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Pradeep earned his Bachelor of Food Science and Technology from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, in 2008 and later pursued a Master of Science in Biochemistry at Pukyong National University, South Korea, graduating in 2013. He completed his PhD at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), the University of Queensland, in 2019. His doctoral research focused on developing strategies to investigate novel and bioactive microbial secondary metabolites, showcasing his proficiency in detecting, isolating, and characterising small molecules using high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS).

After completing his PhD, Pradeep joined the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, as a postdoctoral research fellow in analytical chemistry. At GEOMAR, his research focused on detecting and identifying small organic molecules in complex matrices using state-of-the-art mass spectrometry-based analytical techniques and non-targeted metabolomic approaches.

In 2020, Pradeep joined the Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences (QAEHS). His current research focuses on understanding the chemical landscape covered by non-target analysis and pioneering methods to enhance the monitoring of human exposure to emerging environmental contaminants.

Dr Tracey Di Sipio is a teaching and research academic in the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Division of the School of Public Health. Dr Di Sipio is an experienced cancer epidemiologist with a focus on women’s cancers, caregivers, and health equity.

I am originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina where I achieved a tertiary level degree as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language. In the year 2000, after completing these studies, I came to Australia as an international student to complete a BA (Hons) in Languages and Applied Linguistics. I then continued my postgraduate studies in the area of critical intercultural language pedagogy. For nearly two decades, I have been involved in teaching across Applied Linguistics, English, Italian and Spanish language programs in Australian higher education. I am a passionate languages and intercultural education scholar whose theoretical and empirical work centre on how insights from critical pedagogy and decolonial theories can help us un/re-learn the ways in which we engage with the world. In my teaching practice, I am committed to creating innovative and inclusive, liberatory learning experiences for language learners and fellow language educators to become critically aware of intersectional, power-bound dynamics in everyday interaction.

Dr Abbey Diaz is a Faculty of Medicine Research Fellow and epidemiologist in the FNCWR team. Her program of work is broadly concerned with the quality and equity of cancer care pathways, particularly for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and for people with, or at risk of, other chronic disease.

Recently, Abbey was part of an investigator team (CID; 2021-2024) awarded a $1 million National Heart Foundation Strategic Grant in Cardio-oncology. Through its work, the team aims to:

• Better understand the risk of adverse cardiovascular events in Australians diagnosed with cancer
• Identify potential high-risk groups and health service gaps
• Understand how cancer treatment decision-making by patients and their health professionals are influenced by their cardiovascular risk.
• Co-design and assess educational resources for patients and health professionals to improve care and outcomes for cancer patients at risk of adverse cardiovascular outcomes.

Abbey is also an investigator on an ARC-funded grant to develop a measure supportive care needs of carers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with cancer (CIJ), a World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) funded grant to pilot an intervention to support cancer patients to reduce exposure to behavioural risk factors (CID), and an MRFF grant to co-design and feasibility test a phase III exercise trial for women with metastatic breast cancer (AI). She led the Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Better Cardiac Care Linkage Study, commissioned by the Queensland Health department, and was an investigator on a Cancer Australia and Department of Health tender to better understand how information on Indigenous status is collected, recorded, reported at all stages of the National Cervical Screening Program.

Abbey's PhD thesis investigated whether the higher comorbidity among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with cancer was associated with lower cancer survival and supportive care needs. Her thesis was undertaken and completed while she was part of the National Indigenous Cervical Screening Project, with her PhD (Charles Darwin University/Menzies School of Health research) awarded in 2018.

Taylor Dick is an Associate Professor in The School of Biomedical Sciences and Director of the Neuromuscular Biomechanics Laboratory within the School of Biomedical Sciences. She leads a highly interdisciplinary research program at the nexus of biomechanics, bio-inspired assistive devices, and neuromuscular physiology. Using a combination of experimental and modelling tools, her research answers fundamental questions about how movement underpins evolution, health, and disease.

Upon completing her PhD in 2016 (Simon Fraser University, Canada), in collaboration with Harvard’s Concord Field Station, she undertook post-doctoral training in biomedical engineering (University of North Carolina, 2016-17) where she combined her expertise in biomechanics and muscle physiology to discover how bio-robotic devices influence locomotor energetics and the neuromechanical mechanisms that enable stability during unexpected perturbations. This has since provided inspiration for the optimization of bio-robotic assistive devices, in response to the behaviour of their physiological targets. In 2017, she was appointed a research and teaching academic at the University of Queensland (UQ) where she has developed a uniquely integrative and multi-disciplinary approach to studying locomotion and neuromuscular function with applications across discovery and translation. Her research program integrates musculoskeletal anatomy, neural control, and biomechanics to understand the diverse movements of humans and animals. By combining high-resolution and innovative experimental paradigms with modelling and simulation techniques, her team, a rich blend of biomechanists, physiologists, mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists, investigates the complex interactions between biological systems that enable the remarkable diversity in human and animal movement.

