Find an expert

Markus graduated from the Vienna University of Technology in Technical Physics in 1995 and was awarded his Doctorate in 1999 after which he worked as postdoctoral research associate and then Assistant Professor at the Department of Radiodiagnostics, Medical University Vienna (AT). From 2004 he worked as Senior Researcher at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour (Radboud University Nijmegen, NL) and at the Erwin L. Hahn Institute for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (University Essen-Duisburg, DE). In 2014 he relocated to the University of Queensland to head the Ultra-high Field Human MR Research program at the Centre for Advanced Imaging and was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship. In 2019 he joined the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering as Full Professor Biomedical Engineering working on MR Physics and Medical Imaging. He served as Imaging, Sensing and Biomedical Engineering Discipline lead until 2020 when he took up service roles as Deputy Head of School – Research, Director for the National Imaging Facility – Queensland Node, as well as a member of the ARC College of Experts.

Jin Zou is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering (Materials Engineering) and an affiliated Professor in the Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis at the University of Queensland, Australia. Professor Zou earned his Master’s degree from the University of Science and Technology, Beijing in 1985 and PhD from the University of Sydney in 1994. Through his postgraduate studies, Professor Zou was trained as a transmission electron microscopist. After his PhD, he worked in the Australian Key Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis at the University of Sydney for 10 years with several Australian fellowships, including an Australian Postdoctoral fellowship and a Queen Elizabeth II fellowship. Professor Zou moved to UQ to take up a teaching-and-research position from July 2003. In 2009, Professor Zou won an inaugural ARC Future Fellowship (FT3 - Professor level). In 2021, Professor Zou became an Emeritus Professor.

Over the years, Professor Zou's research interest has been focused on the understanding of the evolution of advanced, smart and nano-scaled materials and the understanding of fundamental properties of these materials through detailed correlating their fabrication and demonstrated properties with their morphological, structural and chemical characteristics (determined by electron microscopy); and on the formation of high-performance functional nanomaterials and their advanced applications, particular in the fields of energy and environmental protection. So far, Professor Zou published over 750 SCI articles with most of them published in leading international journals, which have attracted over 41,000 citations and led to an H-index of 101.

After completing my undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Newcastle, I held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Basel (Switzerland) from 1990-2. I returned to Australia in 1993 to take up an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Australian National University (Canberra) from 1993-4. I joined The University of Queensland in 1994.

Xiuwen Zhou received her PhD in 2014 from the University of Geneva (Switzerland), where she worked with Prof Tomasz A. Wesolowski. Then she moved to the University of Queensland (UQ) as a visiting scholar, supported by two awarded fellowships, i.e., a Swiss National Science Foundation Early Postdoc Mobility fellowship (2015) and an Australia-APEC Woman in Research Fellowship (2016), hosted by Prof Ben Powell and Prof Paul Burn. She then took up a UQ Development Fellowship in 2017, working as a teaching and research fellow at UQ School of Mathematics and Physics. Later, she was awarded an Australia Research Council Discovery Early Research Award (ARC DECRA) commencing in 2019. She is currently an ARC DECRA Fellow and a UQ Amplify Fellow.

Dr David Smerdon is a Senior Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor) in the School of Economics. He primarily works in behavioral and development economics. His research involves theory and modelling, experiments in the lab and field, and microeconometric analysis in order to investigate topics at the intersection of these fields.

David earned his PhD from the Tinbergen Institute and the University of Amsterdam (UvA) as a General Sir John Monash scholar, and afterwards worked as a PODER fellow at Bocconi University in Milan. His research often involves collaboration with non-academic partners, ranging from aid agencies and NGOs like US AID and Save the Children, to tech companies like Chess.com.

Prior to his academic career, David spent three years working for the Australian Department of Treasury as a policy analyst. David is also a chess Grandmaster and has represented Australia at seven chess Olympiads. Combining his passions, David occasionally conducts niche research in chess economics on topics such as gender inequality, cheating, and the life cycle of cognitive performance, supported by organisations such as the World Chess Federation (FIDE) and Chessable.

