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Dr. Matt Reeves completed his PhD degree in theoretical physics from the University of Otago (New Zealand) in 2016. During his PhD, he worked in the field of vortex dynamics and turbulence in quantum fluids, under the supervision of Dr. Ashton Bradley.

In 2017, he joined the group of Prof. Matthew Davis at the University of Queensland as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, studying far-from-equilibrium physics in exciton-polariton and atomic Bose-Einstein condensates.

Dr. Aditya Ashok is a distinguished early career researcher and expert in flexible inorganic nanoarchitectured devices by precisely engineering the material parameters for energy conversion, optoelectronics, catalysis, and biosensing applications. As a Postdoctoral Fellow at Prof. Yusuke Yamauchi's group, UQ-AIBN, his research focuses on fabricating porous multimodal inorganic heterojunction for opto-catalysis and biosensing applications. His long-term research vision is to bridge the gap between fundamental materials science and real-world biomedical and energy solutions through nanoengineered materials and flexible electronic devices.

Dr. Ashok secured a bachelor's in electrical and electronics engineering in 2016 and a master's in nanotechnology and renewable energy in 2018. In 2024, he graduated with his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Biomedical Engineering under Prof. Yusuke Yamauchi's group from the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), The University of Queensland, Brisbane. Immediately after his PhD, he was offered to join a postdoctoral research associate at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, at the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering and the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering. His research at the UNSW focused on developing multimodal flexible electronics and flexible mesoporous 3D buckling electrodes for organoid studies.

Organic functional materials development (design, synthesis & characterisation) for quantum based optoelectronics

Associate Professor Shih-Chun Lo (Lawrence)

Lawrence held a prestigious Swire Scholarship while carrying out his PhD study on semiconductor material development for organic solar cells and light emitting diodes (LEDs) at Oxford University, UK (1996-2000). His post-doctoral research at Oxford University focused on the design, synthesis and characterisation of fluorescent and phosphorescent dendrimers for highly efficient LEDs. Dendrimers have been recognised internationally as the third main class of LED materials, alongside small molecules and polymers, in which he played a key role. In December 2007, he joined the University of Queensland as a Lecturer in Chemistry of Materials. His research work has focused on the development of new functional semiconductor materials for quantum based optoelectronic applications (e.g. solar cells, LEDs, photodetectors, sensors, superconductors & organic lasers) as well as clean energy generation.

Dr. Andrew Groszek completed his PhD in theoretical physics at Monash University in 2018, under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Tapio Simula. His doctoral research involved the numerical simulation of non-equilibrium superfluids, with a particular interest in vortices and turbulence in these systems.

From 2018-2020, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the group of Dr. Thomas Billam at Newcastle University, United Kingdom. Here he continued his research on far-from-equilibrium systems, with a focus on superfluids away from the zero temperature limit.

In 2020, he joined the group of Prof. Matthew Davis at the University of Queensland, and is currently based in the ARC Centres of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems (EQUS) and Future Low-Energy Electronics Technology (FLEET). He is currently investigating periodically driven quantum systems, as well as providing numerical modelling for the Bose-Einstein condensate experiments located on campus.

Aleksandar D. Rakić leads the Photonics and Microwave Engineering group at The University of Queensland focusing on the development of technologies for sensing and imaging across the electromagnetic spectrum including microwave, terahertz wave and optical systems.

Professor Rakić’s research focuses on the principles of laser feedback interferometry with semiconductor lasers, and on the application of these principles to imaging and sensing. Rakić group pioneered the development of several world’s first laser-feedback interferometric sensors including systems based on monolithic Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser arrays (VCSELs), blue-green lasers, terahertz quantum cascade lasers and mid-infrared interband cascade lasers.

His current focus is on the development of sensing and imaging systems exploiting the THz spectrum for applications from security and defence to in vivo biomedical imaging. His other principal contributions relate to the design and characterization of surface-emitting optoelectronic devices (VCSELs and light emitting diodes) and modelling of optical materials.

Dr. Allison Fish is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research lies at the intersections of law, socio-cultural anthropology, and science and technology studies. She has completed higher degree studies in law (JD), public administration (MPA), and anthropology (PhD). Prior to joining UQ Dr. Fish was an assistant professor in the School of Informatics & Computing at Indiana University.

The three questions that have directed much of her recent work are: What are the legal forms, technological infrastructures, and cultural logics that shape information/knowledge management practices? How do law and technology function together to mediate access? And How is accessibility increasingly framed as a fundamental human right and critical pathway to social enfranchisement?

To date, the bulk of her research has addressed the application of intellectual property law to the regulation of various domains including; international markets for South Asian classical health systems, the development of digital archives and databases designed to function as defensive publications against future patents, the impact of open access on scholarly communication practices, and licensing and attribution practices in open source software communities.

