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Stephen is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Bernhardt group at the University of Queensland. His current research is focused on the theory of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and molecular dynamics.

Stephen completed a double degree in electrical engineering and physics at James Cook University, followed by a PhD in physics, also at James Cook University, under the supervision of Prof. Ronald White and Dr Bronson Philippa, as well as the University of Queensland's Prof. Paul Burn and Prof. Alan Mark. His PhD focused on using kinetic Monte-Carlo simulations of charge and exciton dynamics, coupled with atomistic molecular dynamics deposition simulations to establish a better understanding of structure-property relationships in organic semiconductors, particularly organic light-emitting diodes.

Dr Shrapnel is an Associate Professor in Physics and Deputy Director at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems, where she works on topics in Quantum Machine Learning and Quantum Foundations. She is also a registered medical practitioner with over 20 years experience and currently leads the Quantum Technologies for Health Program for the Queensland Digital Health Centre. Her research combines theory, methodology, and applications across a broad range of disciplines.

Professor Stace completed his PhD at the Cavendish Lab, University of Cambridge in the UK on quantum computing, followed by postdoctoral research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, also at Cambridge, and Queens' College, Cambridge. Since 2006, he has held various ARC research fellowships, most recently a Future Fellowship (2015-2019).

His research topics include device physics for quantum computing solid-state and atomic systems, quantum error correction, and quantum measurement and precision sensing.

Professor Stace is the Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Engineered Quantum Systems (equs.org).

Dr Sarah Sweet's research interests are in astrophysics, in the field of galaxy evolution. She received her PhD from the University of Queensland in 2014. Dr Sweet then worked at the Australian National University and at Swinburne University of Technology, before returning to UQ as a Lecturer in Astrophysics in 2020. She was awarded an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship in 2022 and became a Senior Lecturer in 2023.

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. Currently, he is an Amplify Fellow at UQ.

Dr Tartaglino-Mazzucchelli's obtained his PhD at the University of Milano Bicocca in November 2006. After that, and before joining UQ, he has 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 2.5 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.

Dr Tebyetekerwa is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Sub-Group Leader at UQ Dow Centre for Sustainable Engineering Innovation and ARC Centre of Excellence for Green Electrochemical Transformation of Carbon Dioxide(GETCO2), working with Professor Xiwang Zhang. His current main research interests at UQ School of Chemical Engineering rotate around water and electrochemical systems such as electrochemical CO2 capture and conversion to valuable chemicals and electrochemical production of hydrogen peroxide and/or hydrogen. He is deeply interested in designing scalable and industry-relevant chemical cells and generators. He completed his PhD from The Australian National University (ANU), where his research focused on optical spectroscopy and advanced characterization of semiconducting materials and their devices (Supervised by Prof Dan Macdonald, A/Prof. Dr. Hieu T. Nguyen and Prof. Yuerui (Larry) Lu). Dr Tebyetekerwa also holds a Master's in Materials Processing Engineering from Donghua University, Shanghai, where his research focused on fibrous materials for flexible energy storage (Supervised by Academician Meifang Zhu and A/Prof Shengyuan Yang). Mike supervises projects for undergraduate, master's, and PhD students on topics related to the following research interests;

1. Scalable electrochemical production of hydrogen peroxide and/or hydrogen from water*
2. Scalable electrochemical CO2 capture and reduction to valuable chemicals*
3. Reconstructed graphite for sodium-ion batteries
4. High surface area electrospun fibre materials for various applications
5. Aggregation-induced emission (AIE) molecules and their engineered applications
6. Light-matter understanding of 2D materials and other semiconductor materials for optoelectronics*

*Currently funded and active ongoing projects

Featured works

• 2022: His work on 2D materials (https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/S2666-3864(21)00213-7) was selected in the Cell Reports Physical Science “Influential papers-2021” and "Editor's Choice-2021" collection.
• 2021: His works (https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2017/sc/c8ee02607f) and other co-authored works (https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abb8687), ( https://doi.org/10.1016/j.carbon.2017.11.012 ) are listed as "Highly Cited Papers" and "Hot Papers" in Web of Science.
• 2020:His work on nanofibers has continuously been listed as one of the highly cited articles for Advanced Fiber Materials (https://doi.org/10.1007/s42765-020-00049-5), since it was published to date.
• 2019:His work on nanofibers ( https://doi.org/10.1021/acsaem.7b00057 ) was listed as the most-read article for ACS Applied Energy Materials in 2018.