I work with manipulating and measuring the spatial/polarisation and spectral/temporal properties of light, mostly as it travels through multimode fibre. This has applications in optical telecommunications, biomedical imaging, quantum mechanics and astronomical instrumentation but is also just a lot of fun.

There's a good chance that at any point in time I'm using a spatial light modulator in some way to acheive these goals.

2012-2014 : Postdoctoral researcher, The University of Sydney, Australia

2009-2012 : Doctor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, UK

2008-2009 : Codan Limited, Microwave Design Engineer, The University of Queensland, Australia

2007 : Master of Engineering (ME), The University of Queensland, Australia

2002-2006 : Bachelor of Engineering (BE), Bachelor of Science (BSc), The University of Queensland, Australia

Dr Botella's research interests are in genetic engineering, molecular biology and signal transduction in plants.

Dr. Jimmy Botella is Professor of Plant Biotechnology at the University of Queensland. He obtained a degree in Quantum Chemistry from the University of Madrid (Spain) and a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Malaga (Spain). After postdoctoral positions at Michigan State University and Pennsylvania State University he joined the University of Queensland in 1995. At UQ he founded the Plant Genetic Engineering Laboratory (PGEL) specialising in the fields of tropical and subtropical agricultural biotechnology for almost 15 years. J. Botella has eleven international patents in the field of Plant Biotechnology and is a founding member of two biotechnology companies (Coridon Ltd. and Origo Biotech).

Dr Botella is a member of the Plant Molecular Biology and Biotechnology research group.

Some highlights of the Plant Genetic Engineering Laboratory’s research:

• Production and field trial of the world’s first genetically modified pineapples with genetic constructs to control flowering time. These pineapples will allow farmer control over harvesting times.
• Development of a new technology to confer protection against nematode infestation.
• Discovery of a gene that can confer resistance to the devastating fungus Fusarium oxysporum in plants.
• Development of a new technology to confer protection against pathogenic fungi in plants.

Research interests

Dr. Botella’s research has two major foci: basic cell biology and applied biotechnology. In cell biology he is interested in studying the function of the Heterotrimeric G proteins in plants. This family of proteins is extremely important in humans but their role in pant systems is still largely unknown. Dr. Botella’s research has strongly contributed to the current body of knowledge available in plants with critical contributions such as the discovery and characterization of the first plant gamma subunits and the establishment of these subunits as the critical element conferring function specificity to all plant G proteins. Dr. Botella’s team has also discovered the important role that these proteins play in defense against pathogens. New and unpublished data has now revealed that G proteins are important yield enhancing factors in crops such as rice. Another research interest resides in the communication between plants and insects. There is plenty of knowledge of how important smell, volatiles emitted by the plant, is for foraging insects in order to determine their host preferences. Nevertheless, most of the available studies have been performed using synthetic chemicals in artificial experimental settings. Dr. Botella’s team and collaborators have genetically engineered plants to produce different volatile mixes in the flowers in order to perform in vivo behavioral studies in insects.

Biotechnology research at the Plant Genetic Engineering Laboratory mostly arises from discoveries made in basic research. The PGEL focuses in tropical and subtropical crops. These crops have attracted little attention in terms of biotechnology but are essential sources of food and energy for a large part of the world’s population, especially in Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The PGEL has developed a number of platform technologies that can be applied to multiple crops in order to confer resistance to pathogens, modify plant architecture and control flowering time.

Current research projects include:

• Plant heterotrimeric G proteins: New roles in defence, stomatal control and ABA perception.
• Putting smells into context: using in vivo technologies to understand plant-insect odour communication.
• Use of host-derived RNA interference technology to control plant pathogens (especially pathogenic fungi and nematodes).
• Control of Fusarium wilt disease.
• Genetic improvement of grain crops.
• Genetic engineering research projects

I am a Senior Research Fellow in Cosmology based in the School of Mathematics and Physics. I work on making maps of the positions and motions of millions of galaxies in our Universe to uncover how it has evolved since the Big Bang. Current observations suggest 95% of our Universe consists of ellusive Dark Matter and Dark Energy; we can detect these by the influence they have on the light from galaxies, stars and that permeates the background Universe itself, but they don't emit light themselves and we have no idea yet what they are. My research seeks to uncover these using the largest galaxy surveys in the world.

