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Professor Peter Sly is the Director, Children's Health and Environment Program. Professor Sly is a NHMRC Leadership Fellow (L3) and an emeritus paediatric respiratory physician with extensive research experience in respiratory physiology, developmental immunology and children's environmental health. Professor Sly’s research aims to understand the mechanisms underlying chronic childhood lung diseases in order to improve clinical management and to delay or prevent their onset, with consequent reductions in adult lung diseases. A combination of basic science, longitudinal cohort studies and translation of research findings into clinical practice, including clinical trials, are included in three main areas: asthma, cystic fibrosis and children’s environmental health

Professor Sly is an advisor to the World Health Organisation Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Disease and currently serves on International Advisory Boards and committees, including: WHO network of Collaborating Centres in Children’s Environmental Health; Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) Study, Canada; the Infant Lung Health Study, Paarl, South Africa; and A SHARED Future: Achieving Strength, Health, and Autonomy, through Renewable Energy Development for the Future.

RESEARCH INTERESTS Fire Ecology, Restoration Ecology, Ecological Genomics, Wildlife Science, Conservation Biology, Invasive Plants

My research group studies fire ecology and conservation biology. Currently, we are working on:

• Using fire to benefit plant biodiversity and manage invasive plants
• Predicting effects of changing fire regimes on plant-animal interactions
• Native grassland restoration
• Biodiversity in agricultural landscapes

We have a special interest in plants and animals living in fire-prone areas because of the fascinating fact that these ecosystems are never static but continually re-shaped by cycles of fire and regeneration. While being grounded in fundamental biology and ecological theory, our research is always aimed at improving knowledge for biodiversity conservation. Our work has applications in fire management, biological invasion and threatened species conservation.

TECHNICAL APPROACHES: POPULATION GENETICS | SPATIAL LANDSCAPE GENETICS | DEMOGRAPHIC SIMULATION MODELLING | STATISTICAL MODELLING OF POPULATIONS & COMMUNITIES | BIOINFORMATICS | SPATIAL ANALYSIS IN R | We also know how to drop a hand-made 1 x 1 m polypipe quadrat on the ground and do good old-fashioned field work.

TEACHING: I teach ecology, wildlife science and environmental science at UQ. My teaching and coordination activities have included Elements of Ecology (AGRC1032), Wildlife Technology (ANIM3018) and People Fire & Environment (ENVM3215 / ENMV7530).

EDITORIAL I am Associate Editor for Wildlife Letters (2023–)

I was Associate Editor for Journal of Applied Ecology for four years (2018–2022).

CURRICULUM VITAE

• 2019 – current Lecturer, University of Queensland
• 2018 – 2022 Associate Editor, Journal of Applied Ecology
• 2018 – 2019 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, Trinity College Dublin
• 2016 – 2017 Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Trinity College Dublin
• 2015 – 2016 Post-doctoral Research Assistant, University of Melbourne
• 2015 – 2016 Self-employed Consultant Ecologist, Canberra
• 2012 – 2014 Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Australian National University

EDUCATION

2012 PhD in Ecology, Australian National University

2006 BSc in Biodiversity Conservation Honours, Flinders University

2005 BSc in Biodiversity Conservation, Flinders University

Reconciling biodiversity conservation with development pressures is one of the world’s greatest sustainability challenges. This is particularly true given the myriad ways that human wellbeing directly depends on well-functioning ecosystems. My research seeks to understand where, when and how to manage and conserve landscapes, so as to beneift both nature and people. I use land use change models, coupled with remote sensing and GIS datasets, to predict how future development projects (e.g. mines, hydropower dams, transportation infrastructure) will impact biodiversity and ecosystem services. This information allows us to compare the costs and benefits of alternative management interventions and, ultimately, provides the knowledge needed to make more informed decisions. My research benefits from collaborating across disciplines (ecology, economics, engineering) and working alongside government and non-government organizations. I am currently conducting projects in Australia, Brazil and the USA.

I'm a quantitative community ecologist with broad experience across terrestrial and marine systems, modern and geological time, local and global scales with both theoretical and practical focus. I'm driven by discovery, interested in myriad topics on how communities form and function, but particularly how we measure and make comparisons between communities.