In addition to his research, Mike lectures Sustainable Energy Technologies and Supply Systems (ENGY7000) course as part of the Master of Sustainable Energy (MSE) program.

Dr Torniainen's main research interests are in the fields of biomedical signal and image processing, biophotonics, and applied spectroscopy. He holds BSc/MSc in Electrical Engineering from Aalto University (Finland, 2015) and a PhD in Applied Physics from University of Eastern Finland (Finland, 2020). He has previously worked with developing preprocessing techniques for EEG/MEG, real-time analysis methods for physiological signals (e.g., ECG/EMG/EDA), and near-infrared spectroscopy based analysis of tissue integrity for musculoskeletal tissues. His current research focus is on machine learning in image processing, analysis, and synthesis of biomedical images acquired using a combination of terahertz imaging, nano-FTIR, and Raman spectroscopy. The purpose of this study is to better understand the interaction between light and multi-layered tissues such as articular cartilage and skin.

Dr Tristan Vanyai's research interests are in the fields of hypersonic propulsion, aerodynamics, combustion visualisation and laser diagnostics, using both experimental and numerical techniques.

Dr Vanyai received his Doctor of Philosophy from The University of Queensland in 2018, after completing a Bachelor of Aerospace Engineering (First Class Honours) and Bachelor of Science double degree at Monash University in 2012.

His research focuses on fundamentals of hypersonic propulsion through the scramjet cycle. Robust combustion within low intake compression scramjets is a key technology enabler for hypersonic accelerator vehicles, and can be achieved through utilising techniques such as thermal compression. Dr Vanyai is examining the improvements to scramjet combustion due to thermal compression through experiments in the T4 Stalker Tube facility using advanced optical techniques and comparison with results from numerical simulations.

Dr Verdi's research is in the field of computational materials physics. Her work employs first-principles or ab initio methods, complemented by machine learning techniques, to predict and understand physical properties of materials without relying on empirical models.

She received her doctorate in Materials from the University of Oxford in 2017. After working at the University of Oxford and the University of Vienna, Dr Verdi moved to the University of Sydney in 2023 as an ARC DECRA Fellow. In the same year, she then joined UQ as a Lecturer in Condensed Matter Physics.

Her current research focuses on understanding the structural, optical and thermodynamic properties of atomic defects for applications in quantum technologies. She is also interested in studying the influence of atomic vibrations, defects, temperature and disorder on the intrinsic properties of various functional materials that can be exploited for novel technologies. Feel free to reach out to Dr Verdi if you are interested in simulating materials properties from first principles using supercomputers and exploring how this can help develop better materials.

For more information, visit the research group website.

As a lecturer and First-Year Teaching Director in Physics at the University of Queensland, Dr Margaret Wegener teaches both aspiring physicists and physics service courses; she is interested in the educational problems of contextualising physics, and the transition between school and university.

Her PhD was awarded for laser diagnostics of a Superorbital Expansion Tube, by multiple holographic recordings. As well as holography showing the rupture process of a light diaphragm in an expansion tube, this included holographic interferometry of high-speed gas flows around models, and analysis of the resulting images to yield quantitative information about the gas flow structures.

She pursued an interest in physics education by completing further study in Tertiary Teaching. A major concern of her work is to effectively engage students in order to make physics fundamentals meaningful. This includes developing experiments for undergraduate learning.

She is also deeply interested in the interrelationships between science and the arts.

Professor White is Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Engineered Quantum Systems, an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, and leads the Quantum Technology Laboratory at UQ, which he established in 1999. He is internationally recognised for research in quantum science and technology, and is interested in all aspects of quantum weirdness. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the American Physical Society, and Optica. Andrew’s research spans: quantum foundations; production, manipulation and exploitation of quantum states of light, both in conventional optics and nanophotonics; and utilising quantum technology, be it in quantum computation, quantum communication, quantum sensing, or neuromorphic computing. Details can be found at the Quantum Laboratory website.

