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John McGrath AM, MBBS, MD, PhD, FRANZCP, FAHMS, FACPsych

John McGrath is a psychiatrist interested in discovering the causes of serious mental disorders. He has affiliations with the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research, the Queensland Brain Institute (University of Queensland), and past appointments with the National Centre for Register-based Research (Aarhus University) Denmark. His research aims to generate and evaluate nongenetic risk factors for schizophrenia. He has forged productive cross-disciplinary collaborations linking risk factor epidemiology with developmental neurobiology (e.g. using animal models to explore candidate exposures). He has supervised major systematic reviews of the incidence, prevalence and mortality of schizophrenia. He was awarded a John Cade Fellowship by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, and a Niels Bohr Professorship by the Danish National Research Foundation. He has been awarded the Erik Stromgren Medal, the Lieber Prize for Outstanding Schizophrenia Research and made an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists.

Associate Professor Treasure McGuire graduated with a Bachelor of Pharmacy and a Bachelor of Science (Pharmacology) from the University of Queensland UQ). She also completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Clinical Pharmacy and Graduate Certificate in Higher Education at UQ. In 2005, she completed her PhD in the School of Population Health, UQ, entitled Consumer medicines call centres: a medication liaison model of pharmaceutical care.

She held a conjoint appointment between the School of Pharmacy, UQ and Mater Pharmacy, Mater Health, South East Queensland between 1996 and December 2022. She was appointed as a Senior Lecturer in 2006, Associate Professor, Clinical in 2021 and since 2023 Honorary Associate Professor. Treasure also holds a conjoint appointment between Mater and the Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine, Bond University as Associate Professor of Pharmacology. In her clinical role at Mater, she is Assistant Director of Pharmacy (Practice and Development). At UQ, she coordinated a graduate clinical pharmacy course within the Master of Clinical Pharmacy program for over a decade. In 2016, this program received a UQ Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences Team Award for Programs that Enhance Learning and in 2017 a citation in the University of Queensland Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.

Treasure’s research is translational, focusing on patient centred-care and quality use of medicines in the domains of medicines information, evidence-based practice, medication safety, reproductive health, complementary medicines, communicable diseases and interprofessional education. She is a Emeritus Fellow of the Australasian College of Pharmacy, Fellow of the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia and Foundation Fellow, Australian and New Zealand College of Advanced Pharmacy. In recognition of her services to medicines information, she received the Lilly International Fellowship in Hospital Pharmacy and the Bowl of Hygeia of the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia. In 2015, she was the recipient of the Sr Eileen Pollard Medal (Mater Research-UQ) for excellence in incorporating research into clinical care provision.

Professor Frederic Meunier obtained his Masters degree in Neurophysiology at the Paris XI University, France in 1992 and completed his Ph.D in Neurobiology at the CNRS in Gif-sur-Yvette, France in 1996. He was the recipient of a European Biotechnology Fellowship and went on to postgraduate work at the Department of Biochemistry at Imperial College (1997-1999) and at Cancer Research UK (2000-2002) in London, UK. After a short sabbatical at the LMB-MRC in Cambridge (UK), he became a group leader at the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Queensland (Australia) in 2003. He joined the Queensland Brain Institute of the University of Queensland in 2007 and obtained an NHMRC senior research fellowship in 2009 renewed in 2014 with promotion. He became Professor in 2014 at the Queensland Brain Institute and is currently part of the Centre for Ageing Dementia Research.

I received a BA in Biology from Columbia University in New York City. After taking two years off to work as a research assistant, I began graduate school at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, also in New York. My graduate advisor was Andrew Koff at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute. I studied the cdk inhibitor, p27, and discovered that it is regulated at the level of translation as cells exit the cell cycle. I received my PhD in Molecular Biology in 2001. My postdoctoral work was carried out in Larry Zipursky's lab at UCLA. Here, I learned both Drosophila genetics and neurobiology and began working on the Dscam-family of cell recognition molecules. I identified Dscam2 as the first tiling receptor and discovered that Dscam2 and Dscam1 are redundantly required for photoreceptor synaptic specificity. I moved to Brisbane and began as a lecturer at the UQ School of Biomedical Sciences, in December 2009. I am also an affiliate of the Queensland Brain Institute.

