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Professor Diann (Di) Eley is the Director of MD Student Research and Chair of the UQ Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC B). Di became a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) in 2018.

Di is an active member of several professional associations. This includes the Board of Directors of IAMSE (International Association of Medical Science Educators) and Chair of the IAMSE Ambassador Program. As a member of AMEE (Association of Medical Education in Europe), she has served on the AMEE Research Committee since 2017. A longstanding member of ANZAHPE (Australian and New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators) she served on the Board of Directors and as journal liaison officer for seven years.

Di’s research career began with a Master's of Science degree (MSc) in reproductive physiology at the University of Florida in 1978. She subsequently worked for over 20 years as a bench scientist in bio-medical laboratories in the USA, Kenya and the UK. In 2000, she began her academic career after receiving a PhD in health and exercise psychology at the University of Bristol. She moved to the School of Medicine at UQ in late 2003.

The primary focus of Di’s research is medical education, research training and rural health workforce. Her specific area of research interest deals with personality and its association with well-being and healthy mindsets. Di is responsible for the development and implementation of the Clinician-Scientist Track in the UQ Medical School which encourages student interest and experience in research, and facilitates medical students undertaking a Higher Degree by Research (MD-PhD, MD-MPhil) alongside their medical degree.

Di has been recognised for her leadership in several Faculty initiatives in medical education, and received the 2015 University of Queensland Award for Excellence in Leadership. [http://www.hr.uq.edu.au/recognition/uq-awards-excellence-2015-recipients]

Di has over 150 peer reviewed journal publications, and has led successful projects through research funding including ARC Linkage and Discovery grants as well as Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) grants. Additionally she has received UQ and national awards for teaching excellence for programs that enhance learning.

• 2019: Faculty of Medicine Excellence Awards for Leadership – Nomination
• 2016: Faculty of Medicine Excellence Awards for Teaching and Learning – Nomination.
• 2015: The University of Queensland Awards for Excellence in Teaching and Learning [https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2015/11/uq’s-outstanding-teachers-celebrated] [https://vimeo.com/149706002]
• 2015: The University of Queensland Award for Excellence in Leadership [http://www.hr.uq.edu.au/recognition/uq-awards-excellence-2015-recipients]
• 2014: Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences Senior Teaching Excellence Award
• 2014: Dean’s Award for Innovation in Curriculum Development. School of Medicine
• 2013: The University of Queensland - 'Commendation' for an Award for Teaching Excellence.
• 2013: The University of Queensland Faculty of Health Sciences Award for Teaching Excellence.
• 2006: National Carrick Award for Australian University Teaching – Programs that Enhance Learning: Innovation in curricula, learning and teaching.
• 2006: The University of Queensland Award for Enhancement of Student Learning. Programs that Enhance Learning: Innovation in curricula, learning and teaching.
• 2006: The University of Queensland Citations for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning.
• 2005: The University of Queensland Awards for Enhancement of Student Learning

Dr Rachel Elphinston is a Senior Research Fellow at Recover Injury Research Centre at The University of Queensland and clinical psychologist with more than a decade of industry-related experience. Her research interests focus on the psychological risk factors for pain and disability following injury, integrated pain treatments, pain medicines use, and the influence of social media. She has designed and implemented research projects examining factors associated with perceived injustice following road traffic crashes, psychosocial factors associated with prescription opioid use in individuals with chronic pain, the effectiveness of brief psychological risk-targeted telehealth interventions, and the role of social media messaging in policy implementation following the up-scheduling of codeine. She has received industry funding to co-design, develop and test feasibility of a psychological brief intervention to reduce risk of prescription opioid-related harm in patients with chronic pain. Dr Elphinston has a current appointment with Addiction and Mental Health Services in Metro South Health and has experience in working in multidisciplinary clinical and research teams to translate research into practice and design and implement new models of care. She also has experience in delivering education and training to a wide range of health professionals and supervising undergraduate and postgraduate students.

