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Venero has published two collections of short stories and eleven novels, four of which have been published internationally. In 2002 his novel The Volcano won Best Australian Fiction Book in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, and the same novel was shortlisted for the Courier Mail Book of the Year Award. Two years earlier his novel Firehead was shortlisted in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. His latest novel, The Crying Forest, was published in 2022. His short stories have been anthologised internationally, including publications in Barcelona, Hungary, Canada and Serbia. As well as writing for adults, Venero has three illustrated books for younger readers. Also a scriptwriter, Veny has worked with a number of production companies, including Tristram Miall Films (Strictly Ballroom, Children of the Revolution, Looking for Alibrandi) and Liberty Films (Fire, Medivac, The Day of the Roses, The Loves of Lionel's Life), on film adaptations of his novels.

Looking ahead, Venero has four new novellas, an anthology, and a new novel contracted for publication in late 2024 through 2025 and 2026.

Nigel is public health and health services researcher with interests and expertise in quantitative research methods, epidemiology, evidence-based health care, clinical trials, and digital health. He is a member of the Improving health outcomes after musculoskeletal injury group at the RECOVER Injury Research Centre, and is a chief investigator of the NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence in Better Outcomes for Compensable Injury. His work focusses on the epidemiology and burden of minor to moderate injuries, longitudinal data analyses of intervention trial data, population studies of health-related quality of life and chronic pain, and the potential of digital heath for assessment and intervention following injury.

Nigel has particular interests in new innovations in healthcare, and has previously worked in minimally-invasive surgical trials in gynaecology, and clinical trials assessing the feasibility, efficacy and effectiveness of clinical telemedicine in paediatric healthcare. His doctorate work (Awarded 2011, UQ School of Medicine) involved the design, development, and clinical/cost/acceptability evaluation of real-time telemedicine for acute consultation between a tertiary neonatal intensive care unit and four peripheral referring hospitals in Queensland. He maintains an active research interest in telemedicine, and more broadly in digital health. Between 2004 and 2015, Nigel was involved in the telepaediatric service at the Royal Children's, and the Lady Cilento Children's hospitals in Brisbane where he also co-ordinated an Indigenous Ear Health Screening Program. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare and an academic editor for PLOS ONE.

Nigel regularly participates in national and international grant review panels, and is an active HDR and occupational-trainee supervisor. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and the Royal Society for Public Health (FRSPH), a member of the Australian Epidemiological Association (AEA), International Epidemiological Association (IEA), the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science (AIMOS), and is a qualified Justice of the Peace, JP (qual).

Dr Danielle Armour is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Queensland. She has cultural links to Kamilaroi Country in Northern NSW through her paternal Grandmother. Danielle’s research area is in Aboriginal education, and she has been involved in longitudinal mathematical research projects. Her research explores the complexities of working in between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems particularly in education settings. Danielle has expertise in working with community to ensure culturally responsive pedagogies are included in the school setting. Through this work, Danielle has had the opportunity to co-design research projects with Elders and community members. Prior to undertaking a role within the university sector, Danielle worked as a teacher both within urban and very remote settings.

Dr Aurelia Armstrong’s research interests include: history of philosophy; Spinoza; Nietzsche; Foucault; Modern European philosophy; Social and Political philosophy; Ethics; and Gender studies.

Dr Armstrong holds a BA(Hons) from Australian National University, 1992 and PhD, from the University of Sydney, 1998. She is currently a Lecturer in Philosophy at UQ.

She teaches in the following courses: PHIL2500 Philosophy and Art; PHIL2300 Phenomenology and Existentialism; PHIL2013 Rise of Modern Philosophy; PHIL3002 Philosophy Today; PHIL3620 Advanced European Philosophy; PHIL3630 Advanced Moral and Political Philosophy.

Dr Armstrong's current research focuses on Spinoza's contribution to the affective turn in ethics and politics.

Dr Robert Armstrong has 14 years' experience among the fields of ecohydrological and agriculture systems research. He joined the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI) in 2015 as a postdoctoral research fellow. He currently works with an esteemed team of UQ researchers on a major national initiative; Analytics for the Australian Grains Industry (AAGI). The AAGI project includes three strategic partners: Curtin University, University of Queensland, and University of Adelaide along with the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC). AAGI aims to harness quantitative analytics to drive the Australian agricultural sector’s profitability and global competitiveness.