• Translating anomaly detection to ecology: In a world experiencing climate change, biodiversity loss and other human impacts, detecting anomalous ecological systems accurately and early potentially offers vast benefits to conservation and ecosystem management. Anomaly detection is a fast-moving area of research applied in fields as varied as banking fraud detection, cybersecurity and cancer diagnosis. These fields deal with data as complex and incomplete as ecology, but we haven't plumbed this expertise for benefits to ecology. This is the primary focus of my DECRA.
• Grounding ecological novelty for practical use: Ecologists have been talking about novel systems for twenty years, and related topics (such as "no-analog systems") for even longer. Despite well-cited work on how "novel" can be a useful label for ecological restoration, there's a mismatch between management frameworks, which often use ad-hoc qualitative criteria, and quantitative novelty research, which has been mostly performed at global scales. Understanding how to measure novelty, how analytic choices affect measurements, and how to downscale our inferences to be practicable, has been a focus for me and my colleagues.
• The linguistic evolution of programming languages: The use of scientific programming languages like R, Python and Julia are becoming not only popular, but mandatory skills for researchers. The utility of these languages has been improved by new versions and a plethora of community-created addon packages. This approximates features of natural language evolution, where lexicon changes over time. Understanding the speed and direction of how programming languages evolve can give us a unique insight into how humans learn and alter languages, and how we might ensure they remain understandable into the future. I am currently using GitHub as a vast repository of time-stamped programming “texts”, ripe for linguistic analysis.
• Community ecology through the lens of functional traits: It doesn’t matter who you are, it matters what you do. That applies to organisms too. Despite decades of research into how physiology and life history strategy, often proxied through easy-to-measure “functional traits”, functional ecology is still more niche than it should be. Currently my colleagues and I are exploring how a functional lens alters ecological novelty, but I am always thinking about ecology in the light of how organisms live.

Dr Phong Thai is an ARC Mid-Career Industry Fellow. Phong joined Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences (QAEHS) in 2018 after his Vice Chancellor Senior Research Fellowship at the International Laboratory of Air Quality and Health at Queensland University of Technology. His research focus at QAEHS involves the expansion of wastewater-based epidemiological approach to estimate community consumption and exposure to a range of licit and illicit substances including tobacco and alcohol, pharmaceuticals and as well as the monitoring of community infection to Covid-19 during the last pandemic. He is a member of the team who manage the National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program.

Phong is also working on projects monitoring occurence, fate and transport of environmental pollutants in different matrices. He has lso far ed or contributed to several exciting projects totalling > A$ 15 millions.

Professor Kevin Thomas is Director of the Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences (QAEHS). Kevin is an environmental health scientist with a particular interest in understanding the environmental exposures associated with contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) with the goal of protecting environmental and human health. Kevin also leads the Minderoo Centre- Plastics and Human Health at UQ and is Deputy-Director of the Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Hyphenated Analytical Separation Technologies (HyTech).

His current research is focused on understanding human exposure to plastics pollution and developing mass spectrometric analytical methods for characterizing plastics and other CECs, assessing community-wide health status through analysing wastewater (wastewater-based epidemiology) and establishing alternative approaches to exposure monitoring, for example explanted silicone prostheses and wristbands.

Author of over 300 peer-reviewed papers and Associate Editor for the journal Science of the Total Environment, Kevin is a strong collaborative researcher having founded the international SCORE network on sewer biomarker analysis for community health assessment (see www.score-network.eu) and together with colleagues has recently launched InSpectra- A platform for identifying emerging chemical threats.

Associate Professor Ryan Turner is the Director of the Reef Catchments Science Partnership at the University of Queensland (a partnership with the Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation). Ryan was previously the Department's Principal Scientist for Water Quality and Investigations and held an Adjunct Associate Professor role at Queensland University of Technology in the Managing for Resilient Landscapes, Institute for Future Environments. For 14 years, Ryan managed multimillion-dollar water quality monitoring programs assessing the impacts of sediments, nutrients, and pesticides in numerous catchments along the Queensland coast discharging to the Great Barrier Reef and Moreton Bay. Ryan has been on several steering committees and technical advisory panels, such as the Great Barrier Reef Foundations Technical Advisory Panel. He has published extensively (>80 papers and reports) and led several Queensland Government – Academic collaborative research projects. Ryan previously supervised analytical chemistry and microbiology laboratories in the private and public sectors. Ryan has developed numerous methodologies and standard operating procedures for analytical and monitoring techniques (water quality, sediments and soils). Ryan’s passion for the future of water security is what keeps him striving forward.