Dr Michael Morgan is a mid-career academic with a robust foundation in basic sciences, who has built a distinguished path exploring the biological underpinnings of pain—particularly musculoskeletal pain and osteoarthritis. With influential lead author publications in PAIN, Osteoarthritis and Cartilage and Bone his work bridges molecular mechanisms and translational insights. Now pivoting toward clinical research, he is deepening his focus on another musculoskeletal condition, focusing on whiplash injury and the multidimensional nature of pain, driving cross-disciplinary studies that aim to connect lab findings with real-world patient outcomes.

Dr Philip Mosley studied at the University of Oxford and obtained a master’s degree in physiological sciences and a degree in medicine. He was also captain of the university boxing team and was awarded two full 'Blues'. He worked as a junior doctor in Manchester before moving to Australia to complete his specialist training in psychiatry, which he undertook at the Royal brisbane and Women's Hospital.

Dr Mosley is a Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry (RANZCP) and halso holds an advanced certificate in Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry. As part of his training, Dr Mosley undertook a 2-year neuropsychiatry fellowship at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital (RBWH) and the Asia-Pacific Centre for Neuromodulation (APCN), an active research entity of the Queensland Brain Institute.

Currently, Dr Mosley works as a specialist neuropsychiatrist in a deep brain stimulation team, runs a private neuropsychiatry practice and also provides a consultation-liaison psychiatry service to the neurology, medical and surgical wards of the general hospital. Dr Mosley's private practice is focussed on neurodegenerative disease, movement disorders and head injury.

Dr Mosley remains an active clinician-scientist with appointments at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and the Queensland Brain Institute. He completed his PhD in neuroscience in 2019 under the supervision of Professor Michael Breakspear. He published eleven peer-reviewed manuscripts from his thesis alone, and received the UQ Dean's Award for outstanding thesis.

Dr Mosley has been the chief investigator in a study of the neuropsychiatric effects of DBS for Parkinson’s disease, in a study of medicinal cannabis for Tourette’s syndrome, a lead investigator in a clinical trial of DBS for obsessive-compulsive disorder and anorexia nervosa, as well as a clinical fellow in a neuroimaging study of Alzheimer’s disease. He has won prizes from the RANZCP in Old Age Psychiatry and Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry, and he has received research funding from the RBWH Foundation, the RANZCP Young Investigator Grant, Parkinson’s Queensland and Wesley Medical Research. Dr Mosley was awarded an ‘Advance Queensland’ Early Career Fellowship for his Parkinson's disease research and won the postgraduate medal from the Australian Society for Medical Research for findings arising from this project. In 2020, he won the Early Career Psychiatrist award from the RANZCP, which is presented to the fellow producing the most significant piece of research in the five years since fellowship. Currently Dr Mosley's research is funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF).

Bryan is a graduate in medicine from the University of Queensland and holds a BA (Hons) degree in philosophy from the University of Western Australia. A medical specialist in psychiatry, he is a clinician researcher, who is Conjoint Professor at the Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland, and Director of Genetics at the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research. His primary research interest is the molecular genetics of schizophrenia, and holds a MD degree (University of Queensland) in this field. Since 1990, he has conducted studies, with national and international collaborators, to identify susceptibility genes for this disorder. He is the recipient of grants from the Australian NHMRC and the US NIMH.

The primary research goal is to identify and functionally characterise susceptibility genes for schizophrenia and related disorders. A special focus is on the study of large collaborative samples and ethnically homogeneous populations. Key methodologies used in the lab include genome-wide association studies, next-generation sequencing, transcriptome profiling of post-mortem brain samples, neurocognitive and neuroimaging phenotyping and induced pluripotent stem cells.

