Find an expert

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.

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

Prof. Dr Zhigang Chen is currently an Honorary Professor in the School of Mechanical & Mining Engineering, the University of Queensland, and a founding director for the ARC Research Hub in Zero-emission Power Generation for Carbon Neutrality (ZeroPC), ARC Future Fellow, Academic Reseach Lead, and a Capacity Building Professor of Energy Materials at the School of Chemistry and Physics, Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Dr Chen received his PhD from the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2008 under the supervision of Professor Hui-Ming Cheng, and Professor Gaoqing (Max) Lu. His research focuses on thermoelectrics for power generation and cooling; next-generation optoelectronic devices and functional System; topological insulators for next-generation chips; and high-speed sensors. In total, Dr Chen received ~A$40,000,000 in research grants to support the research, including one prestigious UQ postdoctoral fellowship (2009), ARC APD Fellowship (2009), five ARC Discovery Grants (four as lead CI, one as ARC APD fellowship, and one as ARC Future Fellowship), two ARC Research hub, four ARC Linkage Grant (one as lead CI), four ARC LIEF Grant, >10 Industry Investments (eight as sole CI), two Queensland Smart Futures Funds (sole CI), and >10 University Grants. Currently, Dr Chen is leading one ARC Research Hub, two ARC discovery projects, one sub project at ARC Research Hub, one ARC Linkage project, and four industry investments. Dr Chen is one Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (Top 0.1% researcher in the world). He has authored over 330 high-impact journal publications including 1 Nature Energy, 1 Nature Nanotechnology; 3 Nature Communications; 1 Chemical Reviews; 2 Progress in Materials Science; 4 Energy & Environmental Science; 1 Joule; 11 Advanced Materials; and 4 Journal of the American Chemical Society. These publications have attracted >35000 times (Scopus, www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=57188708630) and an H index of 70. His google scholar citation is >25,000 with an H index of 100 (https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=vkRX_vgAAAAJ&hl=en). Particularly, in the last three years, Dr Chen has published more than 40 articles per year and attracted over 5,000 citations per year. Dr Chen has delivered over 50 plenary/keynote/invited talks in the international/national conferences. Dr Chen has authored four commercialized patents, which have been attracted industry investments.

Dr Shujian Chen started his research on nanomaterial modified cement and concrete in 2011. He is also dedicated to developing and adapting new nano/micro-scale characterisation and simulations techniques for developing new cement and concrete-based construction materials via emerging technologies. Since 2014, he extended his research to apply 3D printing technology in advanced manufacturing of multifunctional, high-performance cement-based materials.

Rocky Tong Chen is currently a Senior Lecturer (~Associate Professor in North America) 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.

Conduct interdisciplinary research to tackle technical challenges associated with the efficient and responsible extraction of geo-energy and geo-resources. Three main focuses of my research interests are:

1. Mining geomechanics for high-stress and high-temperature mining conditions.

• It covers ground support design, excavation stability analysis, pillar stability, mine seismicity, strata movement and surface subsidence, and mine paste fill optimisation.
• My research team has also conducted extensive work on (i) using Thin Spray-On Liners (TSLs) to replace shotcrete, (ii) developing new experimental capabilities in assessing grout durability in extremely acidic and hot conditions (>140°C ), and (iii) evaluating rock sensitivity to different weathering conditions (e.g., wet-dry cycles and humidity effect).

2. Reservoir geomechanics, targeting key technical challenges associated with unconventional gas recovery.

• It includes borehole stability, permeability evolution, reservoir petrophysical properties characterisation, multiphase flow in fractured porous media with challenges associated with natural gas extraction, carbon geological sequestration, underground hydrogen storage, and energy storage in depleted reservoirs, and
• Over the years, my group has developed advanced multiscale multiphase and multiphysics computational modelling capabilities

3. Machine Learning Applications in Mining and Natural Gas Fields

• Explore the diverse applications of machine learning and deep learning algorithms in geomaterial strength analysis (sedimentary rock in particular), geotechnical characterization (e.g., automatic calculation of rock fracture characteristics, and roadway stability assessment of different geological conditions), and subsurface characterization. By harnessing the power of data-driven approaches, the research group aims to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of rock mechanics analysis, enabling more effective decision-making in engineering projects.