Dr Armstrong's prior researach, involved leading an esteemed team of QAAFI researchers (2015-2023) and nationally based agronomic managers (2020-2023) in the development of a predictive modelling simulation framework for evaluating phenological and environmental conditions that can result in late-maturity alpha-amylase incidence that affects susceptible wheat genotypes.

Dr Armstrong's research interests include: quantitative geospatial and statistical analysis of climate and land surface data using geographical information systems (GIS), quantitative analysis of remotely sensed imagery; statistical and graphical programming, climate impacts and risks related to agricultural production, hydrological and flood hazard analysis of complex Canadian Prairie environments, and scaling impacts on terrain analysis for hydrological applications.

Dr Armstrong received his Doctoral Degree in 2011 from the University of Saskatchewan (B Sc, M Sc, Ph D), Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. This research specialised in land surface and hydrological parameterisation and spatial variability in land surface evaporation modelling. From 2011-2014 he was awarded an NSERC Visiting Fellowship with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan).

Rebecca is a Lecturer in Speech Pathology at the University of Queensland, and she has a particular clinical and research interest in paediatric populations. Clinically, Rebecca has experience working with school-age children, and she is passionate about sharing her interest and expertise in this area through her teaching and research aspirations. Rebecca’s teaching and research focuses on a range of paediatric areas of speech pathology practice, including speech, language, literacy and special needs in communication (including children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Developmental Language Disorders). To date, Rebecca has presented at national and international conferences and also has published in peer-reviewed journals published in the areas of Autism Spectrum Disorders, and also population-based research examining the early life predictors and long-term outcomes of language impairment.

Urska Arnautovska is an early career clinical academic, working as a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, Faculty of Medicine and as a general psychologist in private practice. Following her professional training in Slovenia, she focused her research on suicide which led her to receiving an appointment at the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention (AISRAP), a World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Suicide Prevention and, since 2008, a National Centre of Excellence in Suicide Prevention. In addition to her research work, she acted as a research coordinator of the Life Promotion Clinic and was involved in the management and analysis of clinical data pertaining to the patients of the clinic, which presented with complex mental health problems and suicidal thoughts and behaviour. Her subsequent research remained focused on mental health, and in more recent years, become dedicated to improving health outcomes in people with severe mental illness. Her PhD, for which she received a competitive Griffith University International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (2012-2016), investigated the motivational processes underlying physical activity in older adults and was awarded the Australian Psychology Society (APS) Award for Excellent Higher Degree Thesis in Health Psychology. She has 48 peer-reviewed publications and has over $8.5 million in competitive research funding, with leading (CIA) roles on projects related to digital health interventions for people living with schizophrenia.

Prof. Derek Arnold

Prof. Arnold studied at Macquarie University before taking up research positions at the University of Sydney and University College London. He took up a continuing position at the University of Queensland in April, 2006.

Joshua earned his undergraduate degree in Engineering (Software) from the University of Queensland. He began his research career developing social behaviours for a rat sized robot (the iRat) to facilitate interactions between the robot and real rats. Joshua completed his PhD in computational neuroscience under the mentorship of Prof. Janet Wiles. This work focused on the role of time in neural computation and in particular focused on how delays between neurons can be used as a functional learning rule. He then joined the Scott Lab at the Queensland Brain Institute where his work focuses on computational models of brain-wide calcium imaging data from the zebrafish model.

Nicholas Aroney is Professor of Constitutional Law at The University of Queensland, Director (Public Law) of the Centre for Public, International and Comparative Law and a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Law and Religion at Emory University. In 2010 he received a four-year Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council to study comparative federalism and in 2021 he secured an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant to investigate the nature and function of constituent power in federal systems. He has held visiting positions at Oxford, Cambridge, Paris II, Edinburgh, Durham, Padua, Sydney, Emory and Tilburg universities.