Current areas of interest include pharmacogenomics of clozapine treatment response, whole exome sequencing focused on de novo mutations, and the neuroimmunology of schizophrenia

Prof Nestor joined the Queensland Brain Institute in October/2017 and has a conjoint appointment as a cognitive neurologist at Mater Misericordiae Ltd (Mater Hospital).

His particular interests include understanding the earliest stages of Alzheimer's disease (i.e. before dementia is established); atypical forms of dementia with a particular focus on primary progressive aphasia and dementias related to Parkinson's and Lewy body diseases; and improving differential diagnosis between the major categories of neurodegenerative diseases.

He works on development of neuropsychological tests of cognition, both to accurately track change over time and improve diagnostic accuracy between the major diseases causing dementia. He also uses multi-modal imaging (magnetic resonance imaging [MRI] and positron emission tomography [PET]) to understand the sequence of events occurring in degenerative brain diseases (particularly Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson's disease, motor neuron disease [ALS], progressive supranuclear palsy [PSP] and corticobasal degeneration [CBD]) and identify novel biomarkers. A major focus of his is on developing novel approaches to MR imaging for single subject pathological diagnoses that can be exported into the everyday clinical setting; recent examples include diffusion tensor imaging to identify PSP and CBD (Sajjadi et al, 2013) and quantitative susceptibility mapping in Parkinson's disease (Acosta-Cabornero et al, 2013).

I am an Associate Professor in the School of Biomedical Sciences (SBMS) at The University of Queensland, where I teach physiology and lead research that explores how cells respond to stress, injury and disease. My work aims to better understand the molecular and cellular processes that influence health and disease, with a particular focus on areas relevant to cancer, heart disease, neurological conditions and emerging cell-based therapies.

I completed my doctorate at the University of Western Australia in Biochemistry and Cell Biology, where I studied how heart cells respond to signals that can drive abnormal tissue growth. I then undertook postdoctoral training in Singapore at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, part of A*STAR, where my research expanded into understanding how the cytoskeleton, internal structures of cells, help control development and disease.

After returning to Australia, I was supported by national fellowships from the NHMRC and ARC, which enabled me to establish an internationally connected research program. My research brings together cell biology, imaging, computational approaches and emerging technologies to uncover how cells make critical decisions, including whether to survive or die under stress.

Alongside my research and teaching, I contribute to leadership within SBMS as Director of Research and support major research infrastructure initiatives across the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Behavioural Sciences (HMBS) as Academic Director of Research Infrastructure. I also serve on steering committees for UQ’s Viral Vector Core (VVC) and the Centre for Cardiovascular Health and Research (CCVHR), helping to strengthen the platforms and partnerships that support biomedical discovery and translation.

I completed a PhD in Neuroscience with Jack Pettigrew (FRS) at Vision, Touch & Hearing Research Centre followed by an NHMRC Clinical Research Fellowship at Alfred Health & Monash University.

Back in QLD I'm continuing a transdisciplinary research & innovation program to Bring Discoveries of the Brain to Life!

I'm currently focused on developing novel MedTech Biotech diagnostics & therapeutics for enhancing human performance, recovery & resilience with the following projects:

[1] Precision Pain Medicine — the largest genetic study of persistent (chronic) pain in Australia, in collaboration with QIMR Berghofer & Monash University, aims to identify pharmacogenomics causal pathways for the design of personalised therapeutics & effective early intervention approaches (e.g., screening, education, prevention).

[2] Brain Switcha — A digital transdiagnostic biomarker and cloud-based large-scale population phenotyping & analytics platform to improve early intervention strategies in sleep & mental health conditions (esp. at-risk youth cohorts) and recruitment screening for Defence forces.

[3] VCS — vestibulocortical stimulation: A simple, inexpensive, non-invasive & non-pharmacologic neurotherapeutic treatment technique for fibromyalgia (with US colleagues) and other centralised pain syndromes, sleep apnoea, dementia & mental health conditions (e.g., depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder).

