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Dr Aaron Ghiloni is the author of Islam as Education: Pedagogies of Pilgrimage, Prophecy, and Jihad (2019) and John Dewey among the Theologians (2012). He is the editor of World Religions and their Missions (2015), a comparative religion textbook now in a second edition (2022). He is Associate Editor of the journal Religious Education.

Dr Ghiloni has research interests in Islam, Christianity, interreligious studies, John Dewey, and education–religion dialogues.

Dr Ghiloni has taught the following subjects within UQ’s Studies in Religion discipline: History of the Supernatural, Belief and Unbelief, World Religions, Spirituality in the Everyday, and Western Religious Thought from the Middle Ages to the Present. He supervises doctoral students working in religion and culture.

I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Applied Artificial Intelligence in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Queensland.

My research spans in Affective Computing and Human Behaviour Understanding using Computer Vision and Machine Learning techniques. I have prior experience in working with multimodal data such as image, video, text and physiological signals. I am pursuing research in Human Behaviour Understanding, Affective Computing, Human Centred AI, Rehabilitation Robotics in different real-world applications.

Prior to my appointment at The University of Queensland, I was a Research Fellow and Lecturer Human-Centric AI Group in School of Electrical Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Curtin University.

If you are prospective PhD student interested in studying for a PhD at UQ, see here.

Dr Giacomotto, NHMRC Emerging Leader, is a young group leader focusing on translational research, genes and diseases, imaging/automatic systems, drug discovery, chemical biology, and medical applications. His work focuses on translating little discoveries made in a single cell or in a model organism to applications or treatments for humans. He has already made discoveries that benefit human health, such as treatment for muscular dystrophies. He is working with a wide diversity of models, including cell lines and mouse models, but he recently spent a lot of time working with the zebrafish model. He believes that this small fish will have an important impact on the seek of treatments for neuromuscular and neurological disorders. Those diseases are very difficult to reproduce in a single cell, making the search for chemical treatments difficult. This fish opens a new avenue for the screening of bioactive compounds and for understanding the progression of these terrible disorders. He believes in translational research, the zebrafish is for him a fantastic complementary model to cell lines in order to recapitulate human diseases and run large-scale experiments. He is working on developing future therapeutical strategies to alleviate the suffering of human patients.

Dr Giacomotto recently established his group at Griffith Research Institute for Drug Discovery (Discovery Biology, Griffith University) and remain an active honorary fellow of the Queensland Brain Institute (The University of Queensland). Dr Giacomotto is currently recruiting. Don't hesitate to contact him for further information.

Dr Giacomotto Laboratory Website

Badin is an environmental engineer with over 20 years’ experience in environmental hydrology and water resource engineering. In his current role with the University of Queensland’s School of Civil Engineering he leads a program of research that aims to support the sustainable management of water resources and aquatic ecosystems. This research seeks to quantify water flows and the associated transport of sediment and contaminants in environmental systems ranging from upland rivers and streams to lakes, estuaries and the near-coastal ocean as well as their connected groundwater systems. Badin employs a multi-disciplinary approach that combines the application of innovative environmental monitoring with a range of models to better understand how different factors influence water quality and ecosystem health in these systems.

Prior to joining the University of Queensland, Badin was active in engineering and environmental management roles within various local government, state government, not-for-profit and professional engineering consulting organisations. He applies this past industry experience in his current research activities, which are characterised by close collaboration with water management agencies, to deliver scientific information to support management decisions.

Badin also maintains an active involvement in the University of Queensland’s undergraduate and post-graduate teaching programs where he delivers lectures in various subjects including environmental engineering, hydrology, environmental risk assessment and modelling of surface water and groundwater systems. The experience gained in these roles enables him to communicate complex environmental information with a level of detail appropriate to a range of different audiences from community stakeholders to the engineering profession and regulatory agencies. Badin also supervises a number of post-graduate and undergraduate students who are pursuing research in the area of environmental hydrology and contaminant transport, with many focusing on the implications of forecast climate shifts on water resource management decisions.

Professor Kristen Gibbons is Group Lead of the Children’s Intensive Care Research Program at the Child Health Research Centre, The University of Queensland, Co-Chair of the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society Paediatric Study Group (ANZICS PSG).

Professor Gibbons holds qualifications in mathematics, information technology, biostatistics, and research communication, and completed her PhD in Biostatistics at UQ. Her career has been dedicated to transforming outcomes for critically ill children through the design and delivery of large-scale international clinical trials and the development of innovative digital platforms to support high-quality research.

She has been instrumental in leading landmark studies, including the NITRIC trial, the largest trial ever undertaken in paediatric congenital heart disease surgery. This trial demonstrated no benefit of using nitric oxide during cardiopulmonary bypass, changing clinical practice internationally and influencing guidance from the American Academy of Paediatrics. Alongside this, Professor Gibbons has pioneered a comprehensive clinical trials digital platform now used across more than 20 projects and 10,000 patient records worldwide.

