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My research focuses on reef recovery following disturbances, looking at the interplay between biological, ecological and physical drivers of recovery. After diving in the Galapagos, my interest in the marine environment was piqued, and I began a PhD in reef recovery dynamics in 2016, receiving my doctarate in 2021. My work is interdisplinary, incorporating aspects of marine geology and hydrodynamics to the core focus of marine ecology. I have investigated how coral recruitment is affected by material legacies (rubble) on coral reefs, how these legacies are affected by the physical environment (mobilisation thesholds) and how marine invertebrates consolidate this material, contributing to reef recovery. My research focuses largely on natural recovery potential, but I also investigate the efficacy of reef restoration techniques in the marine environment, such as mesh netting and metal structures, and where they can speed recovery. My work has spanned multiple regions, including the Maldives, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Coral Triangle.

May 2002–ongoing: Senior Lecturer Land Resources Sciences, Principla Research Fellow, School of Land, Crop and Food Sciences; The University of Queensland, Australia

As lecturer of Land Resources Sciences at the University of Queensland, Dr Kirchhof has both led and collaborated on over half a dozen projects, and supervised numerous research staff and students. His research has focussed on:

• Soil–Water relationships;
• Conservation Agriculture and Irrigation scheduling
• Soil erosion
• Water and Nutrient Balances;
• Spatial Variability of Soil Properties from Ped to Landscape Scales;
• Dry-land Salinity Management;
• Water Recycling
• Computer Modelling of Water Flow with Special Reference to Variability and assessment of deep drainage
• Knowledge Management;

2011-15 Course leader: Australia Awards in Africa Dryland Farming/Soil and Water conservation Short Course Awards, UniQuest; Australia and Africa, Dr Kirchhof led the design and delivery of the AusAID-funded Dryland Farming Short Course Award, contracted to UniQuest/UQ-ID through GRM International, which was delivered twice a year in 2011 and 2014.

Countries of work experience: Indonesia, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Burkino Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tunisia, Uganda, Kenya, Tunisia, Australia.

Previous postions:

Oct 1997–May 2002: Senior Soil Scientist, Soil Conservation, NSW Agriculture; Australia

Mar 1996–Oct 1997: Soil Physicist, International Institute of Tropical Agriculture; Ibadan, Nigeria

Dec 1991–Mar 1996: Research Fellow, Department of Agriculture, The University of Queensland; Brisbane

Jan 1989–Dec 1991: Soil Scientist, CASSIRO Ltd, Wauchope, NSW

Carissa Klein is an ARC Future Fellow at The University of Queensland and Director of The Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science. She is a conservation scientist and leads a research group called The Ocean Conservation Team, a group of students and post-doctoral researchers focused on developing science to support marine and coastal conservation. Her team's research is motivated by real-world conservation management and policy problems and is done in partnership with numerous non-government organisations (e.g. Wildlife Conservation Society) and government departments (e.g., Sabah Parks in Borneo) from around the world. Her research group specialise in integrating social, economic, and ecological information to develop solutions that improve outcomes for nature and people. Her research falls into three themes: land-sea conservation planning, marine spatial planning (ocean zoning), and sustainable seafood.

Carissa has degrees in Chemistry (BA, 2000), Environmental Science (BA, 2000), Environmental Science and Management (MS, 2006) and Conservation Science (PhD, 2010). Her postgraduate studies were at The University of California, Santa Barbara and The University of Queensland. She has received numerous competitive awards, including two that acknowledge her achievements in setting up successful and lasting international collaborations: The Asia Pacific Economic Corporation Science Prize for Innovation, Research and Education (ASPIRE) and the American Australia Association Sir Keith Murdoch Fellowship.

Not only do soils provide humans with 98.8% of our food, they also provide humanity with a broad range of other services such as carbon storage and greenhouse gas regulation. Whilst soil takes hundreds or thousands of years to form, it can be destroyed in a matter of years if not managed correctly.

Peter's work aims to understand the hidden processes in soil that control how plants obtain nutrients, how carbon is stored, and how agricultural systems can remain productive while also protecting the environment. He has worked across highly diverse systems, both in Australia and developing countries. He has a demonstrated ability to lead outstanding research programs across a range of inter-connected themes, spanning in scale from fundamental research to landscape-scale projects, with this demonstrating a unique ability to link industry partners with high quality research.

Peter is Past President of Soil Science Australia (QLD), a former ARC Future Fellow, recipient of the JK Taylor Gold Medal in Soil Science (2018), and recipient of the CG Stephens Award in Soil Science (2005).