Corinne seeks to understand the organizing practices and processes that gradually and invisibly create risks that can worsen over time to become catastrophic. These ‘insidious risks’ were the focus of Corinne’s PhD in the UQ Business School where she identified three ways, on a spectrum of ways these risks are managed: blinkered, law-abiding and attentive. With more than 30 years’ experience in the mining sector, government, consulting and research, Corinne built upon her earth sciences background in mine rehabilitation and closure to become a qualitative researcher through her PhD. This provided a new lens and insights on how organisations manage elongated insidious risks, not only for mine affected water and land disturbance in mining but also during the progressive failure of the insurance market for extreme weather, in her postdoctoral research. In a voluntary capacity Corinne formed and led an ISO standards working group to finalise ISO 24419 Managing Mining Legacies in 2023 providing the first international standard on this topic together with case studies and a bibliography. She represents AusIMM in her standards work. Since 2019 Corinne has been a Board Member of the Victorian Government’s Mine Land Rehabilitation Authority providing oversight for three brown coal mine closures in the Latrobe Valley. Prior to her PhD Corinne developed the field of research in managing abandoned/legacy mines in the Centre for Mined Land Rehabilitation, SMI following her Churchill Fellowship research in 2009.

I obtained my first degree in Psychology (Experimental & Theoretical) from Ghent University in Belgium and completed a Ph.D. in Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Groningen. Following a postdoc at NeuRa in Sydney and a few years lecturing on psychology at the Australian Catholic University, I chose to shift my research focus to environmental issues, and how they affect individual and collective human health and wellbeing. I gained experience with grassroots commmunity conservation projects as a volunteer and completed the interdisciplinary MSc in Conservation Science at Imperial College London in 2016. I was a researcher at Imperial's Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College from 2017-2021. My research is now broadly focused on the human dimensions of environmental change, with a particular interest in how people (emotionally) connect with nature, determinants of pro-environmental behaviour, the health and wellbeing benefits of nature exposure and the mental health impacts of climate change.

Denys Villa Gomez holds a joint appointment at the University of Queensland as Senior Lecturer at the School of Civil Engineering and as a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology. She obtained her PhD at the world-leading institute’s IHE-Delft/Wageningen University, The Netherlands in 2013. She applies advanced methodologies such as omics approaches and micro spectral tools to develop biotechnology processes that reduce carbon emissions and recover resources from mine waste and wastewater. She is the leader of the key area “Synbio Mining” within the recently created UQ Biosustainability Hub and chief investigator at the ARC Training Centre in Critical Resources for the Future. She has published over 40 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers cited more than 500 times, and has served as editor and reviewer for leading journals and advisory roles in industry and scientific committees (e.g. International Mine Water Association).

Teaching and Learning:

• Course coordinator and lecturer for Introduction to Environmental Engineering (CIVL2135)
• Course coordinator and lecturer for Environmental Phenomena (ENVE3160)
• Lecturer in Integrated Design for Environmental Management (CIVL4516)
• Lecturer in Sustainable Built Environment (CIVL4180)

Dr Bernardino Virdis is Senior Researcher in Environmental Biotechnology at the Australian Centre for Water and Environmental Biotechnology (ACWEB). He completed his PhD in Chemical Engineering in 2010 investigating energy recovery from waste materials. The approaches used in Dr Virdis’ research draw on a range of expertise including environmental microbiology, microbial ecology, chemical engineering, material science, spectroscopy, electrochemistry and microbial catalysis, which he applies to develop sustainable biotechnologies for the treatment and reuse of waste streams. Dr Virdis publishes in major outlets in environmental science and technology, including the prestigious ISME Journal, Energy and Environmental Science, ChemSusChem, Water Research, Environmental Science & Technology, and more.

James is an applied conservation scientist and bioegeographer working at the interface between ecology, policy and management to improve outcomes for biodiversity. He has a particular interest in understanding how humanity influences landscape and the climate, and what this means for biodiversity and ecosystem service outcomes, and the implications of this for environmental policy setting and management.

As a Professor of Conservation Science at The University of Queensland, he leads two research groups. The Green Fire Science research group (www.greenfirescience.com) mission is to do applied research that is linked directly to the practice of large-scale conservation and the Research and Recovery of Endangered Species (https://raresgroup.com.au) mission is to focus on Australia's rarest, least studied species to try and work out their needs and work with those on-ground practioners to try and save them.

James has been passionate conservation for decades. As a Rhodes Scholar, James undertook his PhD research studying in Madagascar, trying to come up with conservation plans to save endemic bird species inhabiting the country’s remaining littoral forest. Since then he has published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters and reports on conservation related matters, ranging from assessing the impacts of climate change on species to mapping the effectiveness of protected areas on biodiversity conservation outcomes globally. He has served on the International Panel for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Data and Knowledge Task Force, and is a Research Fellow for the United Nation’s Environment Program, a Senior Technical expert for the United Nations Development Program’s Global Programme on Nature for Development, and was the founding chair of the International Union for Nature Conservation Climate Change Specialist Group. James sits on the scientific committees of BirdLife Australia and SUBAC. James was global president of the Society for Conservation Biology in 2015-17.