My research interests are in social and developmental psychology, focusing on connectedness, participation, and the development of gender and social cognition. I was a dancer with the Queensland Ballet before completing my Bachelor of Psychological Science and PhD at the University of Queensland. Hence, I am also interested in the role of The Arts in mental health and well-being for all. My research is primarily conducted within the Social Identity and Groups Network and The Early Cognitive Development Centre.

Professor Jason Ferris, is the Director of Research and Statistical Support Services (RASSS), University of Queensland. While providing service primarily to the Faculty of Medicine the service is expanding to support other organisation units. He is also a leading research academic at the Centre for Health Services Research (CHSR) where he is the Program Leader for Global Substance Use and Mental Health (GSUMH) unit. He holds an honorary professorial role at Turning Point, Victoria (2018-) and is also the Chief Data Scientist for the Global Drug Survey (2013-). Since 2019 he has held a ministerial appointment as an Advisory Council Member to the Queensland Mental Health Commission and is an interRAI Fellow (interrai.org).

Since 2020, Professor Jason Ferris, in collaboration with Dr Dom Gorse (Director of QCIF Data Science) and many others across QCIF and UQ, have been working on the development and deployment of UQ KeyPoint - an innovative data infrastructure, data governance and digital solution enabling researchers to access, manage, analyse and share sensitive research data in a scalable, fully governed and highly secure environment. The work has received a number of accolades. In 2023, The University of Queensland recognised the value of KeyPoint winning the Award for Excellence in Innovation. In 2022, the Faculty of Medicine recognised his commitment and leadership to the University awarding him and the team the Innovators of the Year Award. Professor Ferris has received other recognition as well. In 2021, the Faculty of Medicine recognised the outstanding support of RASSS with a Service Excellence Award. In 2020, The University of Queensland recognised his contributions to his research field: he was awarded the Faculty of Medicine Leader of the Future Award (Academic) and The Director's Choice Award for contributions to the Centre for Health Services Research. In 2019, he was awarded The Outstanding Mid-Career Researcher within the Centre for Health Services Research and was also chosen as a finalist for the Faculty of Medicine Leader of the Future Award (Academic). Additionally, across the Faculty of Medicine, his Research and Statistical Support Service, was nominated for a Service Excellence Award (2019 and 2020). In 2015, he received the University of Queensland, Early Career Researcher Award within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science. In September, 2014, he received a Highly Commended Early Career Researcher Award within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science.

He has been involved in a number of key projects: The Queensland Evaluation of the Alcohol Fuelled Violence Policy (QUANTEM), The Overarching Evaluation of the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program (CHYME), the evaluation of ProjectSTOP (a decision-making national database for pharmacists aimed at preventing the use of pseudoephedrine based products as a precursor in the manufacture of methamphetamine), and a national review of the links between random breath testing and alcohol-related road traffic accidents. Jason has over 20 years of social science and public health research experience. He has a well-established publication record with a strong focus on alcohol and drug research and public health. With a Master degree in biostatistics he has well developed and expansive quantitative methods skills and a broad range of experience in many of the facets of both social science and medical research. In 2014 his PhD on alcohol epidemiology was conferred.

Previously, as a senior statistician at the Institute for Social Science Research he developed and taught a number of training models in research methods and statistical analysis as part of the Methods for Social Analysis and Statistics (MFSAS). Since its inception in 2012 he has been course coordinator and trainer for a number of these training modules (see below). From 2016-2018 he was the Director of MFSAS. Between 2016-2017 he was also the ISSR Co-postgraduate Coordinator.

Kelly Fielding's research focuses broadly on understanding the social and psychological determinants of environmental sustainability. She seeks to understand environmental decisions and behaviours and to develop communication and behaviour change strategies that can promote greater environmental sustainability. A key focus of her current reseach is on sustainable urban water management, specifically, how we can engage communities with this issue, how we can communicate about new water technologies such as recycled waater, how we can promote water conservation, and how we can understand and communicate about drinking water supplies. Her research is also focused on understanding climate change beliefs as well as identifying ways to address climate change skepticism and inaction. In the past she has conducted research in the areas of sustainable natural resource management, domestic and public place recycling, and environmental activism. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to her research and has worked with local council, State Government, and catchment management authorities to undertake this research.

