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Dr Jorge Campos-González-Angulo develops theoretical and computational models for quantum molecular systems, working at the interface of quantum chemistry, molecular photonics, and quantum computing. His research is part of the quantum decarbonisation mission of the Queensland Quantum Decarbonisation Alliance, providing the physical models needed to simulate and engineer molecular systems for clean energy and quantum technology applications.

His work on light–matter interaction spans from single molecules to collective quantum optical regimes, with applications in the design of organic light-emitting materials for sustainable electronics. A parallel line of research develops reduced models for spin-vibronic systems at molecule–electrode interfaces, with relevance to quantum sensing and electrochemical energy conversion. He also builds physically motivated molecular models that serve as rigorous benchmarks for fault-tolerant quantum computers, connecting advances in quantum hardware directly to chemical problems of practical importance.

Jorge completed his PhD in Chemistry at the University of California San Diego, where he worked with Prof. Joel Yuen-Zhou on foundational problems in vibropolaritonic chemistry. He then joined the Matter Lab of Prof. Alán Aspuru-Guzik at the University of Toronto as a Postdoctoral Fellow, where he was also an affiliate of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He joined the University of Queensland in 2026 as a Lecturer jointly appointed in the Schools of Mathematics & Physics and Chemistry & Molecular Biosciences, and is a Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Quantum Biotechnology (QUBIC).

Dr. Pablo Cañete was awarded a PhD in Immunology in 2019 under Prof. Carola Vinuesa’s supervision at the John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR), The Australian National University (ANU). During this time he characterised a novel human T cell subset important for modulating antibodies associated with allergic responses. His doctoral research has been recognised by several awards, including the prestigious Dewar Milne prize for immunology, awarded to the most outstanding PhD thesis of Immunology at the JCSMR, ANU. He then continued as a postdoc with Prof. Vinuesa investigating 1) novel tolerance mechanisms and 2) characterising bespoke mouse models of autoimmunity at the Centre for Personalised Immunology. In 2022 he joined Frazer institute with Prof. Di Yu where he hopes to uncover novel approaches for harnessing T cell biology for therapeutic purposes. Pablo’s research vision is to integrate human and mouse immunology together with systems biology with the hope to better understand antibody responses, mechanisms of immune tolerance and autoimmunity.

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Digital Health and Accredited Practising Dietitian (APD) interested in the prevention and management of noncommunicable diseases, especially obesity, across the lifecourse.

Through research, I aim to add health to life and equity to health by changing policies and practices to reduce the impact of obesity.

My research program aims to forge a new nexus across dietetics, digital health and public health to improve healthy weight. In my Postdoctoral Fellowship, I have established a new evidence base that supports precision public health approaches to the prevention and management of obesity, including innovate methods of public health surveillance that can use data from sources such as electronic medical records. I trained as a Paediatric Dietitian and have experience as a clinician-researcher working in Queensland's healthcare system, specifically in preventing and managing childhood obesity via clinical, community, and public health programs.

I have used epidemiology, public health informatics, action research, co-design, and ethnographic methods to generate new knowledge in obesity and digital health. I was awarded my PhD (UQ) in November 2020, which developed and validated i-PATHWAY, a clinical model to predict childhood obesity from the first 1,000 days to help guide its prevention. This research was the first of its kind in Australia and uncovered new evidence for risk factors for childhood obesity that are evident from the early years.

At The University of Queensland (UQ), I am a member of the Queensland Digital Health Centre, located within the Centre for Health Services Research (Faculty of Medicine). I established and currently Co-Chair the UQ Digital Health HDR Cohort, which provides research mentorship and support to ~20 PhD, MPhil and Honours research students.

Our team partners closely with multiple healthcare and research organisations across Australia to innovate and translate obesity research into practice, including Health and Wellbeing Queensland (public health and prevention of chronic diseases), Queensland Health (healthcare system) and the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (digital health research). I hold an Honorary Appointment with Health and Wellbeing Queensland, and an Affiliate Research Fellow position with the Faculty of Medicine (UQ) to help bridge the gap between obesity research and practice.

David Cantillo studied chemistry at the University of Extremadura, Spain. In 2011, he obtained his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Jose Luis Jimenez at the same university. His PhD work focused on the experimental and theoretical study of 1,3-dipolar cycloadditions of mesoionic compounds. Then, he moved to the University of Graz as a postdoctoral researcher within the group of Prof. C. Oliver Kappe, where he gained experience in flow chemistry. In 2018, he started his independent academic career at the University of Graz as an Assistant Professor and became an Area Leader at the Research Center Pharmaceutical Engineering GmbH. David has joined the University of Queensland in 2023.

His research group focuses on synthetic organic electrochemistry. In particular, the group explores the use of electrical current to develop novel synthetic methodologies and more sustainable routes for the synthesis of medicines, as well as process scale up using continuous flow technology.