Dr Julius Kotir is a Senior Lecturer in Agribusiness, Rural Development and Economics in the School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability. His academic and research interests focus on understanding and managing the long term sustainability of coupled socio economic and environmental systems. A key area of interest is the development of decision support tools and models that evaluate the impacts of alternative pathways and policy options under uncertain global futures. His work adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines participatory co design, field based research methods, systems thinking, and system dynamics modelling to develop both qualitative and quantitative simulation models that support evidence based decision making.

Julius currently applies these tools and methods to address a broad range of complex agri environmental challenges, including international and rural development, food security, farming systems economics, agrifood and digital twin supply chains, climate smart agriculture, water resources management, farmer adoption of innovative practices, and agribusiness policy design and analysis.

Associate Professor Nina Lansbury (also published as Nina Hall) is an environmental public health research and teaching academic at The University of Queensland’s School of Public Health. Her current research at UQ examines environmental health aspects that support the health and wellbeing of remote Indigenous community residents (as a non-Indigenous Australian) on both mainland Australia and in the Torres Strait in terms of housing, water and sanitation, and women's health. She also investigates the impacts of climate change on human health; at a global level, this involves a role as Coordinating Lead Author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR7 WG II Ch 9, and formerly as a Lead Author in AR6) as well as a focus on remote Indigenous communities in Australia. In her teaching of undergraduate and postgraduate health students, she covers wicked health problems, integrative and interdisciplinary thinking in health, environmental health, and climate change impacts on health. Within the research sector, she was a senior research scientist at CSIRO, manager of the Sustainable Water program at The University of Queensland, and senior research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, UTS. Within the non-government sector, she was the director of the Climate Action Network Australia and research coordinator at the Mineral Policy Institute.

BSc.Hons. (HKU), MPhil. (HKU), PhD (NUS)

Dr Annie Lau is a coastal geomorphologist with a primary research interest in analysing past occurrences of coastal hazards, in particular extreme waves generated by storms and tsunamis, through sedimentary, geomorphological and historical records for assessing the future threat in coastal areas. For example, she has specialised in using the characteristics of large coastal boulders (e.g. size and distribution of rocks) to estimate the strength of extreme waves and to reconstruct the history of extreme events in the past millennia at a few tropical islands in the Asia-Pacific area. More recently, Annie investigates coastline evolution of the sandy Central to Southern Queensland coasts in the late Quaternary - Holocene by analysing sediments and using OSL quartz dating.

Annie teaches a range of courses in Geography, Marine Science, and Geoscience disciplines. She is interested in all types of natural hazards and disaster management, some research areas that she's expanding into since acquiring in-depth knowledge through leading the "Environmental Hazards" course. Students who are interested in researching hazard topics are encouraged to discuss their research ideas with Annie.

She is a project leader of the following research networks:

IGCP Project 725 - Forecasting Coastal Change: "From Cores to Code: Bringing together scientists from coastal geology and numerical modelling to improve the predictive capacity of numerical models to fore- and hind-cast coastal change"

ISROC - Inundation Signatures on Rocky Coastlines: This network serves as a focal point for researchers, educators, and students to understand Coastal Boulder Deposits (CBD) and the storms and tsunamis that generate them.

Prof Colleen Lau - MBBS (UWA), MPHTM (JCU), PhD (UQ), FRACGP, FACTM, FISTM.

Prof Colleen Lau is an NHMRC Fellow and Professorial Research Fellow at the UQ Centre for Clinical Research. Her areas of expertise include emerging infectious diseases, neglected tropical diseases, and clinical travel medicine. Her wide range of research interests include infectious disease epidemiology, spatial epidemiology and disease mapping, infectious disease surveillance and elimination, vaccinations, travel health, environmental health, and digital decision support tools. Professor Lau’s research projects focus on answering practical questions in clinical management of infectious diseases and operational questions on improving strategies to solve public health problems. She leads UQ's HERA program on Operational Research and Decision Support for Infectious Diseases (ODeSI).

Dr. Li has been making noteworthy strides as a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland since June 2023, demonstrating his broad expertise in environmental science. His current research endeavors are focused on soil organic carbon.

Dr. Li's research portfolio is a testament to his intellectual versatility and commitment. It encompasses a variety of critical environmental issues, ranging from sustainable livelihoods for pastoralists in grassland ecosystems to geospatial pattern analysis, grassland degradation management, soil organic carbon studies, and wood decay fungi and community ecology. He also excels in employing bibliometric/scientometric and machine learning analysis in ecological studies. With such a wide gamut of expertise, Dr. Li stands at the nexus of several environmental science disciplines, poised to make substantial contributions.