Research interests:

• Environmental sustainability
• Sustainable urban water management
• Climate change beliefs and action
• Social identity and norms

Frankie’s research interests lie broadly in early childhood social cognitive development, with a particular interest in children’s imitative behaviour, selective trust, and normative understanding across diverse social learning contexts and cultural landscapes. He employs an experimental and cross-cultural approach to study factors that influence children’s social learning modes and outcomes, such as predagogical cues, social motivations, task efficieny, presentation medium, and parenting/educational style. He is also interested in digital media effects on children's socio-cognitive development, evaluating digital screens as children's modern social learning partner. Frankie has established, coordinated, and conducted developmental research with parents and children across urban and indigenous communities in East and West Malaysia. Frankie is currently a Lecturer in Developmental Psychology in Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is also a Guest Scientist at the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipizig, Germany; and an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Department of Psychology, Sunway University, Malaysia. Frankie now holds an Honorary research appointment at the School of Psychology of the University of Queensland.

Dr Cathy Franklin is passionate about improving the health of people with intellectual disability and those on the autism spectrum. Cathy is a psychiatrist who has specialised in the psychiatry of intellectual disability and autism in adolescents and adults since 2004. Her career focussed on clinical work and education until 2015, when she commenced a part-time research appointment, in addition to her clinical work. Cathy is the inaugural Director of the Mater Intellectual Disability and Autism Service (MIDAS), a state-wide clinical service established in 2018 that works to improve the health and mental health of adults with intellectual disability and those on the autism spectrum. Cathy is also Director of QCIDD, the Queensland Centre for Intellectual and Developmental Disability, a centre established in 1997 by Professor Nick Lennox, and best known for its many contributions to health of people with intellectual disability, including the CHAP health assessment tool and the AbleX massive open-online course that Cathy contributed mental health content to.

Cathy's research interests include health services research and the biological underpinnings and health sequelae of conditions occurring in this population. She is Chief Investigator on several projects, including the EASY-Health (Enhancing Access to Services for Your Health) Project, funded by the Australian Government NDIS ($2.3 million 2020-2024) and the NHMRC funded grant ($1.5M), Bridge to Better Health, investigating whether specialised support to primary care nurses can improve the health of people with intellectual disability attending their practice. Cathy also led MIDAS' successful application as a lead consortium member for the National Centre of Excellence in Intellectual Disability Health ($22.6M over 4 years; consortium led by UNSW). Cathy is a regular presenter at national and internaitonal conferences, often as an invited speaker. She has served on the committee of the RANZCP Section of Psychiatry of Intellectual Disability for over 10 years, is chair of the Qld Branch of the Section and also serves as Vice-President of the Australian Association of Developmental Disability Medicine (AADDM). In 2020 she was awarded the Mater Research Sister Regis Dunne award for Outstanding Contribution to research relative to opportunity.

Frederick Graham (BNurs, PhD) is a Clinical Nurse Consultant and a Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for Health Services Research at the University of Queensland. As an academic-nurse, Fred is clinical lead of a hospital-wide Dementia and Delirium Nursing Service at Princess Alexandra Hospital where he has worked as clinical expert in the care of people with dementia and delirium for more than 15 years. As a senior research fellow under the mentorship of Professor Ruth Hubbard, his research focuses on reorganising care environments and building workforce capacity to provide therapeutic care to this vulnerable cohort with a specific focus on accelerating knowledge translation in managing symptoms of agitation through innovative experiential learning, models of care, environmental design, leisure activity, and recognition of pain-related symptomology.