Teaching Courses:

1. Geotechnical Design and Implementation (Open Pit) (MINE6121) (Since 2025)
2. Applied Mining Geomechanics (MINE6112) (Since 2023)
3. Mine Geotechnical Engineering (MINE4120) (2013- 2023)
4. Coal Mine Strata Control (MINE4128) (2013- 2023)

Resources Geomechanics Lab (NATA accredited between 2023-2025) with leading experimental capabilities in:

1. A suite of rock mechanics testing capabilities:

• Mechanical properties (e.g., modulus, Poisson's ratio, density)
• Rock strengths (e.g., UCS, triaxial strength, fracture shear strength, direct shear, punch shear, direct tensile strength, Brazilian Tensile Strength, and bond adhesion force), and
• Rock petrophysical properties (e.g., porosity, permeability/conductivity at different high confining stresses, fracture compressibility, slake durability, and rock weathering etc)

2. Rock dynamic responses to different stress conditions (transient condition) using non-destructive methods (e.g., Acoustic Emission and Ultrasonic Detection for different applications at different scales)

3. Characterization of fluid flow (water or gas) in fractured porous media under a high-stress environment (up to 10,000 psi)

4. Quantifying the evolution of the intrinsic and relative permeability of extremely tight reservoirs (e.g., coals, shales, and tight sandstones) to gas adsorption/desorption as well as the changes of contact angle with varying reservoir pressure

5. Visualising two-phase flow using microfluidics: discontinuous flow vs continuous flow

6. Quantifying the impact of proppant embedment and reservoir stress on shale permeability evolution

7. Gas isotherm and directional sorption-induced strain measurements for different absorbing reservoir rocks

8. Mine paste rheological property measurements at various shearing controls, e.g., constant shear rate, varying shearing rate, ramping controls etc.

Biography: Dr. Peng Chen is a Lecturer in the School of Chemical Engineering and an Emerging Group Leader in the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), The University of Queensland. In 2020, he got his PhD degree from School of Chemical Engineering at UQ under supervision of Prof. Lianzhou Wang , before moving to AIBN for two consecutive research fellowships: Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP) Research Fellow (2020-2022) and ARC DECRA Fellow (2023-2025).

Research: 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 solar hydrogen production. 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 over 65 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 >7300 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, and MATE7016 Materials for Energy Conversion and Storage (Solar Cell Fabrication and Recycling).

A/ Prof. Karen Cheney is a marine ecologist employing a multidisciplinary approach to explore predator-prey interactions, animal signalling, and the fundamental principles behind the evolution and function of animal colour patterns. Her research spans sensory, behavioral, and chemical marine ecology, with a particular focus on marine fish and molluscs. She co-leads the Marine Sensory Ecology Group at UQ.

She is also the Academic Director of the Moreton Bay Research Station, where she is oversees the teaching and research conducted at the station. She also co-leads research projects on understanding the ecosystem services of shellfish reef restoration, and the conservation of the threatened seahorse, Hippocampus whitei, in SE Queensland. She is also the Director of the Centre for Marine Science.

Animal Signalling: She focuses on the evolution of animal signals in the marine environment, particularly those used for camouflage and warning signals (aposematism). Her research employs spectrophotometry, theoretical vision models, phylogenetic comparative analysis, and a novel method using a calibrated underwater camera system to analyse complex animal colour patterns. This innovative approach enables simultaneous in-situ collection of spatial and spectral properties of animals and their backgrounds. She specifically investigates the diversity of colour signals displayed by nudibranch molluscs, examining how these patterns are perceived by potential predators and their relationship to the unpalatability and toxicity of the molluscs’ stored chemical defences.

