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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.

Stephen is a Brisbane-based playwright and academic. His plays have been produced across Australia and won awards including the Griffin Theatre Award (2015) for The Turquoise Elephant, the Matilda Award for Best New Australian Play (2017) for Bastard Territory, and the Patrick White Playwrights’ Award (2005) and New Dramatists’ Award (2006) for Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset. Those plays and others including musical Joh for PM (2017, with Paul Hodge), and The Narcissist (2007), have been shortlisted for a range of awards including the Patrick White Playwrights’ Award, the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award, Queensland Literary Awards (Drama), and two AWGIEs.

His main areas of theatre research at present are in c21st Australian playwriting, and the intersections between Gothic drama and Eco-criticism, where he has written the first two of a propsed trilogy of 'cli fi' plays. He has published on the Australian Gothic, and extended this area of interest into Ireland, the UK, the USA, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand. He has a background in Postcolonial drama, Australian Drama (from c19th melodramas to c21st playwriting), Spatial Inquiry (focussing on the Australian North), and Cultural Geography. He is also co-creator of the Cultural Atlas of Australia with his colleagues Prof. Jane Stadler and A/Prof. Peta Mitchell.

I am an Honorary Research Fellow with the School of Psychology. My research is in the area of psychopharmacology and addiction, where I am interested in the acute and chronic effects of drugs on cognition, emotion and behaviour. I am interested in how extending our understanding in this area can be translated into searching for novel treatments for drug use disorders.

At UQ, I was connected to the Lives Lived Well research group with Professor Leanne Hides, and the National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research. As a Lives Lived Well Research Fellow, I worked on a trial that developed and implemented a new trauma-informed model of care in residential treatment for young people with substance use disorders. Prior to this, I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Exeter, where I investigated the role of social risk factors/stressors in the onset and maintenance of opioid use disorder. Specifically, I examined how experiences of childhood abuse and neglect may alter both pain-processing and the rewarding value of opioids later in life in an acute morphine administration study, alongside disruptions to interpersonal processes such as empathy and social distress. I also investigated disruptions to these interpersonal processes in individuals with an opioid use disorder, alongside evaluating a novel psychological treatment of Compassion-Focused Therapy in this clinical group. I was also interested in investigating pharmacologically-assisted psychotherapies for treating opioid use disorder, and have investigated the effects of recreational drug and alcohol use on cognition and social behaviour.

My research interests include:

• Substance use disorders in adolescents and young people
• The role of childhood trauma and stress in addiction vulnerability
• Pharmacologically-assisted psychotherapies
• Early preventative measures for drug use disorders
• Drug reward and pleasure
• The neurobiological underpinnings of addiction-related behaviours
• Recreational drug use

I work with manipulating and measuring the spatial/polarisation and spectral/temporal properties of light, mostly as it travels through multimode fibre. This has applications in optical telecommunications, biomedical imaging, quantum mechanics and astronomical instrumentation but is also just a lot of fun.

There's a good chance that at any point in time I'm using a spatial light modulator in some way to acheive these goals.

2012-2014 : Postdoctoral researcher, The University of Sydney, Australia

2009-2012 : Doctor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, UK

2008-2009 : Codan Limited, Microwave Design Engineer, The University of Queensland, Australia

2007 : Master of Engineering (ME), The University of Queensland, Australia

2002-2006 : Bachelor of Engineering (BE), Bachelor of Science (BSc), The University of Queensland, Australia

Annemaree Carroll is Professor of Educational Psychology within the School of Education at The University of Queensland. Her research activities focus on the social emotional learning of children and adolescents, and the importance of social connectedness, (dis)engagement, and social inclusion to their behavioural and educational outcomes. Student, teacher, and community voices and agency are key considerations in her research methodologies. She is known nationally and internationally for the development of innovative emotion regulation interventions for children and youth to bring about positive change in their lives. She has conceptualised and coordinated the development of the Mindfields Suite of Programs (www.mindfields.com.au), which encompasses a strengths-based approach to student well-being that targets school-wide practices to help young people take control of their lives. She has also led a team of researchers to develop the KooLKIDS Resources (www.kool-kids.com.au), an emotion resilience program to empower children to live well with themselves and others by learning social, emotional, and cognitive skills that promote self-regulation and well-being. Her research has now extended to teacher emotion regulation strategies, demonstrating that improved teacher well-being has downstream benefits to students' well-being and the teacher-student relationship.

Professor Carroll has extensive experience managing large-scale, school-based projects across classroom settings and clinic-based research, in which she has excellent skills in test administration with children and adolescents. She has also been concerned with children with neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g., ADHD, speech-language disorders, Tourette Syndrome) to examine information-processing tasks that may demand intact executive functioning and that require dual-task performance and control of impulsive reactions.

From 2014 to 2020, Professor Carroll was Co-ordinator of Translational Outcomes within the Australian Research Council Science of Learning Research Centre. Building on this work, she is the co-founder and Head of the UQ Learning Lab, where multi-disciplinary researchers work in partnership with educational and industry professionals to identify and address important learning and training priorities. The Learning Lab’s primary objective is to transform education and learning across schooling and beyond, through partnered innovations and research translation initiatives.

Professor Carroll is a registered teacher and psychologist. She has experience teaching in primary and special education in Queensland and has engaged in research and higher education teaching at The University of Queensland and The University of Western Australia, where she was granted a Master of Education (1991) and PhD in Educational Psychology (1995). She was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 2018.

Dr Carroll completed his doctorate in Neuroscience at the University of Queensland in 2001. He was awarded an Isaac Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship to pursue postdoctoral studies at the University of Alberta in 2002, before accepting a position as a Lecturer in Human Motor Control at the University of New South Wales in 2003. He joined the School of Human Movement Studies as a Senior Lecturer in July 2007.

Dr Carroll’s research interests lie in the broad field of integrative human physiology. His work spans the fields of exercise science and integrative neuroscience, with a focus on determining how the central nervous system is reorganised as a consequence of motor learning and exercise. He has a specific interest in the area of strength training. Dr Carroll’s research involves the application of electro-physiological techniques such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), peripheral nerve stimulation, and electromyography (EMG) in experiments involving human subjects. The ultimate purpose of his work is to generate basic knowledge that will lead to the development of exercise protocols that yield maximal benefits for rehabilitation and injury prevention. His work has been funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) since 2004.