Taylor has established herself internationally as an emerging leader in biomechanics research. This reputation is supported by prestigious awards, invited talks and review papers, and media attention. Her research has been funded through competitive grant schemes and industry partnerships, with total research support exceeding $3.6 million. Her contributions to research and mentorship have been recognized with a 2024 Queensland Tall Poppy Award, 2024 International Union of Physiologists Junior Faculty Award; 2024 International Society of Electrophysiology and Kinesiology Kevin P. Granata Award, and the 2021 International Society of Biomechanics Jaquelin Perry Emerging Scientist Award. Taylor has been nominated (2020 and 2021) for the Faculty of Medicine Rising Star of the Year Award. Taylor is an elected Executive Council member of the International Society of Biomechanics (ISB) and the elected Chairperson of the Comparative Neuromuscular Biomechanics Technical group. She is a passionate promotor of STEM for young girls—having co-developed the led a government-funded nationwide program to boost girls’ engagement in STEM, BRInC https://www.canberra.edu.au/about-uc/faculties/health/brinc

She currently advises 12 PhD candidates, 1 Master’s student, and 5 Honours students. She has successfully advised 5 PhD, 2 Master’s and 9 Honours students to completion since commencing her faculty position at UQ in 2017.

For more information about her program of research, visit her lab website: https://biomedical-sciences.uq.edu.au/research/groups/neuromuscular-biomechanics

Melissa Dickson joined UQ in July 2023 as a Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the School of Communication and the Arts. Prior to this, Melissa was a Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham in the UK. From 2014 to 2018, Melissa was a Postdoctoral Researcher on ‘The Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspective’, an ERC funded project based at St Anne’s College, Oxford, She has a PhD in English from King's College, London, and an MPhil, BA, and University Medal from the University of Queensland.

Melissa’s research focuses on the relationships between Victorian literature, science, medicine, and material culture, and she has published widely in this area. She is the author of Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), co-author of Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Pittsburgh University Press, 2019) and, co-editor of Progress and Pathology: Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester University Press, 2020). Her current monograph project is a study of the senses and in particular of new ways of listening and thinking about sound in the nineteenth century.

Melissa is currently Co-Investigator of a three-year project funded by the Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe, entitled Media and Epidemics: Technologies of Science Communication and Public Health, which seeks to document, from historical and contemporary as well as trans-disciplinary and trans-regional perspectives, the role of media and technologies of communication in the making and management of epidemic outbreaks.

Melissa is an experienced Masters and PhD supervisor and overseen projects on a range of topics, including child loss in Victorian supernatural fiction, Thomas Hardy and music, animals and the environment in the works of the Brontës, and the condition of women in the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and May Sinclair. She is available to supervise topics projects on Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literature and Science, Literature and Medicine, Medical Humanities, Sound Studies, and Narrative and Consciousness.

Plant viruses and horticultural crop improvement

Dr Dietzgen is internationally recognised for his work on plant virus characterisation, detection and engineered resistance. Before joining UQ, Dr Dietzgen was a Science Leader in Agri-Science in the Queensland Department of Employment, Economic Development and Innovation. He previously held research positions at the University of Adelaide, University of California, Cornell University and University of Kentucky. Dr Dietzgen’s research interests are in molecular virus-plant-insect interactions, virus biodiversity and evolution, and disease resistance mechanisms. His focus is on the biology of RNA viruses in the family Rhabdoviridae and the molecular protein interactions of plant-adapted rhabdoviruses and tospoviruses. He has published extensively on plant virus characterisation and genetic variability, RNAi- mediated virus resistance and diagnostic technologies with 20 review articles and book chapters and over 65 peer-reviewed publications.

Sandra Diminic is a Principal Research Fellow at Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research (QCMHR) and leads the Mental Health Services Research stream. She has qualifications in psychology and public health and her PhD focused on understanding the service needs of carers and families of people with mental illness. Before joining QCMHR Sandra worked on the Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank and interned in Mental Health Policy and Service Development at the World Health Organization; she has also been a visiting scholar at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto.

Sandra's research aims to reduce the population burden of mental illness through understanding demand for and utilisation of mental health services, identifying and evaluating evidence-based mental health service models, and applying these findings to improve mental health systems and services. This research program involves close collaboration with health system partners such as national and state governments, Primary Health Networks, and community organisations to provide evidence and advice to support integrated regional and national mental health service planning. Current major projects include development and application of the National Mental Health Service Planning Framework (NMHSPF) and Australian Suicide Prevention Planning Model (AuSPPM), needs-based planning tools which model population needs and required care to produce resource targets for optimal mental health and suicide prevention service delivery in Australia. Sandra also leads projects drawing on population surveys and health service administrative data to understand current mental health service delivery and identify service gaps for specific regions and populations.

Professor in Clinical Psychology at UQ and affiliate Professor at Nottingham Trent University (UK). Her research focuses on social (non-medical) interventions for mental health such as music, arts and nature based programs.

• Course Convenor:

PSYC7291 Cognitive Behaviour Therapies for Adults

PSYC3102 Psychopathology

• Journals:

Associate Editor, Psychology of Music

• Professional Roles:

Cuture and the Arts on Prescription lead, Australian Social Prescribing Institute for Research and Education (ASPIRE)

Member, Arts Health Network QLD (AHNQ) committee.

I am working as part of an academic team on a project aimed at completing a Phase 1 Clinical Trial using pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes for the treatment of “no-option” end stage heart failure. My primary role in the team is the development of a scalable bioreactor based process for the produciton of pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes. This process has been developed to meet GMP and local regulatory requirements. Ancilliary to this, I have been wokring on the development and validation of safety assays in line with ICH guidelines for the clinical trial.