I have been involved in planning, carrying out, and analysing a large number of these surveys. I currently working groups in the American-led Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project, the WALLABY survey based in Western Australia, and the 4MOST Hemisphere Survey (4HS) which will be carried out from Chile. Combined, these will produce the most detailed maps of galaxy positions and motions ever created --- over 40,000,000 unique galaxies!

My personal research makes use of state-of-the art computing techniques to simulate the distributions of these galaxies, their properties, and how fast they are moving. I then analyse these distributions using different statistical techniques and compare to the real data. The properties of Dark Matter and Dark Energy and all the other things that make up our Universe can then be extracted by modelling these statistics with theoretical models, or looking for discrepancies between the simulations and the data. My hope is that by doing so, we are currently on the cusp of uncovering something fundamental about how the Universe came to be the way it is today, and what will happen to it in the future.

Academic Background

• Undergraduate: MPhys 1st Class Honours - University of Sussex, 2008-2012
• Postgraduate: PhD - University of Portmouth, 2012-2016
• Research Associate - University of Western Australia, 2015-2019
• Research Fellow in Cosmology - University of Queensland, 2019-

I am a Professor Emeritus in Sports Physiotherapy in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences where I am the Director of the Master of Physiotherapy (Musculoskeletal and Sports Physiotherapy Majors) and co-Director of the Sports Injury Rehabilitation and Prevention for Health Research unit. My research is mainly focussed on non-surgical management of persistent musculoskeletal problems like tendon related pain/disability (tendinopathy) and knee cap pain (patellofemoral pain). I also delve into the underlying mechanisms of these conditions and other common sporting injuries (e.g., ankle sprains) – a leading cause of ankle osteoarthritis.

Since gaining my PhD in 2000, I have been awarded over $30million in competitive research funding as a chief investigator to study these conditions – 5 NHMRC project grants, 2 NHMRC CRE, 2 NHMRC program grants, 2 NHMRC MRFF grants and an ARC Linkage grant. I have also conducted over half a million dollars of commercially sponsored research.

I have authored 2 books, 26 book chapters and over 382 peer reviewed publications (h-index 68). My top tendinopathy papers are cited over 10 times more than average for the field – most are published in the top sports/general medicine and physiotherapy journals . I have 2 highly cited papers – in the top 1% of the academic field of Clinical Medicine 2022. I have presented my work world wide in over 300 workshops, seminars and keynote presentations.

I enjoy my role in mentoring early/mid career academics and supervising researh higher degree students – having supervised 40 PhD and 2 MPhil candidates to completion. In this capacity I lead the physiotherapy research higher degree seminar series where our students engage in presenting their work and hearing from top international researchers on a range of relevant topics. One reason why my work was recently recognised by the school award for research mentoring.

I completed my PhD at the Australian National University in 2015 working on modelling and simulation of ion specific effects working with Drew Parsons and Barry Ninham. I then completed postdoctoral research at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington State working with Christopher Mundy and Gregory Schenter on quantum mechanical molecular dynamics simulation and modelling of electrolyte solution before coming to the University of Queensland to work on electrochemcial enery storage. I am currently working on my DECRA project on improving the prediction of electrolyte solution properties for improved electrochemical energy storage.

​Associate Professor Blakey is a group leader at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology and the Centre for Advanced Imaging. During his appointment at UQ he has been a recipient of a Vice Chancellor’s Research and Teaching Fellowship, an ARC Future Fellowship, a Linkage Projects International Fellowship, and a Queensland Government Smart State Fellowship. Prior to joining UQ he worked at Polymerat, a materials biotechnology startup company now listed on the ASX as AnteoTech.

