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Professor Ian Yang is a Thoracic Physician and Director of Thoracic Medicine at The Prince Charles Hospital, and Head of the PCH-Northside Clinical Unit, School of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.

Ji Hyun (Julia) completed her PhD in 2020 at the Dementia & Neuro Mental Health Research Unit at the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research and currently working as a postdoctoral research officer. Key areas of her current research focus are developing state-of-the-art neuroimaging analysis techniques related to emotional and cognitive dysfunctions in older persons and those with progressive neurodegenerative disease including Parkinson’s disease and dementia.

Her primary research themes include:

1. Identification of markers and mechanisms of mild cognitive impairment in Parkinson’s disease

2. Neuroimaging biomarker and repurposed therapeutic discovery to reduce risk of dementia in Parkinson’s disease

3. Understand the neurobiology of anxiety in ageing and its role in cognition.

Dr. Zhe Yang currently is an ARC DECRA fellow (Mentor: Prof. Xiwang Zhang) in the School of Chemical Engineering/Dow Centre for Sustainable Engineering Innovation at the University of Queensland since Dec 2023. He obtained his PhD degree in Environmental Engineering in 2018 at the University of Hong Kong (PhD supervisor: Prof. Chuyang Tang). He was appointed as Research Assistant/Post-doc Fellow/Research Assistant Professor at HKU from Nov 2018 to Dec 2023. Dr. Yang has more than 10 years of R&D experience in membrane technology in the context of resource recovery, desalination, water reuse, and water/wastewater treatment. To date, he has published over 80 refereed publications, with total citations of over 6,800 and an h-index of 42 based on Web of Science. Most of these papers (90%) are published in Nature indexed/top-tier journals in the field of environmental engineering and membrane technology, including Nature Water, Nature Communications, Nano-Micro Letters, Nano Letters, Chemical Society Reviews, Environmental Science & Technology, Water Research, Journal of Membrane Science, Desalination, etc. He currently serves as the Early Career Editorial Board member of the leading journals in his field (Environmental Science & Technology - IF 10.9, Link & Desalination - IF 8.3, Link).

Featured Honors and Awards:

• 2024 Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (1/1000, Link)
• 2024 Rising Star in Environmental Research (Link)
• The First Prize of the Water 2023 Young Investigator Award (Link and Interview)

Featured Grants (Sole or lead investigator):

• Lead Entrepreneur, Innovative, ultra-efficient device for sustainable electricity harvesting from CO2, (IG240100353), Department of Education, Australia's Economic Accelerator (AEA) – Ignite, AUD454,240). (Link)
• Sole Investigator, Novel interlayered membrane for highly efficient separation processes, Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), (DE230100114), Australian Research Council (ARC), AUD429,554 (11/12/2023-10/12/2026). (Link)

Dr Haotian Yang is a postdoctoral research fellow driving the study of tumour self-seeding as part of a joint liver cancer research project of UQ Frazer Institute and Gallipoli Medical Research. He graduated with a Bachelor of Biomedical Science (Honours Class I) from UQ, focusing on the role of reactive oxygen species during chemotherapy in liver cancer. Dr Yang later completed his PhD at UQ, where he developed the first spontaneous model demonstrating the process of tumour self-seeding and characterised the tumour self-seeded cells responsible for this phenomenon. His current research investigates the biological and clinical significance of tumour self-seeding and aims to identify novel therapeutics that inhibit this process for the treatment of liver cancer.

My group studies the role of cadherin cell adhesion molecules in morphogenesis and tumor development. E-cadherin is a key mediator of cell-cell recognition. It participates in tissue patterning and its dysfunction contributes to tumor progression and invasion.

Associate Professor Yap is the group leader for Cadherin cell adhesion molecules, Epithelial morphogenesis & Cell locomotion research at the IMB.

A clinical psychologist trained in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with many years of clinical experience, with interest in the understanding of psychosomatic relationships as they appear in clinical practice, and with interest in the understanding of the therapeutic relationship as instance of change, particularly in the treatment of children and young people. This translates into an interest in researching the psychotherapy process with a tendency toward the use of qualitative or mixed methods.

I am a Research Fellow in the Institute of Social Science Research at The University of Queensland.