I am also an affiliated researcher at the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. habil Franzisca Weder, Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Brisbane (Australia), is researching, writing and teaching in the areas of Organizational Communication and Public Relations with a specific focus on Sustainability Communication and Corporate Social Responsibility.

She worked as Guest Professor at University of Alabama (USA), University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (GER), University of Waikato (NZ), RMIT (Melbourne, AUS) and University of Ilmenau (GER).

Franzisca Weder is Chair of the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA) -> check this out (and become a member :-): https://www.theieca.org

Curious about her work? check…

• her eco-culture jamming
• her sustainability related conversations with artists and campaigners
• one of her papers on Sustainability and Storytelling
• one of her books
  • on Sustainability Communication: THE SUSTAINABILITY COMMUNICATION READER
  • on integrated CSR Communication: INTEGRATED CSR COMMUNICATION
  • or (in case you speak German..) on Organizational Communication and PR
• or other recent papers:
  • on how (much) Covid made us more sustainable
  • on sustainability as cognitive friction https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2020.00008/full
  • or on antagonistic framing and CSR Communication https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/CCIJ-01-2018-0014/full/html
  • or (in case you speak German), her ideas on cultures of sustainability

Dr Han Weng is an emerging global leader in soil carbon research. His track record of interdisciplinary, innovative and high-quality research is outstanding for his early career stage. Dr Weng has 20 peer-reviewed papers (eight published since joining UQ in 2020) featuring in the highest impact journals of his research field, particularly those focused on environmental sciences and soil science. His first-author publications feature in Nature Climate Change (IF 25.3), Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology (IF 12.6), Science of the Total Environment (IF 8.0), and Soil Biology and Biochemistry (IF 7.6). To date, he has been cited over 530 times, and has an h-index of 10, and has a Field-Weighted Citation Impact factor of 2.82 (SciVal). This indicates that his papers are being cited 2.82 times more than the world average for publications of the same age and discipline. His achievement also includes one Highly Cited Paper as the first author in Nature Climate Change, which ranks in the top 1% in the field of environmental sciences, and the most downloaded article in 2021 (10,419 times) in Global Change Biology Bioenergy (IF 4.8).

Dr Weng has challenged the existing body of research on soil carbon. His research fills an important gap for maintaining agricultural productivity and mitigating climate change in the absence of a clear national strategy for agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Dr Weng’s outstanding contribution to the food and agriculture sector has been recognised through cross-disciplinary awards and competitive prizes, including 2014 Soil Science Australia Best oral presentation under 35 years of age and 2016 New Initiative Grant Research Fellow, Charles Sturt University.

My research focusses on soil health in cropping and pasture systems, specialising in soil carbon and soil organic matter dynamics, microbial ecology, and plant-soil interactions. I am interested in how agronomic interventions impact soil health and in developing methods to reverse soil fertility decline and build healthier, more productive soils. This includes understanding the impacts of tillage, cover cropping, crop rotational diversity, nutrient management, and organic amendments on soil functional processes and crop development and productivity.

I have extensive experience in designing and analyzing field and glasshouse experiments and implementing advanced statistical models using R. I have excellent verbal and written communication skills, maintain positive relationships with collaborators both nationally and internationally, and publish manuscripts in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Stephanie Wyeth is the Professional Planner in Residence and Senior Lecturer within the Planning Program, and Director of Engagement for the School of Architecture, Design and Planning.

Stephanie is an experienced urban and social planning practitioner with significant research, project and leadership experience in the public and private sectors. She joined The University of Queensland in 2019 following several years as a Director with a multidisciplinary planning and design firm, where she led projects focussed on complex social, urban planning and development issues. Her motivation for joining academia is a belief that a values-led and practice intensive university experience is critical if the next generation of urban planning professionals are to be equipped with the skills, knowledge and mindsets to lead, sustained positive change in our cities, towns and communities.

As a pracademic, Stephanie seeks to bridge the theory – practice divide, by promoting the exchange of knowledge, ideas and capabilities across university, industry and community. She regularly facilitates and brokers opportunities for the university’s world-leading researchers to share their expertise with government and community for projects with a strong public interest focus. Stephanie is regularly invited to join advisory forums and judging panels, and to speak at industry and community events.