Professor Aroney has published over 160 journal articles, book chapters and books in the fields of constitutional law, comparative constitutional law and legal theory. He has led several international research projects in comparative federalism, bicameralism, legal pluralism, and law & religion, and he speaks frequently at international conferences on these topics. His most notable publications in these fields include: The Constitution of a Federal Commonwealth: The Making and Meaning of the Australian Constitution (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Shari'a in the West (Oxford University Press, 2010) (edited with Rex Ahdar), The Future of Australian Federalism (Cambridge University Press, 2012) (edited with Gabrielle Appleby and Thomas John), The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia: History, Principle and Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 2015) (with Peter Gerangelos, James Stellios and Sarah Murray), Courts in Federal Countries (Toronto University Press, 2017) (edited with John Kincaid), The Routledge Handbook of Subnational Constitutions and Constitutionalism (Routledge 2021) (edited with Patricia Popelier and Giacomo Delledone) and Christianity and Constitutionalism (Oxford University Press, 2022) (edited with Ian Leigh).

Professor Aroney is a former editor of The University of Queensland Law Journal (2003-2005) and International Trade and Business Law Annual (1996-1998), and a past secretary of the Australian Society of Legal Philosophy. He is a past member of the Governing Council and the current Co-Convenor of the Queensland Chapter of the Australian Association of Constitutional Law. He is also a member of the editorial advisory board of the American Journal of Jurisprudence, Public Law Review, Australian Journal of Law and Religion and International Trade and Business Law Review. He has made numerous influential submissions to government and parliamentary inquiries and in 2013 undertook a review of the Crime and Misconduct Act for the Queensland Government with the Hon Ian Callinan AC QC, a former Justice of the High Court of Australia. In 2017 he was appointed by the Australian Prime Minister to an Expert Panel to advise on whether Australian law adequately protects the human right to freedom of religion.

Professor Aroney joined the Law School in 1995 after working with a major national law firm and acting as a legal consultant in the field of building and construction law.

Dr Ida Asadi Someh is a senior lecturer in the Business Information Systems discipline at the UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, Australia, and a research affiliate at the Centre for Information Systems Research (CISR), MIT Sloan School of Management, US. Her research focuses on organizational and societal impact of data, analytics and artificial intelligence. She completed her PhD in 2015 at The University of Melbourne and was awarded the best PhD thesis in Melbourne School of Engineering, and the Vice Chancellor’s PhD Prize at The University of Melbourne.

Ida teaches business analytics in undergraduate and postgraduate information systems programs. She previously has taught databases and data warehousing to both computing and information systems students.

Prof David Ascher is currently an NHMRC Investigator, immediate past Director of the Biotechnology Program, and Deputy Associate Dean (Research Partnerships) in the Faculty of Science at the University of Queensland. He is also Head of Computational Biology and Clinical Informatics at the Baker Institute.

David’s research focus is in modelling biological data to gain insight into fundamental biological processes. One of his primary research interests has been developing tools to unravel the link between genotype and phenotype, using computational and experimental approaches to understand the effects of mutations on protein structure and function. His group has developed a platform of over 40 widely used programs for assessing the molecular consequences of coding variants (>7 million hits/year).

Working with clinical collaborators in Australia, Brazil and UK, these methods have been translated into the clinic to guide the diagnosis, management and treatment of a number of hereditary diseases, rare cancers and drug resistant infections.

David has a B.Biotech from the University of Adelaide, majoring in Biochemistry, Biotechnology and Pharmacology and Toxicology; and a B.Sci(Hon) from the University of Queensland, majoring in Biochemistry, where he worked with Luke Guddat and Ron Duggleby on the structural and functional characterization of enzymes in the branched-chain amino acid biosynthetic pathway. David then went to St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research to undertake a PhD at the University of Melbourne in Biochemistry. There he worked under the supervision of Michael Parker using computational, biochemical and structural tools to develop small molecules drugs to improve memory.

In 2013 David went to the University of Cambridge to work with Sir Tom Blundell on using fragment based drug development techniques to target protein-protein interactions; and subsequently on the structural characterisation of proteins involved in non-homologous DNA repair. He returned to Cambridge in 2014 to establish a research platform to characterise the molecular effects of mutations on protein structure and function- using this information to gain insight into the link between genetic changes and phenotypes. He was subsequently recruited as a lab head in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Melbourne in 2016, before joining the Baker Institute in 2019 and the University of Queensland in 2021.

He is an Associate Editor of PBMB and Fronteirs in Bioinformatics, and holds honorary positions at Bio21 Institute, Cambridge University, FIOCRUZ, and the Tuscany University Network.