As a cell biologist specialising in molecular and cell biology and stem cell biology, my work focuses on cardiovascular development, stem cell-base disease modelling and pharmaceutical drug discovery. Specifically, I concentrate on ischaemic heart injury and diabetic cardiomyopathy, aiming to develop novel therapeutics to reduce hospitalisations and community health burdens. I have 13 career publications and an h-index of 5 (Web of Science); 83.3% of my publications are in Q1 journals (SciVal). Across my research career, the topic areas in publications include studies in cell biology (4), development biology (3), pharmacology (3), and cardiovascular system-cardiology (2) (Web of Science). In the last five years, 60% of my publications are in the top 10% of journals, and the studies cover biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology (3 outputs), and medicine (2 outputs) (SciVal). I have held leadership roles including member of International Society for Heart Research Australasia Early Career Investigator Committee, member of the Queensland Cardiovascular Research Network (QCVRN) Emerging Leaders Committee, member of the Early-Mid Career Researchers (EMCR) Association for IMB, UQ. I am organising EMCR Session for the 2024 Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand annual scientific meeting, the 2024 QCVRN & Heart Foundation Research Showcase, the 2024 IMB EMCR Retreat meeting, and was organisation committee member for the 2023 Australia Network of Cardiac and Vascular Developmental Biology conference. I review for journals including Stem Cell Reports, Stem Cells, IUBMB Life and co-review for journals including Nature Methods, Cell Stem Cell, Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology. I am a special guest editor for the journal Pathogens on the Special Issue: Innate Immunity against Pathogens.

Dr Zhe (Selina) Cao is a Research Fellow in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at UQ Business School and an ARC Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology. Her research focuses on how actors engage and coordinate across organisational, sectoral, disciplinary, and cultural differences under conditions of uncertainty, fragmentation, and distributed authority.

Adopting a process-relational perspective, she studies these questions in contexts including interdisciplinary collaboration, innovation ecosystems, university–industry collaboration, research translation and commercialisation, and the governance of emerging technologies such as synthetic biology and quantum technologies.

Her work also engages broader philosophical questions concerning paradox, metaphor, epistemic infrastructures, and East–West perspectives on organisation and knowledge systems.

Methodologically, she adopts interpretive and qualitative approaches.

Selina holds a PhD in Management and Entrepreneurship from Imperial College London. Prior to academia, she worked at DuPont and PwC across North America.

Shoufeng Cao is a disrupter and transformational advocate for impactful and real-world solutions, with research expertise in digital tranformation and blockchain-based innovative solutions for businesses, supply chains, industries and communites. His current research focuses on developing and demonstrating the transformative application of blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the bushfood industry.

Shoufeng obtained his doctoral degree from The University of Queensland (UQ), with his thesis on system-wide data-driven risk analysis and management in global fresh produce value chains for the strategic competition of "value chain to value chain". He started his postdoc research journeys at UQ and Queensland University of Technology (QUT), where he completed three digital transformation projects in agri-food supply chains and the industry funded by three industry-led CRCs including the CRC for developing Northern Australia (CRCNA), the Food Agility CRC, and the Future Food Systems CRC, and one ARC Indigenous Disovery Project.

His research areas span from the identification of digital transformation strategies in complex multi-industry and multi-region contexts to the design, implementation, and evaluation of blockchain solutions with end users for industrial transformation and real-world disruptive impacts. His completed projects won two Good Design Australia Awards 2020 and one of them was a runner-up of the 2021 ACS Digital Disruptors Awards in the ICT Research Project of the Year Category.

Liang Cao is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Queensland's School of Chemical Engineering (UQ, Australia). He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from UQ in 2021. In 2017, he worked as a research assistant at Tsinghua University before coming to UQ. From 2009 to 2016, he earned master's and bachelor's degrees in Environmental Engineering from Hunan University in China.

My research group specializes in the detection, isolation, identification and evaluation of biologically active small molecules from Nature (natural products). We acquire valuable knowledge on how and why natural products are made, and apply this knowledge to better understand living systems, and solve important scientific and societal challenges.

To achieve these goals we have established specialist capabilities that extend across;

Microbiology – the isolation, characterization and cultivation of bacterial and fungal strains.

Chemistry – the extraction and fractionation of natural extracts, the purification, chemical and spectroscopic characterization, and structure elucidation of natural products, and the use of synthetic and medicinal chemistry to explore bioactive scaffolds.

Biology – to evaluate extracts and natural products against an array of bioassays, leading to new human pharmaceuticals that target such indications as infectious and neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, pain and epilepsy, as well as new animal health products and new crop protection agents.

Carina is an occupational therapist with a doctorate in psychology. Carina works in the area of child, adolescent and youth psychiatry in both the public and private sector. Her interests are in neurodevelopmental psychiatry, sensory processing and modulation, developmental psychiatry and early engagement for psychotic-like experiences. Carina is currently the project manager for the evaluation of the adolescent extended treatment facility in Queensland at the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research at the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research. Carina is currently partnering in collaborative research projects working with neurodevelopmental psychiatry, nutrition and neuropsychology to improve the outcomes for children, young people and families at risk of mental ill-health.

Sandra Capra AM joined the Faculty of Health Sciencesand then the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciencesi 2008 as professor of nutrition. Professor Capra received her BSc(Hons) and Diploma in Nutrition and Dietetics from Sydney University, her MSocSc from the University of Birmingham and her PhD from the University of Queensland.