My research interests coalesce around issues of social justice within organisations. I am particularly curious about how the way we perceive others informs our treatment of one and other in the workplace. I spend a lot of my time exploring this idea in the context of leadership. For example, collaborators and I have been working with industry professionals in Australia and North America to understand what organisational structures inhibit minority leaders' (e.g., women, racially diverse) progression and retention. We've also been investigating possible disrupters that may serve to improve minority leaders' chances of success in leadership roles.

I also spend a lot of time on applied research problems through partnering with industry to examine the effectiveness of practical initiatives or policy shifts. Recently, we've been working on understanding the supportive mechanisms that enhance boat safety in Northern Australia, while another partnership has focused on understanding how novel bail support programs can be enhanced to support young people to meet their youth justice orders.

I received my BPsycSc and MPsyOrg from UQ Psychology before completing a PhD in Leadership / Organisational Behaviour at UQ Business School. In 2019 I moved to The University of Illinois for a postdoctoral fellowship before joining the Institute of Social Science Research in 2021.

I am also an Organisational Psychologist and consult with industry on people focused challenges. I partner with business leaders and people managers to develop and implement evidence based actions and strategies.

I work with collaborators in Australia and North America, and I have the good fortune of supporting several RHD candidates at present.

Dr Liu Ye is is a Professor at The University of Queensland (UQ) in the School of Chemical Engineering. Dr Ye’s research is focused on sustainable environmental engineering and is dedicated to finding innovative and practical solutions to tackle challenges in achieving net zero emissions, climate resilience, and sustainability. She is the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) research program leader at UQ urban water engineering. She has an established national and international leadership in the research field of net-zero emissions from urban wastewater systems. Prof Ye has been awarded over AU$10M competitive research funding and has a broad research collaboration within academia and industry. She collaborated extensively with water industry partners (> 15, both Australia and overseas water utilities), Australian state Government, Industry peak bodies (Water Services Association of Australia (WSAA), Water Research Australia (WarterRA)) and Technology companies (e.g., Jacob, Suez, Veolia). She has also received more than eight scientific awards (including Research Innovation Award from Australia Water Association, UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award, etc.), and the EAIT faculty teaching excellence award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and an elected member in the Strategic Council of International Water Association (IWA). She is also a member of the Australia Association for Engineering Education (AAEE) and Engineers Australia (EA). She current servers as the Associate editor of Environmental Science: Water Research and Technology and in the Editorial board of Engineering journal.

Research:

Liu’s research includes greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and mitigation from biological wastewater treatment processes; sludge minimization and biogas production enhancement; advanced biological nutrient removal (BNR) technology development; on-line process control and optimisation and resource recovery from wastes.

Teaching and Learning:

CHEE2020: Process Equipment and Control (Coordinator and Lecturer);

CHEE2501: Environmental Systems Engineering I: Processes (Lecturer);

CHEE4012: Industrial Wastewater & Solid Waste Management (Lecturer);

CHEE4007/4027 Thesis project;

Nan Ye's research interest spans machine learning, statistics and optimization. He has published papers on topics including sequential decision making under uncertainty, weakly supervised learning, probabilistic graphical models, statistical learning theory, in venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, UAI, JAIR, JMLR. He received an IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize in 2022, and a UAI Best Student Paper Award in 2014.

He is a Lecturer in Statistics and Data Science in the School of Mathematics and Physics in University of Queensland. He previously held postdoc positions at QUT and UC Berkeley from 2015 to 2018, and at NUS from 2013 to 2014. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from NUS, and completed double first-class honors in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, also from NUS.

Please visit his personal webpage for more information: https://yenan.github.io/.

​Ram Yegappan is an early career researcher at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) at The University of Queensland (UQ). They completed their PhD in September 2023, focusing on understanding the science and application of snake venom proteins in wound healing. Ram has authored 8 research articles (4 as first author, 2 as co-first author) and 1 book chapter. These publications not only showcase their contributions to the field but also underscore their proficiency in conducting impactful research that translates into practical applications. In addition, they have also served as peer reviewer for journals and have reviewed over 30 research and review articles. Ram’s track record of honours and awards demonstrate their commitment to academic and research excellence, further enhancing his credibility as an emerging leader in this field.