Professor Kris Thurecht has appointments at AIBN and UQ’s Centre for Advanced Imaging where he is the Deputy Director of Imaging Technologies. Professor Thurecht has been recognised for scientific excellence with a 2012 Queensland Young Tall Poppy Science Award and a 2010 UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award for his work in developing polymer ‘theranostics’. In 2015 he was recognised by the Royal Australian Chemical Institute Polymer Division through award of the David Sangster Polymer Science and Technology Award for scientific excellence for a mid-career researcher. Since obtaining his PhD in 2005, he has been the recipient of five competitive national and international fellowships, the latest being an NHMRC CDF, and prior to that award an ARC Future Fellowship. He has contributed scientific and review articles to various leading journals in his field, including invited articles in the Emerging Young Investigator issue of Chemical Communications and a Young Talent article in Macromolecular Chemistry and Physics. Professor Thurecht has been chief investigator on grants from various funding bodies, including ARC Discovery grants; ARC Linkage Grants, with both national and international companies; National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) grants; and funding from various cancer foundations. He is co-inventor on 8 patents. He is CI on the ARC Training Centre for Innovation in BioMedical Imaging Technology in which he is theme leader, and is Director of the ARC Research Hub for Advanced Manufacture of Targeted Radiopharmaceuticals.

Professor Guido Zuccon is a Professorial Research Fellow at The University of Queensland, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science School, the AI DIrector for the Queensland Digital Health Centre (QDHeC), an Affiliate Professor at the UQ Centre for Health Services Research, Faculty of Medicine, and an Honorary Reader at Strathclyde University (UK). He leads the Information Engineering Lab (ielab), a research team working in Information Retrieval and Health Data Science. He was an ARC DECRA Fellow (2018-2020).

Guido's main research interests are Information Retrieval, Health Search, Formal Models of Search and Search Interaction, and Health Data Science. He has successfully attracted funding from the ARC via an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award Fellowship and an ARC Discoverty Project. His research has also been funded by Google (Google Research Awards program), Grain Research and Development Corporation (GRDC), Microsoft (Microsoft Azure for Research Award), the CSIRO (research gifts and PhD Students Top-up scholarships), the Australian Academy of Science (FASIC program), the European Science Foundation, and Neusoft Corporation.

Guido has published more than 100 peer-reviewed research articles at conferences and in journals, in information retrieval and health informatics; of these more than 30 are ranked in the top 10% of his filed (field weighted average) and more than 10 are ranked in the top 1%. He has won best papers award at AIRS 2017 (“Automatic Query Generation from Legal Texts for Case Law Retrieval”), CLEF 2016 (“Assessors agreement: A case study across assessor type, payment levels, query variations and relevance dimensions”), ALTA 2015 (“Analysis of Word Embeddings and Sequence Features for Clinical Information Extraction”), and ECIR 2012 (“Top-k retrieval using facility location analysis”). His research on people using search engines to seek health advice on the web has been widely disseminated by the media (190+ national and international newspaper articles, 10+ TV and radio interviews in 2015; see the media page coverage for that project). Guido is the Consumer Health Search task leader for the CLEF eHealth Evaluation Lab, since 2014. He is one of the TREC 2019 Decision Track organisers: this is an international evaluation effort in Information Retrieval that aims to investigate how people use search engines to make decisions (with a focus in 2019 on consumer health search). Guido has provided scientific tutorials to other researchers in his field at ACM SIGIR 2015 and 2018, ACM CIKM 2015, ACM ICTIR 2016, RUSSIR 2018, WSDM 2019.

Guido has reviewed for top journals and conferences in his field, including ACM TOIS, FnTIR, JASIST, IRJ, ACM TIST, ACM TWEB, IP&M, ACM SIGIR,ACM CIKM, ACM ICTIR, ACM WSDM, WWW, ECIR, ACM SIG-PODS. He was awarded the Best Reviewer Award at ECIR 2014. He has served as general chair, program chair, workshop chair and publicity chair for conferences in his research field, including ADCS (either PC Chair or General Chair in 2013, 2014, 2017), AIRS 2015 (General Chair), ECIR 2015 (Workshop Chair) and WSDM 2019 (publicity chair). Dr Zuccon is the Information co-Director for ACM SIGIR and was one of the recognised IR leaders invited to participate to the 3rd Strategic Workshop in Information Retrieval (SWIRL III, 2018).