After more than 15 years in professional practice in NSW, Victoria, Queensland and New Zealand Prof Capra entered academia full time. Professor Capra has a strong commitment to allied health professions and has served three terms as President of the Dietitians Association of Australia, has been a member of the Council of Pro Vice Chancellors and Deans of Health Sciences and served on many national policy making committees including the Nutrient Reference Values Steering Committee and the Dietary Guidelines Working Party of the National Health and Medical Research Council. She served sixteen years as Chair of the Board of Directors (President) of the International Confederation of Dietetic Associations from 2004-2016. She was an Independent Director of Health Workforce Australia 2010-2014.

Professor Capra is an expert on allied health in general and nutrition and dietetics curricula and competencies in particular and reviews educational programs both in Australia and overseas. In early 2017 she was appointed Executive Director of the International Commission for Dietetics and Nutrition Education and Accreditation, implementing an international program of competency development and program accreditaion. She is regularly invited to speak on the topic of educational standards, quality and competence. Professor Capra has been recognised for her service to nutrition and dietetics education and research by being appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2003, a Fellow of the Dietitians Association of Australia (the first appointed) and elected to life membership of the DAA. She was named one of the Westpac/Financial Review "100 Women of Influence" in the global category in 2014.

Professor Capra designed and developed the Master of Dietetics Studies, an innovative and distinctive program within Australia, and sought and achieved accreditation for this novel program as well as more recently its reaccreditation. Graduates are complimented on their skill and employability.

She has acted as a consultant to governments, in the area of foodservices for hospitals, detention centres, custodial facilities as well as serving on numerous governent committees at the state and national level.

Prior to her move to the University of Queensland she was the Head of School, School of Health Sciences and Professor of Nutrition and Dietetics at the University of Newcastle, NSW. Before that she was at QUT for 15 years.

She was appointed Emeritus Professor in January 2019, and retains an active interest in research and mentoring.

Research Interests

Professor Capra has positioned UQ as a leader in research in nutrition. Her personal research interests focus on nutrition and dietetics practice, food and nutrition policy and quality outcomes for food and nutrition services in a variety of settings. Much of her work focuses on the development of tools to use in practice and developing systems for quality improvements and outcomes measurements of service delivery. Studies include nutrition service delivery models, best practice, tools development, measurement in dietetics and outcomes research in dietetics, staffing and efficacy. This is not limited to clinical fields, but includes other domains of policy and public health and service delivery and alllied health more generally. Professor Capra was a principal investigator on the Department of Health and Ageing “Implementing best practice nutrition and hydration support in Residential aged care” which was part of the national “Encouraging Best Practice in Residential Aged Care” program. She has developed tools now used across Australia such as the Malnutrition Screening Tool, the Meal Assessment Tool, and the Acute Care Patient Satisfaction with Foodservice Questionnaire. many of her former students have proceeded to key leadership roles in Australia and overseas.

Nicholas Carah is Director of the Centre for Digital Cultures & Societies in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and Professor in the School of Communication and Arts. He is an Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, and a Chief Investigator on ARC Discovery and Linkage projects. In 2023, they were Deputy Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Nicholas' research examines the algorithmic and participatory advertising model of digital media platforms, with a sustained focus on digital alcohol marketing. Nicholas is the author of Media and Society: Power, Platforms & Participation (2021), Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture (2016), Media and Society: production, content and participation (2015), Pop Brands: branding, popular music and young people (2010). And, co-editor of Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media (2018) and Conflict in My Outlook (2022). Nicholas is a Director and Deputy Chair of the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education.

Researching venom peptides and ion channel pharmacology to develop next-generation therapeutics for neurological disorders

Dr Fernanda Cardoso is a Brazil-born Australian dual-citizen researcher interested in venom peptide-based biodiscovery and therapeutics development. Cardoso was awarded an MSc in Molecular Pharmacology and a PhD with an emphasis in Biochemistry and Immunology and is part of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, where she develops novel therapies for complex neurological diseases. Cardoso has interdisciplinary training in the fields of neuropharmacology, medicinal chemistry and chemical biology and a strong background in drug discovery, which provides the skills to identify naturally occurring or synthetic bioactive molecules and to study their effects in human physiology with applications in neurologic disorders such as chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and motor neuron disease (MND). Please see Dr Cardoso’s Grants and Publications list for more details.

Before joining the University of Queensland, Dr Cardoso was part of the Queensland Institute for Medical Research, holding a prestigious CAPES Postdoctoral Fellowship. During this period, Cardoso developed unique high-throughput screen platforms for discovering protein and peptide targets of novel therapies to combat infectious diseases and novel helminth-derived bioactives with anti-inflammatory properties. Please see Dr Cardoso’s Publications list for more details.

Dr Cardoso manages several industry and academic projects studying ion channel modulators derived from natural repertoires, particularly venoms, and developing novel, effective drugs to treat neurological disorders. She is also a Board Member and Treasurer of the prestigious and long-standing International Society on Toxinology (https://toxinology.org/office-bearers/), and serves in the Editorial Board of Toxicon, Toxins, and Marine Drugs.