I also have >5 years professional services experience providing specialist research performance evaluation, consultation, reporting & training workshops that successfully delivered several major strategic priorities to a large internal & external client base — such as organisational unit leaders/managers at multiple levels (e.g., Centre/Department) and senior executive business missions for national/international strategic partnerships. This work includes mapping, monitoring & benchmarking of research capacity, capabilities/strengths, gaps & collaboration networks (e.g., clinical, corporate & government) across diverse disciplines for Annual & Septennial Departmental Reviews (e.g., patent, policy & clinical guideline citations; external stakeholder engagement including media); ARC Engagement & Impact assessments; and workforce capability development (e.g., recruitment for senior leadership positions and ranking of NHMRC/ARC funding applicants).

In particular, I enjoy meeting & connecting people with a shared vision & commitment towards building innovative & sustainable public-private partnerships to deliver meaningful solutions for the wider community.

I completed my PhD in Neuroscience at UQ in 2009. After this, I undertook postdoctoral training in motor neuron disease/amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (MND/ALS) under the mentorship of neurologists at Royal Brisbane & Women's Hospital. In 2012, I received a MND Research Australia Bill Gole Fellowship to develop a research focus to study metabolic dysfunction in MND/ALS. I started my independent research group at UQ in 2015, after receiving the Scott Sullivan MND Research Fellowship to lead a translational program to define the contribution of altered metabolic homeostasis to MND/ALS pathophysiology. In 2017, I relocated my laboratory to the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology to introduce the use of human stem cells for disease modelling into my reserach program. In 2020, I was awarded a FightMND Mid-Career Research Fellowship to transition into clinical trials.

My current research integrates studies in MND/ALS patients with studies in human-derived cell models (stem cell-derived neurons, human primary myosatellite cells, human myotubes) and mouse models of MND/ALS. I have served as lead investigator or co-investigator on several projects aimed at defining the mechanisms that drive MND/ALS and identifying therapeutic strategies for the disease. Projects have led to the expediting of clinical trials (NCT03506425; NCT04788745, NCT05959850). In 2021, I established the MND at UQ Collective to enhance national and international collaboration, and to facilitate community consultation to drive scientific and clinical discoveries in ALS and FTD (www.uq.edu.au/mnd-collective).

I have received invitations to contribute to high impact review articles (i.e., Brain, Nat Rev Neurol), and have received >20 invitations to speak at conferences including: 33rd International ALS/MND Symposium (2022, Plenary), 64th Japanese Society of Neurology Meeting (2023, Tokyo; Plenary), 3rd International Pan-Asian Consortium for Treatment and Research in ALS (PACTALS) Congress (2023, Kuala Lumpur), 18th International Congress on Neuromuscular Diseases (2024, Perth).

Shaun O’Leary, BPHTY (Hon), MPHTY (Msk), PhD, is an Associate Professor in Physiotherapy between the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Queensland, and the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital Physiotherapy Department, in Brisbane, Australia. He is also a Specialist Musculoskeletal Physiotherapist (as awarded by the Australian College of Physiotherapists (ACP) in 2008). Shaun is a longstanding member of the Australian Physiotherapy Association and Fellow of the ACP. Shaun is across clinical education at all levels of physiotherapy training. He has had a major teaching role in the University of Queensland’s postgraduate specialty Masters of Physiotherapy (Musculoskeletal and Sports Physiotherapy) programs since 2001, and nationally has served the ACP as an examiner, and former council member and Chair of the Fellowships Program Standing Committee. In 2021 Shaun was awarded a Senior Fellowship within the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). Shaun has over 130 publications relating to the management of musculoskeletal conditions (including >110 research articles, 6 book chapters, 2 books translated to multiple languages), > 50 conference presentations, nearly AUD$6 million career grant funding, and have delivered over 60 clinical workshops worldwide, and received clinical research awards nationally and internationally, and supervised 13 research higher degrees.

