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Main research interests include development and health economics. Current research topics include mental health, health inequality, income insecurity, inequality in opportunity, mortality uncertainty.

My research focuses on developing and applying data science methods to address real-world challenges in the legal domain, particularly in legal information retrieval, legal reasoning, and legal decision-making. I am especially interested in graph neural networks (GNNs) and large language models (LLMs).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dr Gabriele Tartaglino-Mazzucchelli's research interests include topics in theoretical physics of fundamental interactions and mathematical physics like supersymmetry, supergravity and superspaces in various space-time dimensions, quantum field theory, extended supersymmetry, covariant formulations of superstrings, complex geometry, quantum gravity, holography, (A)dS/CFT and integrability.

Since October 2019 Dr Tartaglino-Mazzucchelli has joined the School of Mathematics & Physics at the University of Queensland (UQ) as Senior Lecturer (Level C), Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow. He has been an Amplify Fellow and a tenured Senior Lecturer since 2025.

Dr Tartaglino-Mazzucchelli's obtained his PhD at the University of Milano Bicocca in November 2006. After that, and before joining UQ, he held several academic appointments and fellowships in Australia (UQ and The University of Western Australia), Belgium (KULeuven U.), Sweden (Uppsala U.), Switzerland (Bern U.), and the USA (Maryland U.).

So far in his career, Dr Tartaglino-Mazzucchelli's successfully attracted competitive research grants and awards for approximately 2.7 million Australian dollars, including, among other grants, a Marie Curie fellowship, an ARC DECRA award, and an ARC Future Fellowship – some of the most prestigious fellowships available to early and middle career researchers in Europe and Australia – and two ARC Discovery Projects, one recently awarded as first Chief Investigator.

Associate Professor Jess Taubert was awarded the ARC Future Fellowship and moved to the University of Queensland in 2021. She is now a UQ Amplify Principal Research Fellow and the director of the BRISbrain lab, which focuses on understanding the neural and cognitive basis of social intelligence and face perception in humans and other animals.

She completed a Bachelor of Science Degree with Honours at Macaquarie University (2005) and a PhD in Psychology at the University of Sydney (2009) where she trained in psychophysics and cognitive science. In 2009 she accepted a postdoctoral position as a comparative psychologist at Emory University (GA, USA). Here she worked jointly with Lisa Parr at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Philippe Rochat in the Department of Psychology. In 2011 A/Prof Taubert was awarded a FSR incoming postdoctoral fellowship by UCLouvain and moved to Belgium to train as a neurophysiologist (supervised by Rufin Vogels, Wim Vanduffel, and Bruno Rossion). After briefly returning to Australia, A/Prof Taubert was appointed as an Intramural Research Fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health in the US (2016 – 2021). During this time she worked with Leslie Ungerleider, Chris Baker, David Leopold, and Elisabeth ("Betsy") Murray among others and she mastered neuroimaging techniques including task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Leonie is proud of her traditional connections to the Djaku-nde people of North Burnett, Juru people in Bowen North Queensland and the Nuigi people of Mulgumpin (Moreton Island) with bloodline traces back to Tanna, Santo and Lifu Island's in Vanuatu. With over 30 years of experience in social work, Leonie is a nationally recognised leader in cultural safety, Indigenous engagement and community development. Leonie has extensive experience in across child protection, mental health and teritary education sectors. Her professional expereist encompasses policy development, legislative reform, and practice frameworks, with a strong emphasis on co-design, cultural mentoring and workforce development. She has lectured in Indigenous Health, Social Work, Mental Health and contributed to the development of culturally safe, student-centred curricula. Renowned for her authentic faciliation style, she empowers individuals and organisations to embed cultural safety and drive systemic change across government, non-government, and academic contexts.