In their current role, Ram manages multiple projects, conducting experiments at the interface of materials and cells, related to wound healing applications. They collaborate with researchers on project design, protocol preparation, data analysis and validation, statistical analysis and interpretation of findings, grant applications, and publications. Ram brings valuable expertise in the development and evaluation of next-generation biomaterials for wound healing applications, including the development of animal models for wound healing, in vivo evaluations, functional assays, as well as biochemical and histological evaluations. They have generated preliminary data for several grant proposals, and their foundational work formed the basis of two successful grants from the US Department of Defense and a CUREator, progressing the outcomes to preclinical stages.

Dr Loic Yengo is a Professor of Statistical Genomics at The University of Queensland (UQ) and Group Leader of the Statistical Genomics Laboratory within UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience. He was awarded a prestigious Snow Medical Research Fellowship in 2024 to dramatically advance the use of genomics to prevent chronic disease such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimer’s, with a particular focus on increasing participation of people with diverse ancestries. After completing a PhD in applied mathematics and statistics at the University of Lille (France) in 2014, he joined UQ in 2016 for postdoctoral training in Quantitative and Statistical Genetics. Loic started his own lab in 2020 to investigate the causes and consequences of genetic variation within and between human populations. His group develops and applies novel statistical methods to analyse large volumes of genomic data. Loic’s research has contributed to improving understanding of the genetic and phenotypic consequences of non-random mating (inbreeding and assortative mating) in human populations and has led to identifying novel genetic variants associated with complex traits and diseases. Loic was named among the top 40 rising stars of research by The Australian newspaper in 2021 and received the UQ Foundation research excellence award the same year. Loic is the 2022 recipient of the Ruth Stephens Gani Medal of the Australian Academy of Science recognizing outstanding contributions to research in human genetics, and was named in Nature Medicine’s 2022 Yearbook among 11 early-career researchers “to watch”.

In 2024, he was the recipient of the American Society of Human Genetics Early Career Award and a Snow Medical Research Foundation Fellowship to accelerate the deployment of genomic risk prediction in the clinic and improve the benefit of genomic medicine in all populations.

I have a multidisciplinary background in chemical and civil engineering, chemistry and materials science. Currently, I am the UQ leader of the National Centre for Timber Durability and Design Life, based at USC. I apply my expertise to understand the effects of fungal decay and moisture intrusion in timber connections, as well as the improvement of the fire performance of timber. I supervise 6 PhD students.

Mehmet Yildirimoglu is a Senior Lecturer of Transport Engineering at the School of Civil Engineering. Mehmet received his B.Sc. degree in civil engineering from the Middle East Technical University (METU) in 2009, M.Sc. degree in civil engineering from the Rutgers University in 2011 and Ph.D. degree in civil engineering from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2015. Prior to joining the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland in 2016, he was a Postdoctoral researcher at EPFL, Switzerland. His research revolves around large-scale traffic modeling, dynamic traffic assignment, data mining techniques and real-time traffic management.

Dr Tesfa Yimer is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research, The University of Queensland. Tesfa’s PhD was on mental health systems in low resource settings, particularly focusing on depression and alcohol use disorder. His research interest is on addiction and mental health epidemiology.

Prof. Hongzhi Yin works as an ARC Future Fellow and Professor and director of the Responsible Big Data Intelligence Lab (RBDI) at The University of Queensland, Australia. He has made notable contributions to predictive analytics, recommendation systems, graph learning, social media analytics, and decentralized and edge intelligence. He has received numerous awards and recognition for his research achievements. He has been named to IEEE Computer Society’s AI’s 10 to Watch 2022 and Field Leader of Data Mining & Analysis in The Australian's Research 2020 magazine. In addition, he has received the prestigious 2023 Young Tall Poppy Science Awards, Australian Research Council Future Fellowship 2021, the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award 2016, UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award 2019, Rising Star of Science Award (2022-2024) and 2024 Computer Science in Australia Leader Award, AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention in Data Mining (2022-2024). His research has won 8 international and national Best Paper Awards, including Best Student Full Paper Award at CIKM 2024, Best Paper Award - Honorable Mention at WSDM 2023, Best Paper Award at ICDE 2019, Best Student Paper Award at DASFAA 2020, Best Paper Award Nomination at ICDM 2018, ACM Computing Reviews' 21 Annual Best of Computing Notable Books and Articles, Best Paper Award at ADC 2018 and 2016. His Ph.D. thesis won Peking University Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award 2014 and CCF Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award (Nomination) 2014. He has ten conference papers recognized as the Most Influential Papers in Paper Digest, including KDD 2021 and 2013, AAAI 2021, SIGIR 2022, WWW 2023 and 2021, CIKM 2021, 2019, 2016, and 2015. He has published over 300 papers with an H-index of 83 (20000+ citations), including 250+ CCF A/CORE A* and 80+ CCF B/CORE A, such as KDD, SIGIR, WWW, ACL, WSDM, SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCAI, ACM Multimedia, ECCV, IEEE TKDE, TNNL, VLDB Journal, and ACM TOIS. He has been the leading author (first/co-first author or corresponding author) for 250+. He has been an SPC/PC member for many top conferences, such as AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, VLDB, ICDE, ICDM, and CIKM. He has been serving as Associate Editor/Guest Editor/Editorial Board for Neural Networks (JCR Q1, CCF B, 中科院一区), Science China Information Sciences (JCR Q1, CCF A, 中科院一区), Data Science and Engineering (JCR Q1, 中科院一区), Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST, CCF B), Journal of Social Computing, ACM Transactions on Information Systems 2022-2023 (JCR Q1, CCF A, CORE A, 中科院一区), ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology 2020-2021 (JCR Q1), Information Systems 2020-2021 (CORE A*), and World Wide Web 2020-2021 and 2017-2018 (CORE A, CCF B). Dr. Yin has also been attracting wide media coverage, such as The Australian, SBS Radio Interviews, UQ News, Sohu.com, Faculty News of EAIT, IEEE Computer Society, ACM Computing Reviews.