Colour Vision: She studies the visual performance of coral reef fish using behavioural assays inspired by tests used to screen for human color vision deficiencies. By relating behavioural data to theoretical visual modelling, she assesses the accuracy of these models. More broadly, she explores the sensory, neural, and cognitive foundations of colour perception and investigates the genetic basis for the diversification of visual systems.

Dr Wenting Cheng is a legal and regulatory scholar specialising in intellectual property law, sustainability governance, and their intersection. She has applied interdisciplinary skills, comparative perspectives, and regulatory theories to research in diverse areas, including intellectual property law, innovation policy, energy regulation (particularly hydrogen and off-shore wind power), just climate transition, and sustainable finance at local, national, and international levels.

Wenting obtained her PhD in Regulation and Governance in 2018 from the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet), College of Asia Pacific, the Australian National University. From 2020 to 2023, she worked as a Grand Challenge Fellow at ANU Grand Challenge Zero Carbon Energy for the Asia Pacific. In this role, she had the opportunity to work in a multidisciplinary team, including scientists, engineers, and economists, to explore how to address technical, economic, and regulatory challenges for energy transition nationally, regionally, and globally.

Wenting is interested in understanding IP as a regulatory instrument for knowledge commodification in global regulatory capitalism. Her research has focused on the impact of IP regulation on broader issues such as access to medicines and climate change and how the global diffusion of IP law has impacted the receiving countries. Her PhD monograph was published in the well-regarded Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies series in 2023. Wenting's article on IP and international clean technology diffusion (awarded the 2023 Asian Society of International Law Young Scholar Prize, First Prize) crystallises the norm collision between IP and climate objectives, advising developing countries to take a national-based approach instead of engaging in treaty negotiation to consolidate TRIPS flexibility at the national level.

In sustainability regulation, Wenting's research focuses on understanding the frameworks, practices, and mechanisms that define the 'green' boundaries in various intersecting issues. She has worked on diverse topics, including environmental goods liberalisation, sustainable finance, ESG disclosure, renewable hydrogen regulation, hydrogen certifications, embedded carbon accounting, and offshore wind regulation. A common theme across her work is how to measure, assess, and enhance regulatory stringency to set effective green boundaries and stimulate genuine behavioural change beyond mere managerial compliance.

Our lab aims to test fundamental hypotheses in genetics and evolutionary biology. Principally, we are interested the relationship between genotypic and phenotypic change during adaptive evolution. This line of inquiry requires an understanding of both the type of selection acting on traits as they evolve and ultimately the functional polymorphisms available for selection to act upon. We presently use both native and exotic species of Drosophila in our work but also undertake collaborative study in other organisms that represent examples of recurring ecological and evolutionary phenomena. We are equipped to use a broad range of techniques in our investigations including experimental evolution, field-based selection studies, quantitative genetics, molecular population genetics, genomics and advanced quantitative methods in statistics and computational biology. The broad range of techniques available to our group provides students with a unique opportunity to broaden their skill sets as they address fundamental questions.

Dr Karine Chenu is Associate Professor at the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI) at the University of Queensland. Karine has expertise in ecophysiology, genetics and modelling with a focus on drought and heat adaptation.

Her group is conducting research that supports crop modelling technology, plant design and breeding strategies in winter cereals.

Her research mainly concerns: - understanding trait physiology and genetics, - developing gene-to-phenotype crop modelling - exploring novel combinations of genotypes, environments and management practices to assist productivity improvement in changing environments.

Karine collaborates with plant breeders, geneticists, modellers and agronomists in a range of national and international research projects in both public and private sectors.

She is also one of the UQ representatives on the APSIM Initiative Reference Panel, which is responsible for the on-going development of the APSIM model (www.apsim.info), which is now used world-wide.

Dr Adrian Cherney is a Professor in the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland. He was an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow. He has completed evaluations of programs aimed at countering violent extremism and is undertaking research on violent extremism risk assessment. His ARC Future Fellowship explored case-managed interventions targeting convicted terrorists and those at risk of radicalisation.