After completing neurology training at the Royal Brisbane & Women’s Hospital(RBWH) in 1995, A/Prof O’Sullivan completed Fellowships in Movement Disorders at the Austin & Repatriation Medical Centre, Melbourne then the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, and Middlesex Hospital in London, UK. He was awarded a doctorate in Medicine from Melbourne University in 2000 for studies into surgery for Parkinson’s disease. He returned to the RBWH in 2001 and set up the Movement Disorders Clinical Service which he directs including botulinum toxin and later Friedreich's ataxia clinics, and co-ordinating the Huntington's disease multidisciplinary clinic. Through these clinics he has established collaborations with local, interstate and international researchers in the fields of Parkinson's disease, and other movement disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. He is currently Associate Professor of Medicine at UQ Centre for Clinical Research, currently co-director of the Neurodegenertion Clinical Research Group. A/Prof O'Sullivan past President of the Movement Disorders Society of Australia and New Zealand (MDSANZ), having previously served as Chair of the MDSANZ Clinical Trials and Research Group. He has been is on the Council of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Neurolgists (ANZAN) and previously chaired the ANZAN Scientific Program Committee.

Dr Antonio Padilha L. Bo completed the BEng and MSc at the University of Brasília, Brazil, in 2004 and 2007, respectively, and he was awarded the PhD from the University of Montpellier, France, in 2011. From 2011 to 2019, he has been a tenured assistant professor in electrical engineering at the University of Brasilia, Brazil, where he coordinated Project EMA (Empowering Mobility and Autonomy), which is one of the teams that took part in the Cybathlon competition in 2016 and 2020. He has co-authored over 75 peer-reviewed publications, including awards from societies such as IFAC, IFESS, and MICCAI.

Over the past ten years, Dr Bo has been engaged in research projects concerning the development of technology dedicated to healthcare, particularly in the design of systems to be directly used by a patient in rehabilitation or assistive settings. Every effort featured strong experimental work and was conducted in close collaboration with local rehabilitation centers. In his work, tools from neuroengineering, robotics, control, virtual reality, and instrumentation are often integrated to create devices and algorithms to sense and control human motion. For instance, he has used wearable sensors to segment and estimate parameters of human movement in real-time, a technique that may lead to novel rehabilitation protocols. More importantly, his work has also focused on developing closed-loop control strategies for electrical stimulation applications and prosthetic/orthotic devices. Some examples include systems based on superficial electrical stimulation to enable persons with spinal cord injury to exercise using the lower limbs (e.g. in cycling or rowing) and to attenuate the effects of pathological tremor in essential tremor and Parkinson's Disease.

His long-term research goal is to develop and evaluate the use of noninvasive technology, including electrical stimulation, robotics, virtual reality, and wearable devices, for improving rehabilitation and assistance for persons with motor disabilities.

Dr Giovanni Pietrogrande is based at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), where he is the Synthetic Neuroimmunology Theme Leader.

He leads the development of advanced human brain and spinal cord organoid models to study neuroinflammation, demyelination and neurodegeneration, with a particular focus on how microglia, oligodendrocytes and other neural cells interact to drive diseases such as multiple sclerosis and motor neuron disease, and on using this knowledge to identify and test new therapeutic strategies. His research program is supported by competitive funding from HNMRC, MS Australia, MND Research Australia and FightMND, underscoring the translational impact and clinical relevance of his work.

Together with his team, he works on a broad range of problems, from engineering next-generation immune-based cell therapies and endowing central nervous system organoids with a functional immune system, to modelling their interactions with immune cells to fully reproduce neurodegenerative and neuroinflammatory pathologies. The group also leverages synthetic biology to design new strategies to rebalance neuroinflammation, promote remyelination and repair neural circuits.