Fred qualified as registered nurse from The Queensland University of Technology and has worked in acute-care wards at Princess Alexandra Hospital. He has clinically led multiple quality initiatives focussed on improving acute-care for patients with cognitive impairment including education and change champion initiatives, models of specialised care, resource development to facilitate person-centred care and development of a chart for evaluating analgesic trials through monitoring pain-related behaviour. These initiatives led Fred to undertake his PhD with Professor Elizabeth Beattie at QUT, titled “Do hospital nurses recognise pain in older agitated patients with cognitive impairment. A descriptive correlational study using virtual simulation.”, which was awarded QUT Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award 2021. He has subsequently published his PhD results in the top gerontological and nursing journals in the world. Fred currently holds a Queensland Health Early Career Nursing Fellowship under the mentorship Professor Amanda Henderson, Nursing practice Development Unit PAH. He also has three Metro South Research Support Grant schemes including the Metro South Health Future Research Leader Fellowship under the mentorship of Professor Ruth Hubbard which will investigate pain-related phenotypes through a longitudinal response to treatment study.

As an emerging research leader and early career researcher, Fred is passionate teacher and encourages nurses to consider higher degree by research pathways in the clinical careers. He is currently supervising two higher research nursing students and a mentoring nurse practitioner student at UQ.

My research focuses on social functioning in three main domains: identity processes, emotion regulation, and human agency. At its heart, my research aims to understand the formation and consequences of social connections between people. I conduct two broad programs of work that address these research goals. My first line of research explores how emotions shape our social connections, focusing on how emotion can be regulated to create social harmony or social distance. My second line of work explores how and why social groups improve personal and social functioning, with consequences for individual health and well-being as well as group productivity and communication.

I completed my PhD at the University of Queensland before taking up a position as Global Scholar with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Global Fellow Academy. I worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Alex Haslam at the University of Queensland before beginning my Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship in 2016. In 2017 I began a position as Lecturer the University of Melbourne and now hold an Honorary Research Appointment at the University of Queensland.

Wayne Hall is Emeritus Professor at the National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research (NCYSUR) at the University of Queensland (January 2021-). He was a Visiting Professor at the National Addiction Centre, Kings College London (2009-2019), the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2010-2021); and the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, UNSW (since 2001).

Wayne was formerly Professorial Fellow (2017-2020) in and Director of the National Centre for Youth Substance Abuse Research (2014-2016), an NHMRC Australia Fellow in addiction neuroethics at the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research and the Queensland Brain Institute, UQ (2009-2015); Professor of Public Health Policy in the School of Population Health (2005-2010); Director of the Office of Public Policy and Ethics at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (2001-2005) at the University of Queensland; and Director of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, UNSW (1994-2001).

In 2016 Wayne was made a Fellow of the Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. Wayne has advised the World Health Organization on: the health effects of cannabis use; the effectiveness of drug substitution treatment; the scientific quality of the Swiss heroin trials; the contribution of illicit drug use to the global burden of disease; and the ethical implications of genetic and neuroscience research on addiction.

Associate Professor Meredith Harris is a researcher in the field of mental health services research and evaluation. She is a Principal Research Fellow with the School of Public Health at the University of Queensland, based at the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research.

Meredith holds qualifications in psychology, policy and applied social research, and public health. She has over 25 years of experience in the management and administration of research projects, including systematic literature reviews, cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, studies based on epidemiological survey data, and evaluations of health programs and interventions using observational, quasi-experimental and experimental research designs.

Meredith's current role is with the Analysis and Reporting Component of the Australian Mental Health Outcomes and Classification Network (AMHOCN), which leads the design, analysis and reporting of the National Outcomes and Casemix Collection (http://www.amhocn.org/). In this role, she is leading a range of projects designed to improve the measurement of patient- and service-level outcomes in Australia's specialised public sector mental health services.

My work aims to ensure all children have access to safe, stable, violence-free childhoods they need to thrive in childhood and across life. This spans from extensive work on evidence-based parenting programs to major national epidemiological work on child maltreatment, corporal punishment (smacking) & mental health & wellbeing.

In 2023, I was a ministerial appointment to the Child Death Review Board which conducts systemic reviews of child deaths to identify areas to improve child safety in QLD. In 2024 the World Health Organisation appointed me to their international Technical Expert Group for Violence Against Children Estimations. I also serve on the Board of Directors for the Parenting & Family Researchers Alliance and on the editorial board of the Australian Journal of Social Issues a policy masthead.