Between 2016 – 2022 Stephanie served as a Non-Executive Director on the Board of the South Bank Corporation. In 2020 she was appointed a Fellow of the Planning Institute of Australia for services to the profession. Her most recent panel appointments include Logan Urban Design Awards, Lord Mayor’s Business Awards (Brisbane), and an advisory committee for a national design project.

Memberships

• Planning Institute of Australia
• Committee for Brisbane

Teaching Responsibilities

PLAN1000 The Planning Challenge (Course Coordinator and Lecturer – 2019 to date)

PLAN1100 Foundational Ideas in Planning (Course Coordinator and Lecturer – 2019 to 2024)

PLAN4001/PLAN7120 Citymaking: Theory and Practice (Course Coordinator and Lecturer – 2020-2022)

PLAN4100 Advanced Planning Practice (Course Coordinator and Lecturer – 2021 to date)

PLAN4130 | PLAN7130 Planning Industry Placements (Course Coordinator and Lecturer – 2019 to February 2025 (Semesters 1, 2 and Summer)

ADPS3300 | ADPS7300 Industry Placement (Course Coordinator and Lecturer - 2025 to date)

ENVM3103 Regulatory Frameworks for Environmental Management and Planning (Guest lecturer 2021-2023)

Various guest lectures providing insights into urban planning, employability and planning practice.

Student supervision for PHD, Honours and research projects

Awards

2022 Teaching Award - Planning Program, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences

2022 Staff Award, Organisation of Planning Students

Service and Engagement

Director of Engagement – School of Architecture, Design and Planning (2023 to date)

Academic Program Advisor for Bachelor of Regional and Town Planning (2021 to date)

Deputy Director of Engagement School of Earth and Environmental Sciences (2022 – 2023)

Co-founder and Director of UQ City Impact Lab (2021 to date)

Research Affiliate – UQ Sustainable Infrastructure Research Hub (since 2022)

Member - UQ Community Engagement Community of Practice – Leadership Group (since 2023)

Planning Institute of Australia (Qld) - Fellow

Dr. Ayaho Yamamoto is the Group Leader of Laboratory Science at the Children's Health and Environmental Program and is a research fellow in the field of Biomedical Science. Her research focuses on understanding the mechanistic links between environmental exposures and adverse respiratory outcomes. In particular, she focuses on the cellular responses following air pollution exposure and/or viral infection on human respiratory epithelium, and the age differences in immune defence mechanisms. Investigate on early intervention strategies with dietary antioxidants to improve respiratory health and reduce the risk of long-term chronic diseases.

Dr. Yamamoto has a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Health and Public Health; her research focused on childhood asthma. She has a Master of Science in Biomedical Science and Pharmacology; the research focus was to understand the mechanisms and to test new drugs for osteoporosis and chondrosarcomas metastasis. She has worked in a Uni-based start-up company for drug development.

Dr Liu Ye is is a Professor at The University of Queensland (UQ) in the School of Chemical Engineering. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and a Fellow of International Water Association (IWA). Dr Ye’s research is focused on sustainable environmental engineering and is dedicated to finding innovative and practical solutions to tackle challenges in achieving net zero emissions, climate resilience, and sustainability. She is the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) research program leader at UQ urban water engineering. She has an established national and international leadership in the research field of net-zero emissions from urban wastewater systems. Prof Ye has been awarded over AU$10M competitive research funding and has a broad research collaboration within academia and industry. She collaborated extensively with water industry partners (> 15, both Australia and overseas water utilities), Australian state Government, Industry peak bodies (Water Services Association of Australia (WSAA), Water Research Australia (WarterRA)) and Technology companies (e.g., Jacob, Suez, Veolia). She has also received more than eight scientific awards (including Research Innovation Award from Australia Water Association, UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award, etc.), and the EAIT faculty teaching excellence award. She is an elected member in the Strategic Council of IWA and also a member of the Australia Association for Engineering Education (AAEE) and Engineers Australia (EA). She current servers as the Associate editor of Environmental Science: Water Research and Technology and in the Editorial board of Engineering journal.

Research:

Liu’s research includes greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and mitigation from biological wastewater treatment processes; sludge minimization and biogas production enhancement; advanced biological nutrient removal (BNR) technology development; on-line process control and optimisation and resource recovery from wastes.

Teaching and Learning:

CHEE2020: Process Equipment and Control (Coordinator and Lecturer);

ENGG1100: Professional Engineering (Lecturer);

CHEE2501: Environmental Systems Engineering I: Processes (Lecturer);

CHEE4012: Industrial Wastewater & Solid Waste Management (Lecturer);

CHEE4007/4027 CHEE7340/7380/7382 : Thesis project;