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A/Prof. Seth Cheetham is an ARC Future Fellow and Group Leader at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology. He is also the Director of the National Biologics Facility, Australia's leading bio-manufacturing hub. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge, supported by the Herchel Smith Research Studentship. Seth is a molecular biologist and geneticist with a focus on biotherapeutics, mRNA and bio-manufacturing. He has authored >30 publications, in some of the most influential molecular biology journals including Science, Molecular Cell, Nature Reviews Genetics, Nature Protocols, Genome Biology and Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. His work has attracted > $85M in competitive funding including eleven years of continuous NHMRC and ARC Fellowship support. In 2021 Seth was awarded the Genetics Society of Australasia Alan Wilton Early Career Award.

Learning a foreign language is hard. Studying overseas in a foreign language is even harder!

Universities in Australia have up to 40% international students, that's 400,000+ students and makes up a significant portion of the Australian economy. These students face immense struggles adapting to Australian culture, language and education style. Without help, these students get lost in the complexities of higher-education and cannot successfully graduate.

Shaun's work involves developing innovative solutions with partner universities across the greater Asian regions though contextualised development programs, workshops that highlight modern teaching, and assisting students in acclimatising to their study-life in Australia. Shaun works heavily with China, India, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Dr. Qiaomin Chen is currently a Research Fellow in the School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability (AGFS) at the University of Queensland (UQ). Before receiving her PhD in Agricultural Science at UQ, she completed a Master’s degree in Physical Geography at UCAS and a Bachelor’s degree in Geographical Information System at WHT in China. With a solid foundation across earth and agricultural sciences, she has consistently pursued interdisciplinary learning and collaboration, actively exploring innovative solutions at the interface of geoscience and agriculture. Her diverse background empowers her to tackle real-world challenges in agricultural production.

She is particularly passionate about developing and applying advanced technologies in precision agriculture and modern crop breeding to improve efficiency and sustainability. She works at the intersection of plant phenotyping, crop modelling, machine learning and climate adaptation. Her current research focuses on leveraging integrative modelling approaches to inform field experiment design, optimize phenotyping strategies, and support crop growth monitoring across spatial and temporal scales.

• My academic qualifications include a PhD in Neurosciences, an MSc in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and a Bachelor of Medicine.
• I have initiated and managed multiple projects to develop novel therapeutics for neurological disorders, including: 1) Developing a nanoparticle-based siRNA delivery system for the treatment of Huntington’s disease (ARC project; as Postdoctoral Research Fellow). 2) Examining the treatment effects of intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) on epilepsy (Advance Queensland Women’s Academic Fund; as Sole Investigator). 2) Examining the effectiveness of three neuroinflammation modulatory agents on traumatic brain injury and epilepsy through randomised controlled preclinical trials (Seed projects sponsored by industry partners: VivaZome Therapeutics, Implicit Bioscience, and Innate Immunotherapeutics; as Co-investigator). 3) Developing treatment strategies to prevent the development of epilepsy after severe traumatic brain injury and identifying medical imaging biomarkers to evaluate the risk of epilepsy post-injury (two U.S. Department of Defense, Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs; as Co-investigator). 4) Developing exosomal therapy for traumatic brain injury (Cooperative Research Centres Projects (CRC-P) Grant with two research groups from academic institutions and three pharmaceutical companies; as Principal Investigator).

Yi-Hsun Chen completed his PhD in Physics at the Monash University in 2024. Prior to this PhD, he obtained his Master degree in Optoelectronics at the National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, in 2014.

His research interests relate to electronic transport and optical properties of the following field of study:

• Superconducting qubits
• Exciton science
• Bose-Einstein condensate
• 2D materials (graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides, etc.)
• Plasmonics

In 2024, He joins UQ as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow under an ARC Linkage Project "Surface and Interface Engineering for Superconducting Quantum Circuits," pursuing high-quality superconducting quantum circuits using surface engineering strategies.

Please find his publication list via google scholar profile https://scholar.google.com.tw/citations?user=EvKa9qIAAAAJ&hl=en

Dominique coordinates BlackWords, AustLit's dedicated research resource for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and storytellers. She is passionate about people and Country care, and is committed to supporting self-determined, community-engaged and culturally-grounded research within the academy.

Biography: Dr. Peng Chen is currently a Senior Lecturer at the School of Chemical Engineering and a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), The University of Queensland (UQ). Dr Chen received his PhD degree from the School of Chemical Engineering at UQ in 2020 under the supervision of Prof. Lianzhou Wang. He then moved to AIBN for Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP) Research Fellow (2020-2022) and ARC DECRA Fellow (2023-2025). Dr. Chen's research focuses on the development of low-cost and efficient thin-film photovoltaic technologies for renewable energy conversion and storage, including perovskite solar cells, quantum dot solar cells, and lead-free perovskite optoelectronics. In 2018, he pioneered the concept of bilayer 2D/3D heterostructures for stable perovskite solar cells (Adv. Funct. Mater. 2018, 28, 1706923; citation: >800 times). In 2021, he participated in the design of ultrastable perovskite-MOF glassy composites for lighting applications (Science 2021, 374, 621). In 2024, he led the team to achieve a certified world-record efficiency of 16.65% for lead-free perovskite solar cells (Nature Nanotechnology 2025, 20, 779). Over the past decade at UQ, Dr Chen has contributed to 66 peer-reviewed publications in top journals, including Science (×1), Nature Nanotechnology (×1), Nature Energy (×1), Nature Communications (×2), Advanced Materials (×3), Angewandte Chemie International Edition (×7), Journal of the American Chemistry Society (×2), Advanced Energy Materials (×4), ACS Nano (×3), Advanced Functional Materials (×4), Nano Energy (×3), etc. His publications have attracted >7500 citations with a H-index of 36 (Google Scholar). He has attracted over $4 million competitive research funds from ARC, ARENA, Australian Government, etc.