As both a clinical psychologist and a research academic, I use a prevention lens to target risk and protective factors to enhance child and family wellbeing to reduce the presence and impact of early adversity & mental ill health. This includes a focus on parenting stress, family violence and maltreatment, and issues associated with balancing work and life.

I am a chief investigator on the Young Minds: Our Future study which is the Third Australian Child and Adolescent Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing, and I am part of the award-winning Australian Child Maltreatment Study (ACMS) team which generated the first nationally representative Australian data on the prevalence and mental health impact of the five types of child maltreatment in Australia.

As a researcher, I have received >$10 million in research funding and published extensively in leading D1 & Q1 journals. I am a sought-after speaker & frequently engage in science communication via the media across all platforms.

Alex is Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology and Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland. His research focuses on the study of group and identity processes in organizational, social, and clinical contexts.

Together with colleagues, Alex has written and edited 15 books and published over 300 peer-reviewed articles on these topics. His most recent books are:The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power (2nd Ed. with Stephen Reicher & Michael Platow, Psychology Press, 2020), The New Psychology of Sport: The Social Identity Approach (with Katrien Fransen & Filip Boen, Sage, 2020),The New Psychology of Health: Unlocking the Social Cure (with Catherine Haslam, Jolanda Jetten, Tegan Cruwys and Genvieve Dingle, Routledge, 2018), andSocial Psychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies (2nd Ed. with Joanne Smith, Sage, 2017).

Alex is a former Chief Editor of the European Journal of Social Psychology and currently Associate Editor of The Leadership Quarterly. He has won a range of major awards from scientific organisations in Australia, Europe, the UK, and the US, including recognition for distinguished contributions to psychological science from both the Australian Psychological Society and British Psychological Society. In 2022 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia "for significant service to higher education, particuarly psychology, through research and mentoring".

I have worked in both the clinical and academic fields of clinical psychology, in Australia and the UK, before joining UQ in 2012. My research investigates the cognitive and social consequences of trauma and disease in neurological populations, and also on identity-cognition relationships in aging. In this work I have addressed questions about the integrity of cogntiive ability, notably memory, and its rehabilitation, but also the impact that impairment of these abilities have on personal andsocial identity.

Maureen Hassall is Professor and Director of the Sustainable Minerals Institute's Industrial Safety and Health Centre at the University of Queensland. Her expertises crosses the fields of industrial risk management, safety engineering and human factors. Maureen works collaboratively with industry professionals to develop better human-centred risk management and safety engineering approaches that improve companies’ operational performance and competitiveness. Maureen also develops and delivers process safety, systems safety engineering, risk management and human factors training, education and expert advice to students and to industry. Her industry-focused research is motivated by 18 years of industry experience working in a number of different countries and in a variety of roles including specialist engineering, line management, organisational change and business performance improvement roles.

Helen works across a range of projects in both the research and consultancy arms of the Centre for Online Health, Centre for Health Services Research. Her focus is on the effective use of technology to increase access to health interventions (e.g. online psychoeducational tools for carers; telehealth implementation, telemental health and allied health) and increasing health literacy in the community (e.g. dementia knowledge and digital health). She is particularly interested in using health technology to promote quality end-of-life care. Her current projects aim to increase care closer to home for people with dementia and with life-limiting illnesses (e.g. telepalliative care). In 2023, she was awarded a 3-year National Palliative Care Project Grant funding to lead a national palliative care telementoring project - Palliative Care ECHO. Other research includes: evaluation of telepalliative care services (e.g. patient/ carer outcomes and perceptions and staff perceptions); mental health interventions via telehealth and social media and; online psychoeducational support for carers of people with primary brain tumours in order to increase quality of life and mental wellbeing.

Helen coordinates a range of COH consultancy projects.

She is a Registered Psychologist with clinical experience working with a range of issues and diverse populations and has over ten years’ experience teaching and facilitating workshops on psychology and health communication.