I am now looking for highly motivated Ph.D. students. The University of Queensland ranks in the top 50 as measured by the Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities. The University also ranks 40 in the QS World University Rankings and 41 in the US News Best Global Universities Rankings. The University of Queensland is the best in Australia according to the Australian Financial Review (AFR), which has now ranked UQ in the #1 position for 2 consecutive years. Please find the following two PhD scholarships.

• https://study.uq.edu.au/study-options/phd-mphil-professional-doctorate/projects/building-trustworthy-information-recommendation-system

• https://study.uq.edu.au/study-options/phd-mphil-professional-doctorate/projects/build-trustworthy-information-recommendation-system

Latest News

1. [4 April 2025] We have four full research papers accepted by the top conference SIGIR 2025 (CORE A*, CCF A).

   • ID-Free Not Risk-Free: LLM-Powered Agents Unveil Risks in ID-Free Recommender Systems

   • Diversity-aware Dual-promotion Poisoning Attack on Sequential Recommendation

   • Towards Distribution Matching between Collaborative and Language Spaces for Generative Recommendation

   • STAR-Rec: Making Peace with Length Variance and Pattern Diversity in Sequential Recommendation

2. [2 April 2025] Congratulations to the three new doctors, Dr. Wei Yuan, Dr. Jing Long and Dr. Yuting Sun, who were awarded their PhD by The University of Queensland.

3. [10 March 2025] Our survey paper "A Survey on Point-of-Interest Recommendation: Models, Architectures, and Security " has been accepted by TKDE 2025 (CORE A*, CCF A).

4. [21 Feb 2025] Our joint foundation work "On the Trustworthiness of Generative Foundation Models– Guideline, Assessment, and Perspective" has been released on both arXiv and Hugging Face. This research is the result of a broad collaboration with leading universities and research institutions worldwide, including the University of Notre Dame, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Waterloo, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University, University of California, Santa Barbara, IBM Research, Microsoft Research, The University of Queensland and more.

5. [20 Feb 2025] I have been recognized as a Highly Ranked Scholar - Prior 5 Years (top 0.05% of all scholars) and #15 in Data Mining on ScholarGPS.

6. [26 January 2025] Our survey paper "Graph Condensation: A Survey" has been accepted by TKDE 2025 (CORE A*, CCF A).

7. [20 January 2025] We have three full research papers and one demo paper accepted by the top conference WWW 2025 (CORE A*, CCF A).

   • Rethinking and Accelerating Graph Condensation: A Training-Free Approach with Class Partition

   • On-device Content-based Recommendation with Single-shot Embedding Pruning: A Cooperative Game Perspective

   • Epidemiology-informed Network for Robust Rumor Detection

   • BiasNavi: LLM-Empowered Data Bias Management

8. [18 January 2025] We have two research papers accepted by AAAI 2025 (CCF A, CORE A*) for Oral Presentation.