Before joining the University of Queensland, Guido was a Lecturer (2014-2017) and Senior Lecturer (2017-2018) at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, and a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the Australian E-Health Research Centre (AEHRC), CSIRO (2011-2014), Australia. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Glasgow, UK (2012), focusing on Formal Models of Information Retrieval based on Quantum Theory, and a M.Comp.Eng. summa cum laude at the University of Padova, Italy (2007).

Dr Ebinazar Namdas is an Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Queensland. Dr Namdas has a strong international track record in the field of organic optoelectronics materials and device research across several platforms including organic transistors, light emitting transistors, OLEDS, organic lasers, and photo-sensors. He has published more than 110 papers in top international journals including 15 x Advanced Materials; 4 x Nature Communications; 7 x Advanced Functional Materials; 11 x Advanced Optical Materials; Nature Materials; Nature Photonics; Science; 3 x Laser & Photonics Reviews; 2 x JACS; 5 x ACS Photonics and 10 x Applied Physics Letters. Additionally, he has co-authored the first ever academic textbook on semiconducting and metallic polymers with Nobel Laureate Professor Alan Heeger and Professor Serdar Sariciftci. The book, titled Semiconducting and Metallic Polymers was published by Oxford University Press. Currently, Dr Namdas is an Editorial board member of Communications Materials (nature.com).

Dirk Kroese's research interests are in: Monte Carlo methods, rare-event simulation, the cross-entropy method, applied probability, and randomised optimisation.

Dirk Kroese is a professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the School of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Queensland. He has held teaching and research positions at The University of Texas at Austin, Princeton University, the University of Twente, the University of Melbourne, and the University of Adelaide. His research interests include Monte Carlo methods, adaptive importance sampling, randomized optimization, and rare-event simulation. He has over 120 peer-reviewed publications, including six monographs:

• Rubinstein, R.Y., Kroese, D.P. (2004). The Cross-Entropy Method: A Unified Approach to Combinatorial Optimization, Monte-Carlo Simulation, and Machine Learning, Springer, New York.
• Rubinstein, R. Y. , Kroese, D. P. (2007). Simulation and the Monte Carlo Method, 2nd edition, John Wiley & Sons.
• Kroese, D.P., Taimre, T., and Botev, Z.I. (2011). Handbook of Monte Carlo Methods, Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics, John Wiley & Sons, New York.
• Kroese, D.P. and Chan, J.C.C. (2014). Statistical Modeling and Computation, Springer, New York.
• Rubinstein, R. Y. , Kroese, D. P. (2017). Simulation and the Monte Carlo Method, 3rd edition, John Wiley & Sons.
• Kroese, D.P., Botev, Z.I., Taimre, T and Vaisman, R. (2019) Data Science and Machine Learning: Mathematical and Statistical Methods, Chapman & Hill/CRC.
• Kroese, D.P. and Botev, Z.I. (2023). An Advanced Course in Probability and Stochastic Processes, Chapman & Hill/CRC.

Dr Mitchell Stark is a molecular biologist and Group Leader/Senior Research Fellow from the Dermatology Research Centre (DRC) based at the Frazer Institute. His group has extensive experience in microRNA biology and biomarker discovery, next-generation sequencing, bioinformatics, and functional analysis for a variety of applications. The Stark Lab’s major research streams include: miRNA biomarkers for melanoma progression and the development a Genomics Atlas of pre-skin cancer lesions, which aim to provide insight into the early progression of melanoma and keratinocyte cancer, to aid in preventing invasive skin cancer formation and offer increased precision to the clinical management of patients.

Dr Stark completed his PhD (2015) in melanoma microRNA biomarkers at The Queensland University of Technology based at the QIMR Berghofer (QIMRB) Medical Research Institute. Prior to commencing his PhD, he worked as Senior Research Assistant (since 1999) and was trained and mentored in the Hayward lab (QIMRB) where he contributed to and led some seminal findings in the melanoma genetics/genomics field. Dr Stark joined the DRC in 2015 and in 2016 he was awarded a prestigious NHMRC Peter Doherty Early Career Fellowship to lead a pre-melanoma genomics program. Dr Stark has a career total of 80+ publications (h-index 35) including 1 patent and has published in respected journals such as Nature, Nature Genetics, Cancer Research, and Journal of Investigative Dermatology.