I graduated from The University of Tasmania, and received my PhD in Developmental Biology from The University of Queensland in 2003. My PhD, performed at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience with Prof. Melissa Little, centred on understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying embryonic kidney development. My first postdoc was performed with Prof. Christine Holt at The University of Cambridge, UK, where I studied the mechanisms by which axonal growth cones navigate to their targets in the brain, using the frog Xenopus laevis as a model system. In my second postdoctoral position, with Prof. Linda Richards at the Queensland Brain Institute at The University of Queensland, my work focussed on understanding the molecular mechanisms of neural progenitor cell specification in the developing cerebral cortex. In late 2010, I took up a joint position with the Queensland Brain Institute and The School of Biomedical Sciences (SBMS) to continue my research into the mechanisms underlying neural stem cell differentiation. I have held numerous fellowships during my career, including an NHMRC Howard Florey Fellowship, an NHMRC CDF and an ARC Future Fellowship. I currently hold a continuing Teaching and Research position within SBMS, and am currently the Director for Higher Degree Research Training at SBMS.

Dr Juan Carlos Polanco leads a research team on "Extracellular Vesicles and Neurodegenerative Disorders" at the Clem Jones Centre for Ageing Dementia Research (CJCADR), part of the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) at the University of Queensland (UQ). He holds an MSc in Biochemistry from the National University of Colombia and a PhD in Molecular Bioscience from UQ. During his PhD, Dr Polanco made significant contributions to understanding how SOX genes are involved in XX disorders of sex development. He furthered his expertise during a postdoctoral fellowship at CSIRO, developing assays to detect unstable human-induced pluripotent stem cells prone to tumorigenesis.

In 2013, Dr Polanco joined Prof. Jürgen Götz's lab at CJCADR, where he began pioneering work on small extracellular vesicles, known as exosomes. His highly cited 2016 paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry was the first to demonstrate that exosomes encapsulate 'Tau seeds' capable of inducing Tau aggregation in recipient cells. He also showed that exosomes can propagate between interconnected neurons and that some exosomes internalised by neurons are re-released by hijacking endogenous secretory endosomes, thereby increasing their pathogenicity (Acta Neuropathologica Communications, 2018). Since 2019, Dr Polanco has secured NHMRC grants and leads a research team within Prof. Götz's larger laboratory at CJCADR.

I received my Bachelor's in Biology (2001) from Yarmouk University in Jordan, followed by postgraduate degrees from the University of Houston in Houston-Texas (2002-2007). My studies are integrative in nature, joining the best of both the Neuroscience world and Circadian Biology (the study of biological clocks). In the laboratory of Prof. Arnold Eskin, I investigated how processes as complex as learning and memory are modulated by biological clocks i.e. the circadian (about 24 hours) system, using Aplysia californica as the experimental model. After completing my Master's in Science in 2005, my research focused on the mechanism by which biological clocks modulate learning and memory. This work was performed in the laboratories of Prof. Gregg Cahill and Prof. Greg Roman, experts in chronobiology and behavioral neuroscience, respectively. Using Zebrafish as a model system, I investigated the role of melatonin, a night-time restricted hormonal signal, in modulating long-term memory consolidation. My findings, published in Science in 2007, shows that the circadian system via the cyclic night-time confined synthesis/release of melatonin “the hormone of darkness” functions as a modulator, shaping daily variations in the efficiency by which memories are processed. After receiving my Ph.D. in 2007, I joined as a postdoctoral fellow the laboratory of the pharmacologist and melatonin researcher Prof. Margarita Dubocovich. My postdoctoral work engaged in elucidating the role of melatonin in circadian physiology and pharmacology during development and ageing in rodents (Mus musculus) and non-human primates (Macaca mulatta) at the Feinberg School of Medicine (Northwestern University-Chicago) and the State University of New York (SUNY). From 2010-2015, I held a teaching/research position in the Dr. Senckenbergische Anatomy and the Dept. of Neurology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt-Germany. During this time, I was involved in teaching gross human anatomy while continuing my endeavor in understanding the mechanistics involved in shaping memory processes (acquisition, consolidation and retrieval) by the circadian system.