Course coordinator: CHEE4006/4007 Research Project, and CHEE4026/4027 Research Thesis; Course Lecturer: ENGG1500 Thermodynamics: Energy and Enivronment; Guest Lecturer: MATE7016 Materials for Energy Conversion and Storage.

I am a Senior Research Fellow, NHMRC Emerging Leader Fellow, and Group Leader at UQ Frazer Institute. I was awarded my PhD in late 2017 by Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University. Under the UQ Health Research Accelerator (HERA) program, I lead a team to investigate T and B cell responses that profoundly regulate vaccine responses, viral clearance, and anti-tumour immunity.

My research program employs combinatorial methodologies of Biochemistry and Immunology to uncover new molecular mechanisms controlling T-cell-mediated immunity:

1. The action of T cells is required in antibody responses for suppressing viral infection or tumour growth and to confer protection upon vaccination. In particular, follicular helper T (Tfh) cells, a specialised subset of CD4+ T cells, essentially instruct the B cells to produce long-lived antibody protection. The knowledge of Tfh cells has fundamentally enabled vaccine development and therapy design for autoimmune diseases.

2. T-cell-derived cytokines play pivotal roles in both humoral and cellular immunity. Particularly, interleukin-21 (IL-21) is essential for supporting germinal centre (GC) reaction, where the B cell memory and long-lived antibody responses are generated. Besides, IL-21 is also the only known cytokine to maintain the functionalities of CD8+ T cells in the context of chronic infections or cancers by preventing a loss-of-function program termed 'exhaustion'.

This research program has generated multiple cutting-edge discoveries in the field, producing publications as 1st or joint 1st authors in top-tier journals including Nature Immunology, Science Immunology, and Nature Communications.

Rocky Tong Chen is currently an Associate Professor and ARC DECRA Fellow with the Data Science Discipline, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Queensland. Dr Chen's main research interests include recommender systems, LLM agents, graph and sequential data mining, and social media content moderation. His research outputs shares a common focus on developing accurate, efficient, and trustworthy data mining solutions to discover actionable patterns and intelligence from large-scale user data to facilitate prediction and recommendation in a wide range of domains.

To date, Dr Chen has published 90+ peer-reviewed papers in the most prestigious, CORE A*/A-ranked and CCF A-ranked conferences (e.g., KDD, SIGIR, WWW, ICDM, ICDE, AAAI and IJCAI) and journals (e.g., VLDBJ, IEEE TKDE, IEEE TNNLS, ACM TOIS and WWWJ). Dr Chen's work has attracted 7,500+ citations and an h-index of 40 on Google Scholar. a Field-Weighted Citation Impact of 4.51 (SciVal), i.e., his publications attract 4.51 times of the citations in comparison to similar papers of the same age, type and area. According to CNCI (Web of Science), 10 and 36 of his papers are respectively the top-1% and top-10% most cited. His publications have won 4 Best Paper Awards, 1 Best Paper Nomination, and 2 Travel Awards.

Dr Chen has been regularly providing services in the data science discipline as reviewers for CORE A*/A journals like TKDE, TNNLS, TOIS, and as program committee members for CORE A*/A conferences like KDD, SIGIR, NeurIPS, WSDM, ICDM, ACL. He is one of the Area Chairs of top conferences KDD, WWW, and ACL in 2024-2025, and the Program Chair of the 2024 Australasian Database Conference (ADC’24). In 2025, he is appointed as an Associate Editor of the SJR Q1-ranked journal Neural Networks. Besides, he led and delivered a series of technical tutorials at WWW (the No. 1 international web mining conference) in 2022, 2024, and 2025, as well as WSDM’25 (CORE A-ranked conference) and DASFAA’23 (top database conference), which all aimed to promote trustworthy, resource-efficient, and unbiased personalisation algorithms.

Professor Chen graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota. She has over twenty five years research experience in the areas of membrane separation, gas separation, biocatalytic systems, nanomaterials, and water treatment. She was professor of chemical engineering at the University of New South Wales from 2008 - 2018, the Director of the UNESCO Centre for Membrane Science and Technology from 2006 - 2014 and head of school of chemical engineering from 2014 - 2018. She is currently on the editorial board for the Journal of Membrane Science and was formerly on the editorial board for Desalination Journal. Professor Chen was the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Architecture, and IT at the University of Queensland from 2018 - 2022 and Provost and Senior Vice-President at the University of Technology from 2022 - 2025.

She currently holds ARC Discovery grants focussed on application of nanomaterials in membrane separation and had recently held funding from diverse sources such as CO2CRC, Coal Innovation NSW, ARC Linkage program, and CRC-P (Printed Energy). She is on the the advisory boards for the GETCO2 ARC Centre of Excellence and the Carbon Science and Innovation ARC Centre of Excellence.