clinical academic pharmacist and lecturer working at the School of Pharmacy and the Princess Alexandra Hospital. He graduated with a Bachelor of Pharmacy at the University of Queensland in 2014. After working as a mental health pharmacist at the Princess Alexandra Hospital, he became interested in schizophrenia and psychopharmacology. He completed his PhD with the School of Medicine in 2026 and his research interests include clozapine, treatment-resistant schizophrenia, and the safe use of antipsychotic medicines. He is the team leader of mental health pharmacy at the Princess Alexandra Hospital. Tim teaches into the Bachelor of Pharmacy and the Masters of Clinical Pharmacy programmes at the University of Queensland, and supervises research project placements.
Faculty of Health, Medicine and Behavioural Sciences
Availability:
Available for supervision
Dr Caley Tapp is a Research Fellow in Substance Use and Mental Health with the School of Public Health at the University of Queensland.
Caley holds qualifications in psychology and epidemiology. She has a PhD in social psychology and completed a post doctoral fellowship on an ARC funded project examining a disease avoidance basis for stigmatisation.
In her previous role with the Analysis and Reporting component of the Australian Mental Health Outcomes and Classification Network she was involved in a range of projects designed to improve the measurement of patient- and service-level outcomes in Australia’s specialised public sector mental health services. She has experience in conducting systematic literature reviews, as well as conducting experimental, quasi-experimental and qualitative studies.
Caley is available to supervise honours, Masters and HDR students on a variety of topics; please get in touch to discuss.