   • Efficient Traffic Prediction through Spatio-Temporal Distillation

   • Rethinking Cancer Gene Identification through Graph Anomaly Analysis

9. [5 December 2024] Our tutorial "Graph Condensation: Foundations, Methods and Prospects" has been accepted for presentation at The Web Conference 2025.

10. [30 November 2024] I have been invited to serve as SPC for IJCAI 2025 and DASFAA 2025.

11. [29 November 2024] I was honored with The Faculty Higher Degree Research Supervision Excellence Award.

12. [19 November 2024] Congratulations to Dr. Liang Qu on being awarded his PhD degree by The University of Queensland.

13. [17 November 2024] Our research paper "Progressive Generalization Risk Reduction for Data-Efficient Causal Effect Estimation" was accepted by the top conference KDD 2025 (CCF A, CORE A*). Congratulations to Hechuan.

14. [24 October 2024] Our research paper "Physics-guided Active Sample Reweighting for Urban Flow Prediction" won the Best Student Full Paper Award at the top conference CIKM 2024. Congratulations to Wei!

15. [18 October 2024] We have published two survey papers in top-tier journals: ACM Computing Surveys and Science China Information Sciences. Additionally, we have recently released two new survey papers on arXiv.

    • Manipulating Recommender Systems: A Survey of Poisoning Attacks and Countermeasures (ACM Computing Surveys 2024)

    • A Survey of Privacy-Preserving Model Explanations: Privacy Risks, Attacks, and Countermeasures (SCIENCE CHINA - Information Science 2024)

    • Graph Condensation: A Survey (arXiv)

    • A Survey on Point-of-Interest Recommendation: Models, Architectures, and Security (arXiv)

16. [17 October 2024] We have two research papers "PUMA: Efficient Continual Graph Learning with Graph Condensation" and "Handling Low Homophily in Recommender Systems with Partitioned Graph Transformer" accepted by the top journal TKDE.

17. [26 September 2024] We have one research paper "Distribution-Aware Data Expansion with Diffusion Models" accepted by NeurIPS 2024 (CCF A, CORE A*).

18. [23 September 2024] We have three journal papers recognized as ESI Hot and Highly Cited papers.

    • Self-Supervised Learning for Recommender Systems: A Survey (Hot and Highly Cited)

    • XSimGCL: Towards Extremely Simple Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (Highly Cited)

    • Enhancing Social Recommendation With Adversarial Graph Convolutional Networks (Highly Cited)

19. [10 September 2024] I have been recognized with the 2024 Rising Star of Science Award in Research.com and ranked #8 in Australia among Rising Stars for 2024.

20. [24 August 2024] Two of my PhD graduates have been awarded the competitive ARC DECRA Fellowship. Congratulations to Weiqing and Junliang.

21. [23 July 2024] Recently, we have released 3 comprehensive survey papers.

    • Graph Condensation: A Survey

    • Poisoning Attacks and Defenses in Recommender Systems: A Survey

    • A Survey of Privacy-Preserving Model Explanations: Privacy Risks, Attacks, and Countermeasures

22. [2 July 2024] I have been invited to serve as area chair at KDD 2025.

23. [27 June 2024] Our ARC Linkage Project "Building an Aussie Information Recommendation System You Can Trust" has been granted and funded.

24. [16 June 2024] I have been invited to co-chair the User modeling, personalization and recommendation track at The Web Conference 2025.

25. [6 June 2024] Recently, we have released 2 comprehensive survey papers.

    • Poisoning Attacks and Defenses in Recommender Systems: A Survey

    • A Survey of Privacy-Preserving Model Explanations: Privacy Risks, Attacks, and Countermeasures

26. [23 May 2024] Our project Personalized On-Device Large Language Models was shortlisted as a finalist for the 2024 iAwards.

27. [22 May 2024] Our research paper "Adversarial Item Promotion on Visually-Aware Recommender Systems by Guided Diffusion" has been accepted by the top journal TOIS 2024 (CORE A and CCF A).

28. [17 May 2024] We have 4 full research research papers accepted by the prestigious conference KDD 2024 (CORE A*, CCF A).

    • Diffusion-Based Cloud-Edge-Device Collaborative Learning for Next POI Recommendations

    • Graph Condensation for Open-World Graph Learning

    • Hate Speech Detection with Generalizable Topic-aware Fairness

    • Unveiling Vulnerabilities of Contrastive Recommender Systems to Poisoning Attacks