Prof David Ascher is an NHMRC Investigator Leadership Fellow and Deputy Associate Dean (Research Partnerships) in the Faculty of Science at The University of Queensland. He also serves as Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics and Head of Computational Biology & Clinical Informatics at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute. Internationally, he sits on scientific advisory boards for A*STAR (Singapore), Fiocruz (Brazil) and the Tuscany University Network (Italy), and has been recognised with major honours including the Royal Society of Chemistry Horizon Prize.

A global leader in computational biology and personalised medicine, Prof Ascher develops advanced AI- and structure-based approaches to understand how genetic variation alters protein structure, function, and clinical outcomes. His group has built one of the world’s most widely used platforms for interpreting coding variants—over 90 computational tools, accessed more than 9.5 million times per year from 120+ countries. These tools underpin clinical diagnostics, guide drug development pipelines, and support international public-health responses to antimicrobial resistance and emerging infectious diseases.

His research has led to new molecular insights across infectious disease, rare disease, oncology and cardiometabolic health, and has been translated directly into practice—informing WHO policy, enabling early resistance detection in tuberculosis and leprosy, stratifying patients with hereditary cancers, and supporting vaccine design with partners including Pfizer. Many of his methods are embedded in globally used resources such as Ensembl VEP, PDBe, and the EMBL-EBI KnowledgeBase.

Prof Ascher has a longstanding commitment to interdisciplinary leadership and capability-building across UQ. As Director (Strategy) of the Biotechnology Programs and later as Deputy Associate Dean (Research Partnerships), he has driven initiatives to transform UQ’s biotechnology education, grow industry-embedded training, expand international partnerships, and diversify research income. He has led the development of UQ’s biotechnology–industry placement ecosystem, initiated new professional development programs adopted across multiple Faculties and Institutes, and established major collaborations with government, industry and global research organisations.

He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers (over half as senior author: FWCI 2.7), secured more than $30M in competitive research funding, and supervised over 60 HDR students who now hold leadership positions in academia, industry and government. His work appears in leading journals including Nature, Nature Genetics, Science, PNAS and Nature Microbiology, and is cited in over 100 policy documents and 40 patents.

Prof Ascher holds degrees in Biotechnology, Biochemistry, Structural Biology and Law. His research career has spanned Adelaide, Melbourne, Cambridge and Brisbane. After his PhD with Professor Michael Parker, he worked with Sir Tom Blundell at the University of Cambridge, where he led programs in structure-guided drug discovery and protein–protein interaction targeting. He established his independent laboratory at Cambridge and then at the University of Melbourne/Bio21 Institute, before moving to the Baker Institute in 2019 and joining UQ in 2021.

Dr. Naipeng Dong is an expert in automatic formal verification of security and privacy in cryptographic protocols, Android applications and blockchain systems.

She has developed efficient automatic formal verification techniques with a focus on attacker reasoning and analysis on cryptogrpahic protocols, developed algorithms to verify fault-tolerance of systems with dishonest participants, and analysed systems in e-auction, e-health, Single-Sign-on authentication, and blockchain consensus.

Biography: Dr. Peng Chen is currently a Senior Lecturer at the School of Chemical Engineering and a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), The University of Queensland (UQ). Dr Chen received his PhD degree from the School of Chemical Engineering at UQ in 2020 under the supervision of Prof. Lianzhou Wang. He then moved to AIBN for Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP) Research Fellow (2020-2022) and ARC DECRA Fellow (2023-2025). Dr. Chen's research focuses on the development of low-cost and efficient thin-film photovoltaic technologies for renewable energy conversion and storage, including perovskite solar cells, quantum dot solar cells, and lead-free perovskite optoelectronics. In 2018, he pioneered the concept of bilayer 2D/3D heterostructures for stable perovskite solar cells (Adv. Funct. Mater. 2018, 28, 1706923; citation: >800 times). In 2021, he participated in the design of ultrastable perovskite-MOF glassy composites for lighting applications (Science 2021, 374, 621). In 2024, he led the team to achieve a certified world-record efficiency of 16.65% for lead-free perovskite solar cells (Nature Nanotechnology 2025, 20, 779). Over the past decade at UQ, Dr Chen has contributed to 66 peer-reviewed publications in top journals, including Science (×1), Nature Nanotechnology (×1), Nature Energy (×1), Nature Communications (×2), Advanced Materials (×3), Angewandte Chemie International Edition (×7), Journal of the American Chemistry Society (×2), Advanced Energy Materials (×4), ACS Nano (×3), Advanced Functional Materials (×4), Nano Energy (×3), etc. His publications have attracted >7500 citations with a H-index of 36 (Google Scholar). He has attracted over $4 million competitive research funds from ARC, ARENA, Australian Government, etc.

Course coordinator: CHEE4006/4007 Research Project, and CHEE4026/4027 Research Thesis; Course Lecturer: ENGG1500 Thermodynamics: Energy and Enivronment; Guest Lecturer: MATE7016 Materials for Energy Conversion and Storage.

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.