Professor Gibbons’ research spans clinical trial methodologies, epidemiology, machine learning, prediction modelling, and bioethics, with a strong commitment to improving consent practices in paediatric and adult intensive care research. Her leadership has attracted over $22 million in competitive grant funding, including major NHMRC and MRFF awards, and her contributions have been recognised with the UQ Faculty of Medicine Leader of the Future Award (2023) and the Child Health Research Centre Collaborator of the Year Award (2024).

She is also deeply invested in training and mentoring the next generation of clinician-researchers and data scientists, supervising PhD, Masters, and biostatistics students.

Dr. Nicholas Gibbons an open-source programmer and numerical simulations expert presently employed as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland. His research interests include numerical simulation of compressible turbulence, high-temperature effects in re-entry flows, and the fluid dynamics of electrically charged plasmas. By applying this research to practical problems in space engineering and aeronautical design, he hopes to play a small part in an exciting future of space travel.

Dr Rosemary Gibson is a Lecturer at the TC Beirne School of Law, teaching in the Law of Contract and International Maritime Trade Law. Dr Gibson's PhD thesis concerned powers to terminate commercial contracts for breach.

Dr Gibson is also an experienced commercial litigator. Dr Gibson practised as a commercial lawyer for many years, most recently in the Shipping & Transport team at a leading Queensland law firm, where she advised clients on a range of matters including cargo and wharf damage claims, ship groundings, charterparty disputes and marine insurance matters. In 2016, Dr Gibson was one of the primary lawyers in the high profile Shen Neng 1 litigation.

Before commencing legal practice, Dr Gibson was an Associate to the Honourable Justice Chesterman RFD in the Queensland Court of Appeal.

Dr Gibson holds a Bachelor of Laws (Hons), a Bachelor of Arts, a Master of Laws and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Queensland. In 2015, upon completing her Master of Laws, she was awarded the Faculty of Business, Economics & Law Dean’s Honour Roll Award for Outstanding Academic Excellence.

Dr Gibson’s research interests are in contract law, maritime and shipping law, private international law and insurance law.

Justine Gibson is an Associate Professor in Veterinary Bacteriology and Mycology at the School of Veterinary Science at the University of Queensland (UQ). She graduated with a Bachelor of Veterinary Science from UQ in 1996 and, after working as a veterinarian for several years, completed a PhD investigating the epidemiology and basis of fluoroquinolone resistance in multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli and Enterobacter spp. from companion animals.

Assoc. Prof. Gibson's research focuses on antimicrobial resistance, stewardship, infection control, and point-of-care diagnostics to improve animal and human health in Australia and internationally. She has led projects investigating antimicrobial-resistant pathogens in companion and production animals, characterising resistance mechanisms using traditional culture and molecular techniques. Her work aims to translate pure research into clinical practical outcomes by merging pathogen identification and resistance mechanisms with epidemiological studies. Recent research has also explored the microbiota of wildlife, livestock and companion animals.

Passionate about teaching, Justine became a Senior Higher Education Academy Fellow in 2019. She encourages critical and independent thinking, fosters clinical reasoning skills, and incorporates eLearning pedagogies in her teaching.

Assoc. Prof. Gibson has authored over 50 conference papers and 70 scientific publications in bacteriology, mycology, antimicrobial resistance, stewardship and teaching.

Professor Mike Gidley is Director of the Centre for Nutrition and Food Sciences (CNAFS) at the University of Queensland, Australia. The Centre is part of the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI) in conjunction with the Queensland Government. Prof Gidley’s research is focussed on structure – function relationships in biopolymer assemblies such as starch granules and plant cell walls. This has led to the detailed characterisation of starch and dietary fibre digestion/fermentation in vitro and in vivo, with the understanding generated leading to opportunities for optimising nutritional value of foods and feeds. He is also a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plant Cell Walls.

Professor Gidley was trained in chemistry at the Universities of London (BSc) and Cambridge (PhD), and worked on food-related research for more than twenty years in Unilever’s R+D laboratory at Colworth House in the UK, beginning as a research scientist and culminating as the Group Leader for Plant-based Foods and Ingredients, before joining UQ in 2003.

Professor Gidley’s major research interest is the linking of plant molecular structures to macroscopic properties with relevance to plant-based food properties. In particular, he is interested in investigating polysaccharide assemblies such as plant cell walls and starch granules, particularly the way these structures are assembled in nature and then disassembled during manufacturing and later during digestion. His field of research involves the use of spectroscopic, microscopic and materials analyses of natural materials and model systems. Insights into structure-property relationships are obtained, that can then be used to provide targets for raw materials and processes with enhanced food and nutritional properties.

Rob Gilbert worked as a teacher in Queensland secondary schools before completing his doctorate in curriculum studies at the University of London. His experience in curriculum work includes research and evaluation, consultancy and involvement in curriculum committees and agencies.

Rob Gilbert’s expertise is in curriculum development, research and evaluation. He has been a consultant for State and Commonwealth governments, the New Zealand Ministry of Education and the Curriculum Corporation. His research addresses issues of curriculum theory, design and development across a range of fields and levels of education. The work draws on sociocultural perspectives on schools and school contexts, concepts from the sociology of knowledge and the curriculum, and discourse theory.