In recognition of his academic excellence, Dr. Li has earned prestigious accolades. He received the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad in 2021, ranking him among the top 500 worldwide. The following year, he was distinguished with the President's Award for Excellence from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, positioning him in the top 400 recipients.

Professor Lovelock's research focusses on the influence of environmental change, including climate change, on the ecology of coastal and marine plant communities and in providing knowledge to underpin conservation and restoration of these ecosystems now and in the future.

Professor Kristen Lyons is a public intellectual with over twenty years experience in research, teaching and service that delivers national and international impacts on issues that sit at the intersection of sustainability and development, as well as the future of higher education. Trained as a sociologist, Kristen is comfortable working in transdisciplinary teams to deliver socially just outcomes, including for some of the world's most vulnerable communities. Kristen works regularly in Uganda, Solomon Islands and Australia, and her work is grounded in a rights-based approach. In practice, this means centring the rights and interests of local communities, including Indigenous peoples, in her approach to research design, collaboration, and impacts and outcomes. Kristen is also a Senior Research Fellow with the Oakland Institute.

As an agricultural and resource economist, Thilak Mallawaarachchi focuses on building resilient and sustainable food, agricultural and natural resource systems under climate, market and policy uncertainty. His work combines economics, public policy and systems thinking to improve decision-making across agriculture, agribusiness, water and environmental management.

With over 35 years of international experience across Australia, Asia and Africa, Thilak has contributed to research and policy development on climate adaptation, agricultural productivity, water allocation, food systems, natural resource management and rural development. He has worked with governments, industry and international development agencies to address challenges affecting farmers, communities and ecosystems.

Current multidisciplinary research focuses on economic modelling and policy analysis to inform institutional arrangements in agriculture, food systems and land management, including:

• Agricultural economics and rural development • Risk management and resilience • Industrial organisation and entrepreneurship • Collective decision-making and cooperation • Contract theory and its applications • Environmental and resource economics

His work has informed major Australian policy initiatives, including climate adaptation strategies, Murray-Darling Basin water reform and national food policy, while supporting agricultural development programs across the Asia-Pacific and Africa aimed at improving agricultural productivity, reducing food loss and waste, and enhancing market access.

Conserving biodiversity is essential for maintaining the health of the environment upon which human life and wellbeing relies. But the task will only get harder, with human pressures increasing in magnitude and ubiquity. My research tackles questions central to this challenge. A particular focus is biodiversity net gain policy, particularly the design and consequences of biodiversity offsetting, as well as the conservation and restoration of Australia’s woodlands and woodland bird assemblages. I collaborate with a broad network of individuals and organisations including government and non-government bodies to help achieve effective uptake of research findings into policy and environmental management. Sound conservation policy is essential if we are to apply ecological knowledge to reduce and ultimately halt biodiversity declines. I provide guidance on offset/no net loss/net gain policy development internationally including in Malaysia, the UK, Mozambique, and Guinea, and to intergovernmental convening bodies including IPBES, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the IUCN. I currently chair the IUCN’s Impact Mitigation and Ecological Compensation Thematic Group, am a director of BirdLife Australia and the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, and am a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists and The Biodiversity Council. My research group is part of the Centre for Biodiversity & Conservation Science.

Dr McDonald-Madden is an ARC Research Fellow in the School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management at the University of Queensland and a Chief Investigator on the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, NESP Threatened Species Hub and is a founding member of UQ Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science. Her research is focused on improving environmental decision-making in complex systems.

To resolve questions in environmental decision-making her team uses a suite of analysis techniques that are largely novel to ecology and conservation. The foundation of our work is ‘Decision Theory’, a concept initially used to maximise the effectiveness of scarce military resources while dealing with the uncertainties always present in war. By investigating the use of techniques from fields such as manufacturing sciences, artificial intelligence research and economic theory her group hope to improve decision-making in the face of complexity that is inherent, but often ignored, in environmental problems, incorporating the social context of decisions, the complexity of interacting species and the uncertainty faced by decisions makers.

Eve’s groups work spans all forms of conservation decision-making including population management, organisational and government reporting, the management of interacting species, ecosystem services and conservation planning.

Dr McDonald-Madden completed her PhD at the University of Queensland (2009), prior to that she worked for the Victorian Government on biodiversity research and management whist completing a graduate diploma in Mathematics. She has two young children.

Ross McVinish has research interests in applied probability, Bayesian statistics and mathematical modelling of complex systems in population biology.

He received his PhD from Queensland University of Technology in 2002.

He is currently an associate editor for the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics.