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Dr Karyn L Healy is a registered psychologist with expertise in addressing bullying and conflict. She has extensive practical experience working with schools, parents and children to prevent and address bullying, and resolve conflict. Karyn has a Masters of Organisational Psychology, specialising in change management, process consultancy, training and facilitation, and conflict management. Her PhD investigated intervening with families of children bullied by peers at school, which is a promising new approach to complement school anti-bullying programs. Karyn is co-author of Resilience Triple P program, a family program to address school bullying. She has published papers in Tier 1 peer-reviewed journals, as well as several book chapters about school bullying. She is author of several widely read pieces in The Conversation about school bullying. She was a featured presenter at the National Centre Against Bullying Conference in Melbourne in 2016. In 2018, she was engaged by Australia’s Safe and Supportive School Communities committee to develop a professional development resource for staff on how to manage parental reports of bullying; this has now been made available to all Australian schools. Karyn is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Child and Family Studies and served as a member of the Queensland Anti-Cyberbullying Committee.

Julie is a Professor in the School of Psychology at The University of Queensland, and is also an Affiliate Professor at The Queensland Brain Institute as well as The Mater Research Institute. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and of the Association for Psychological Science.

Julie leads a group that particularly focuses on how social cognition and prospection are disrupted by normal adult ageing and clinical illness. Social cognition refers to how we perceive, process, and interpret social cues in our environment. Good social cognitive skills are therefore key to mental health and wellbeing because they provide the foundation on which strong social relationships are built. Prospective memory plays a different but equally important role in our everyday lives, critical if we are to appropriately anticipate, plan and/or act with the future in mind.

Julie has published more than 250 peer‑reviewed papers which appear in prestigious outlets that include Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Annual Review of Psychology, Cognition, Psychological Bulletin, Cortex, Human Brain Mapping, Developmental Science, Psychology and Aging, Emotion, Brain, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, and Nature Reviews Neurology. Her work has been cited ~ 20,000 times in Scopus and > 36,000 in Google Scholar. In 2021 and 2022, The Australian identified 40 Lifetime Achievers who are “Superstars of Research”. These are “chosen for the consistent excellence of their work and the impact they had in their fields.” In both years Julie was identified as a Lifetime Achiever and one of the top five researchers in Social Science across all of Australia. Julie has also appeared on Stanford University’s list of the top 2% of science researchers in the world every year since the list was first published in 2019.

Julie has also received continuous prestigious and highly competitive research funding. This includes two ARC Fellowships and eight ARC Discovery Projects, seven of which she has led as first-named CI. Between 2011 and 2017, Julie was Editor in Chief of the British Journal of Clinical Psychology, and she is currently an Associate Editor for Psychology and Aging and sits on a number of Editorial Boards, including Journal of Aging & Social Policy. Julie has been the recipient of many prestigious awards. This includes the Research Higher Degree Supervision Award (2016) and the Research Mentorship Award (2022) from the Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences, competitive across the Faculty’s six schools and three research centres. In 2023, Julie was also the sole recipient of The UQ Award for Excellence in Graduate Research Training - Supervision, competitive across all UQ, for “outstanding and exemplary supervisory practice”.

Julie is Director of The Queensland Multidisciplinary Initiative for Neurocognitive Difficulties (The QLD MIND Project) and President of The Australasian Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

Professor Leanne Hides is the Director of the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence on Meaningful Outcomes in Substance Use Treatment and the Deputy Director of the National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research (NCYSUR)

Professor Hides is a clinical psychologist with over 25 years of experience working on the interface of alcohol and other drug (AOD) clinical research and practice. Her translational research program co-designs, trials and implements innovative AOD treatments into clinical practice. She has been a chief investigator on over 40 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) on substance use and mental health treatment (23 as lead CI including 11 NHMRC-funded RCTs). She also develops web and mobile-phone based programs (16 RCTs). Most of this research has been conducted with industry partners (e.g., Lives Lived Well, Qld Health).

Hides has been in research only positions since 2010, funded by prestigious fellowships including an NHMRC Senior Research Fellowship (2017-21), ARC Future Fellowship (2012-16) and a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellowship (Queensland University of Technology, 2010-13). Her research has been supported by $46m in grants ($37 nationally competitive) including 15 NHMRC ($14.5m; 3 as CIA including a Centre for Research Excellence), 3 MRFF ($7m) and 2 ARC ($1m) grants. Professor Hides has 248 career publications, including 243 journal articles with over 10,000 citations.

Prof Hides' current research interests include:

• Developing and testing new models for understanding youth substance use and comorbidity
• Improving the treatment of youth substance use and comorbidity by:
  • Integrating more strengths-based approaches
  • Identifying and enhancing mechanisms of change
  • Combining psychological and pharmacological treatments,
  • Integrating mobile phone and web-based interventions
• Understanding the relationship between youth wellbeing and mental disorders
• Development of mobile phone and web-based interventions targeting the mental health and wellbeing of young people
  • Ray’s night out: mobile app targeting risky alcohol use
  • music eScape: mobile app using music to improve affect regulation
  • Breakup Shakeup: mobile app for coping with relationship breakups
  • Keep it Real: web-based program targeting psychotic-like experiences in substance users
  • Routine outcome monitoring (ROM) plus feedback in SMART Recovery Australia: a feasibility study examining SMART ROM (led by A/Prof Kelly, UoW).
• Training, supervision, and dissemination of evidence-based practice

Nationally Competitive Funding

• NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence (led by Prof Hides, UQ): Meaningful Outcomes in Substance use Treatment. See https://mo-cre.centre.uq.edu.au/
• Commonwealth Department of Health (Connor & Hides), National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research (NCYSUR) National Addiction Centre
• MRFF Health and Healthy Lifestyles (led by Prof Bonevski, Flinders University): "Escape the vape" Designing health communications for prevention of e-cigarette use in young people
• MRFF Health and Healthy Lifestyles (led by Prof Newton, Matilda Centre Uni Syd): A new scalable e-health appraoch to prevent e-cigarette use amongh adolescents: The OurFutures Vaping Program
• NHMRC Ideas Grant (led by Prof Johnson): Understanding and Treating Videogame Addiction in Young People
• Alcohol and Drug Foundation Research Grant (led by Prof Kelly): Building peer and provider capacity to effectively deliver SMART Family & friends meetings: A two stage mixed- methods evaluation.
• MRFF Million Minds (led by Prof March, USQ): Translating evidence-based interventions into population-level digital models of care for child & adolescent mental health
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Hides): Brief interventions to prevent future alcohol-related harm in young people presenting to emergency departments.
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Hides: Randomised controlled trial of a telephone-delivered social well-being and engaged living (SWEL) intervention for disengaged at-risk youth
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Teesson, University of Sydney)- Internet-based universal prevention for anxiety, depression and substance use in young Australians
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Teesson, University of Sydney)- Healthy, wealthy and wise: The long-term effectiveness of an online universal program to prevent substance use and mental health problems among Australian youth
• Paul Ramsay Foundation (led by Prof Teesson, University of Sydney): The Healthy Lifestyles program: An innovative online primary and secondary prevention intervention
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Kavanagh, QUT) - Trial of a new low-cost treatment to support self-management of Alcohol Use Disorder: Functional Imagery Training
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Toombs, University of QLD) - Indigenous Network Suicide Intervention Skills Training (INSIST): Can a community designed and delivered framework reduce suicide/self-harm in Indigenous youth?
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Collins, University of Newcastle) Efficacy and cost-effectiveness of varying levels of technology-delivered personalised feedback on dietary patterns in motivating young Australian adults to improve diet quality and eating habits: The Advice, Ideas and Motivation for My Eating study
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Cotton, University of Melbourne) - Rates, patterns and predictors of long-term outcome in a treated first-episode psychosis cohort

Supported by over 20 external grants - including an ARC Laureate - I am known for developing insights around three themes: (1) rejection of science and technology, (2) pro-environmental behaviour, and (3) intergroup relations. In each domain I have developed unique models designed to understand the logic behind supposedly “irrational” behaviour, and used them to facilitate attitude and behaviour change. My most recent work focuses on understanding (and reducing) people’s motivations to reject scientific consensus, including the psychology of climate inaction. Matthew is currently leading the Net Zero Observatory at the University of Queensland, a multi-disciplinary group of academics and practitioners who design strategies to accelerate industry action and community support for rapid decarbonisation.

Currently active research interests include assessing and training hazard perception in driving and risk-taking propensity in drivers.

Overview

Dr Adam Hulme studies complex adaptive systems and applies methods and models from the systems and complexity sciences to policy-resistant issues in various domains. His current interests lie in the areas of regional, rural and remote health and public health more broadly. Dr Hulme prefers to adopt a systems thinking or holistic perspective over a reductionist one, as doing so is to consider the whole system, or multiple interacting elements of it, as the primary unit of analysis. As an expert in systems modelling and analysis, Dr Hulme has applied an extensive list of over 20 qualitative and quantitative systems science approaches to address complex problems that threaten to disrupt performance and safety within various sociotechnical systems contexts. This includes the use of System Dynamics modelling and simulation, which is a relatively distinctive approach and practiced deeply by a select few inter/nationally. He is the #1 mid-career researcher in Australia (#10 nationally), for the topic ‘systems analysis’, placing him in the top 0.033% of 208,280 published authors worldwide on this topic (Expertscape).

Background

Dr Hulme is a Research Fellow and School Research Chair at Southern Queensland Rural Health (SQRH), Toowoomba, Queensland. He has qualifications in Sports and Exercise Science (BSc HONS; England), Health Promotion (MA; Australia), and obtained a PhD in Sports Injury Epidemiology and Systems Human Factors in August 2017 (Ballarat, Victoria, Australia). His doctoral program was completed at the Australian Collaboration for Research into Injury in Sport and its Prevention (Federation University Australia), which is recognised by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as a world leading research centre.

Following his PhD, Dr Hulme spent four years as a Post-Doctoral researcher at the Centre for Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems (CHFSTS) at the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC). In this role, he conceived, led, developed, and published the world’s first Agent-Based Model (ABM; complex systems microsimulation) of running injury causation in the sports sciences alongside an international multidisciplinary author team. Dr Hulme has also published multiple peer reviewed systems modelling and analysis applications to address various systems problems in leading international journals.

As a result of his achievements, Dr Hulme was offered employment as a full-time Research Fellow on an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery project though the CHFSTS. It was during this time that he worked on the theoretical development and testing of state-of-the-art systems-based safety management methods in an effort to overcome known limitations with traditional and reductive scientific approaches. Dr Hulme has applied systems-based risk assessment and incident analysis methods to multiple work domains, including defence, construction, healthcare, manufacturing, mining, sports, transportation (e.g., road, rail, aviation, maritime), and general workplace safety.

Current role

In his current role at SQRH, Dr Hulme is advancing the complexity science and systems thinking research agenda in the area of regional, rural and remote health. He is using conceptual-qualitative and computational-quantitative System Dynamics modelling to holistically map and analyse the behaviours that occur within complex rural health systems. Dr Hulme was recently awarded a highly competitive ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE 2024) to explore how climate change and extreme weather events may further impact the rural health workforce maldistribution crisis using systems science methodologies. He warmly welcomes collaborations with other researchers, both within and outside of the UQ network, and is readily available to discuss potential HDR projects that involve systems and complexity science applications to any problem in most domains.

Mel’s research uses social and health psychology theories to understand altruistic behaviour such as donating substances of human origin (e.g., organs/tissue, blood, bone marrow/stem cells, breast milk, faecal microbiota). Mel has worked in research roles for over a decade in academic and non-profit organisations and has undertaken competitive university and industry-based research fellowships which focused on mitigating social or health problems. Mel is particularly interested in applied research that contributes to solving real world problems. She has over 100 peer-reviewed publications including many focused on organ donation and communicating donation wishes as well as volunteering, psychooncology, healthy and risky behaviours, and road safety, that have been published in Health Psychology, Transfusion, Transfusion Medicine Reviews, Progress in Transplantation, Non-profit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Psycho-Oncology, and Accident Analysis and Prevention.

Professor Janda is a NHMRC Leadership Fellow (2025-29), and serves UQ as the Director, Centre for Health Services Research, and Professor in Behavioural Science at the Faculty of Faculty of Health, Medicine & Behavioural Sciences.Professor Janda leads the NHMRC Centre for Reserch Excellence in Skin Imaging and Precision Diagnosis (2021-2025) and the NHMRC funded Synergy Roadmap Towards Melanoma Screening (2022-2026). She trained as a health psychologist and is a behavioural scientist with a research background in cancer prevention and quality of life research. Prof Janda has strong clinical collaborations, and a passion for consumer-centered digital interventions that make self-management of health-related issues easier for people. Her work focuses on applied health and clinical research problems, making a difference to cancer prevention, early detection and treatment outcomes.

Previousely, until 2017, she led the Health Determinants and Health Systems Theme at The Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation (IHBI), Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Before her NHMRC Leadership Fellowship, research was funded through an NHMRC Translating Research into Precatice Fewllowhip (2018-2020), NHMRC Career Development Fellowship Level II (2013-2017), NHMRC Career development fellowship I (2009-12) and NHMRC early career fellowship (2004-8). She was a research fellow for the Melanoma Screening trial with the Cancer Council Queensland before joining QUT in 2006.

After being awarded my PhD in 1997 from the University of Amsterdam, I took up a postdoctoral fellowship position at the University of Queensland funded by UQ, the Dutch Research Council (NWO), and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW), 1998-2001. I moved to Britain in 2001 and spend nearly 6 years at the University in Exeter. In 2007, I joined the University of Queensland again as a Research Fellow. After this, I was employed as an ARC Future Fellow (2012-2016), UQ Development Fellow (2017-2019), and I was recently awarded an ARC Laureate Fellowship (2019-2023).

Emeritus Professor Justin Kenardy is a research and health sector leader. He is also an active disseminator of evidence-based practice in clinical and health psychology, mental health care, and health service delivery. His work is outcomes focussed and is engaged with health users, providers and industry. He is known for his interdisciplinary research work on the psychological impacts of trauma and injury. This is situated at the intersection of mental health, and physical health. His work includes the development and application of preventative, integrative and novel intervention approaches. His published work demonstrates the interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary approach to collaborating with psychology, medical specialties, allied health, nursing, law, and health economics. He has a practical, respectful and strategic leadership style. He is style is goal-driven and consultative which aims to bring others along to achieve the goal. He is also a mentor and consultant. He provides service to the profession of psychology and the broader community through his range of roles in the Australian Psychological Society, the Psychologists Board of Australia, and the Australian Psychology Accreditation Council, to the field of research through his leadership roles within Queensland Health, the NHMRC, and ISTSS, and to the Jamieson Trauma Institute and Gallipoli Medical Research Institute. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia, Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society, Fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of both the Australian Psychological Society's President's Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychology and the Ian Campbell Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Clinical Psychology. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Journal of Psychology.

Dr Hassan Khosravi is an Associate Professor in Data Science and Learning Analytics at The University of Queensland. As a computer scientist by training, he is passionate about the role of artificial intelligence in the future of education. In his research, he draws on theoretical insights driven from the learning sciences and exemplary techniques from the fields of human-centred AI and crowdsourcing to build technological solutions that enhance student learning and experience. His past research and publications have addressed a number of diverse topics such as learning graphical models, statistical-relational learning, social network analysis, cybersecurity and game theory.

Hassan's teaching career includes coordinating 30 different offerings with class sizes ranging from 50 to 700, in 10 distinct courses to a total of approximately 7000 students at three top-ranked institutions: Simon Fraser University (SFU) and The University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada, and The University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia. He has taught a range of courses including introductory programming courses, data structures and algorithms, artificial intelligence, database management systems as well as graduate-level data science courses. he also leads and teaches into a variety of formal and programs that mentor and foster the next generation of great teachers. These programs cover a wide variety of topics, including student-centred learning, active learning tools and strategies, supporting assessment design and delivery at scale, and enhancing teaching with learning analytics.

Hassan holds a Senior Fellowship with the Higher Education Academy, which has been awarded in recognition of his contributions to effective approaches to teaching and learning as well as successful coordination, support, supervision, management and mentoring of others in relation to learning and teaching.

James N. Kirby, Ph.D., is a Clinical Psychologist and the Co-Director of the Compassionate Mind Research Group at the University of Queensland. He has broad research interests in compassion, but specifically examines factors that facilitate and inhibit compassionate responding. He also examines the clinical effectiveness of compassion focused interventions, specifically in how they help with self-criticism and shame that underpin many depression and anxiety disorders. James also holds a Visiting Fellowship at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University and is an Honorary Member of the Compassionate Mind Foundation UK. In 2022 he authored Choose Compassion, and in 2020 he co-edited Making an Impact on Mental Health. He serves as an Associate Editor for two international journals Mindfulness and Psychology & Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice.

I am a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne. My research examines how societal structures and economic inequalities influence psychological and behavioral outcomes, with a particular emphasis on social cohesion and tolerance of moral differences. My work investigates how economic inequality may impact social cooperation and contribute to polarization, aiming to identify ways to foster tolerance within pluralistic societies. My approach is interdisciplinary, drawing from social, developmental, political, and moral psychology, as well as economics. Collaborating with colleagues worldwide, I apply a range of methods including experimental and correlational studies, analysis of large-scale multinational data, social media data, qualitative research, and social simulation studies. This diverse methodology enables a comprehensive understanding of human behavior and societal dynamics.

Professor Kisely is a psychiatrist and public health physician with health services research experience in the UK, Australia & Canada. After graduating from the University of Bristol, he worked in New Zealand in various medical and surgical specialties, before starting psychiatric training in Auckland. He finished his psychiatric training in Western Australia & Manchester, including a Masters degree by research on atypical chest pain. While working as a lecturer in psychiatry he completed a research Doctorate on the effect of physical disorder on psychiatric outcome in primary care. Professor Kisely worked at the Universities of Western Australia and Dalhousie University in Canada before returning to Australia in 2007.

I am a sociologist currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR) at the University of Queensland. I hold a PhD in Sociology from the Australian National University (ANU) and a master’s degree in social policy (research) from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). With extensive experience spanning over a decade, one of my specialisations is based on designing and executing qualitative and quantitative research projects across public and private sectors. My expertise lies in evaluating the effectiveness of social policies through data analysis and critical assessment, aiming to inform evidence-based recommendations for improving social programs and interventions. My doctoral thesis used quantitative methods and secondary data to analyse the subjective perceptions of inequality and its effects on today’s society. My research focuses on subjective perceptions of inequality and its societal implications, social classes, social stratification, and social mobility.

Professor Lee is a public health psychologist with research interests in gender and health. She has been a CI on the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health since its initiation in 1995, and has been Project Manager (2000-2003) and National Coordinator (2003-2005).

Professor Lee is a former Head of the School of Psychology (2006-2010) and former Associate Dean (Research) for the Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences (2014-2019). As an Emeritus Professor she is actively involved in research grant application development and support.