Professor White has worked with twenty-one postdoctoral researchers since 2001, five of whom received ARC Discovery Early Career Researchers Awards whilst working in his lab, six receiving Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowships subsequently and one a Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship. He has supervised more than 40 postgraduate students, who have received an array of awards including a Rhodes Scholarship, three Springer PhD thesis prizes, Australian representative at the Lindau Nobel Meeting, the only-ever runner for the Australian Institute of Physics Bragg Medal, and UQ Medals and Valedictorian, to name but a few.

Bio: Andrew was raised in a Queensland dairy town, before heading south to the big smoke of Brisbane to study chemistry, maths, physics and, during the World Expo, the effects of alcohol on uni students from around the world. Deciding he wanted to know what the cold felt like, he first moved to Canberra, then Germany—completing his PhD in quantum physics—before moving on to Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico where he quickly discovered that there is more than enough snow to hide a cactus, but not nearly enough to prevent amusing your friends when you sit down. Over the years he has conducted research on various topics including shrimp eyes, nuclear physics, optical vortices, and quantum computers. He likes quantum weirdness for its own sake, but his current research aims to explore and exploit the full range of quantum behaviours—notably entanglement—with an eye to engineering new technologies and scientific applications. He is currently Director of the Centre of Engineered Quantum Systems, an Australia-wide, 14-year long, research effort by more than 250 scientists to build quantum machines that harness the quantum world for practical applications.

Carolyn is a theoretical physicist studying quantum information and quantum foundations. She grew up in central Queensland and holds bachelor’s degrees in physics (UQ) and applied linguistics (Griffith University). She completed her PhD in physics at the University of Queensland.

Her research is focused on physics at the interface between quantum mechanics, general relativity and thermodynamics, quantum machine learning, and the applications of both to quantum information theory and quantum computing. She is also broadly interested in artificial intelligence, and cross-disciplinary research combining physics and linguistics.

Carolyn was awarded a Deborah Jin Research Fellowship by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems (EQUS) in 2022.

Yuan Xu completed a Bachelor of Engineering degree (Chemical and Material) from the University of Queensland in 2015. After that, he started his PhD in the research field of colloidal science, rheology and chemical engineering, supervised by Professor Jason Stokes. He has continued in UQ as postdoctoral research fellow since 2019, at which, he has contributed to multidisciplinary projects including viscoelastic lubrication of soft matter systems, and programming structural anisotropy in nanocellulose hydrogels. His research capability focuses on the area of rheology, colloidal science/ physical chemistry, material/physical science, soft matters/complex fluids, and tribology/lubrication.

Dr Zhenjiang You is a Senior Lecturer within the School of Chemical Engineering. He holds a PhD in Fluid Mechanics. He conducts research on mathematical modelling, numerical simulation and experimental study of flows in porous media, and their applications in petroleum/chemical/mechanical/mining/civil engineering, energy, environment and water resources. He develops new theories and models for colloidal/suspension transport in porous media, innovative technologies for enhanced gas/oil production, and applicable tools for reservoir engineering, production engineering and geothermal industry. He has received research funding support from ARC, NERA, DMITRE, ARENA and a range of Australian and international companies. He collaborates with researchers in Australia, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, China, Russia, USA, Brazil and Iran.

His teaching contributions include Reservoir Engineering, Well Test Analysis, Reservoir Simulation, Field Design Project, Mathematical Modelling and Fluid Mechanics for Petroleum Engineers, Formation Damage, Enhanced Oil and Gas Recovery, Unconventional Resources and Recovery, etc.

Xiuwen Zhou received her PhD in 2014 from the University of Geneva (Switzerland), where she worked with Prof Tomasz A. Wesolowski. Then she moved to the University of Queensland (UQ) as a visiting scholar, supported by two awarded fellowships, i.e., a Swiss National Science Foundation Early Postdoc Mobility fellowship (2015) and an Australia-APEC Woman in Research Fellowship (2016), hosted by Prof Ben Powell and Prof Paul Burn. She then took up a UQ Development Fellowship in 2017, working as a teaching and research fellow at UQ School of Mathematics and Physics. Later, she was awarded an Australia Research Council Discovery Early Research Award (ARC DECRA) commencing in 2019. She is currently an ARC DECRA Fellow and a UQ Amplify Fellow.