Particular applications have included research in social and environmental education, education for citizenship, gender in education, the education of boys, standards based curriculum and assessment, and research training.

He is currently working on an analysis of contemporary Australian curriculum debates related to the culture wars and controversies about educational standards, as well as the development of standards based approaches to curriculum and assessment.

Stephanie Gilbert is in its truest word an inter-discplinary scholar. Her undergraduate work lies in community welfare and social work. Moving then to Women's studies and history Professor Gilbert encapsulates the lives of removed chlldren in Australia and elsewhere. Her work in Indigenising work in universities is ground-breaking and works to embodies Indigenous data principles, ethical perspecitives and centring Indigenous knowledges and new knowledge creation.

David Gildfind’s research is primarily concerned with experimental hypersonics. His research interests include: expansion tube facility development; scramjet propulsion; planetary entry aerothermodynamics; and magnetohydrodynamic aerobraking.

David graduated as an aerospace engineer from RMIT University in 2001. He worked in industry on various aircraft platforms in Australia and overseas (GKN in Melbourne 2002-2003 on A340/A380; Australian Aerospace in Brisbane 2003-2005 on DHC4 Caribou; and Stork Fokker in The Netherlands 2005-2007 on F35-JSF and Gulfstream G6), and retains a strong interest in aircraft structures. He later completed his PhD and post-doctoral work in hypersonics at the University of Queensland (UQ), where he developed the capability for expansion tubes wind tunnels to simulate reallistic scramjet flight trajectories beyond Mach 10. His research in this area includes optimising free-piston driver operation, expansion tube flow condition development, and test flow characterisation.

David became a lecturer at UQ's School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering in 2014, and teaches into aircraft structures, design, and hypersonics. During this time David has initiated a new research program on Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) aerobraking, which was awarded an ARC DECRA fellowship (2017-2020) to experimentally evaluate MHD aerobraking technology for a human mission to Mars. This work continues with ARC Discovery Projects "Magnetohydrodynamic Aerobraking for Spacecraft Entry to Earth's Atmosphere" (2023-2025) and "Effect of Magnetic Field Deflection on Magnetohydrodynamic Heat Shield" (2025-2027), both of which David is leading. These projects are focussing on the development of new MHD aerobraking technology for both small and large scale spacecraft, to reduce spacecraft heating, leading to safer, more efficient, and potentially reusable spacecraft.

Dr Trish Gilholm is a Research Fellow (4 years post‑PhD) within the Children’s Intensive Care Research Program, Child Health Research Centre. Her emerging research programs explore 1) long‑term outcomes for critically ill children using data linkage and 2) adaptive trial designs in paediatric critical care. Dr Gilholm completed her PhD in statistics at the Australian Centre of Excellence in Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers, Queensland University of Technology (PhD conferral September 2021) and was awarded an Executive Dean Commendation for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award for her PhD thesis. Through her developing research programs in adaptive trial design and data linkage, she has established a unique research profile within paediatric critical care. She is currently supervising 1xHonours (Principal Advisor), 1xPhD (Associate Advisor) and regularly supervises undergraduate and medical school research projects. Her outstanding commitment to research and future potential as a researcher was recognised with the 2024 Child Health Research Centre Rising Star of the Year Award.

The molecular evolution of cytochrome P450 Enzymes: biological catalysts of unprecedented versatility.

Cytochrome P450 enzymes (CYPs, P450s) especially those responsible for drug metabolism in humans, are the unifying theme of the research in our lab. These fascinating enzymes are catalysts of exceptional versatility, and functional diversity. In humans they are principally responsible for the clearance of a practically unlimited variety of chemicals from the body, but are also critical in many important physiological processes. In other organisms (plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, almost everything!) they carry out an unprecedented range of functions, such as defense, chemical communication, neural development and even pigmentation. P450s are involved in the biosynthesis of an unequalled range of potent, biologically active natural products in microbes, plants and animals, including many antibiotics, plant and animal hormones, signalling molecules, toxins, flavours and fragrances. We are studying how P450s have evolved to deal with novel substrates by reconstructing ancestral precursors and evolutionary pathways, to answer such questions as how did the koala evolve to live on eucalyptus leaves, a toxic diet for most mammals.

The capabilities of P450s are only just coming to be fully recognized and structural studies on P450s should yield critical insights into how enzyme structure determines function. For example, recently we discovered that P450s are present within cells in the Fe(II) form, a finding that has led to a radical revision of the dogma concerning the P450 catalytic cycle, and has implications for the control of uncoupling of P450 activity in cells. Importantly, the biotechnological potential of P450s remains yet to be exploited. All of the specific research themes detailed below take advantage of our recognized expertise in the expression of recombinant human cytochrome P450 enzymes in bacteria. Our group is interested in finding out how P450s work and how they can be made to work better.

Artificial evolution of P450s for drug development and bioremediation: a way of exploring the sequence space and catalytic potential of P450s. The demonstrated catalytic diversity of P450 enzymes makes them the ideal starting material for engineering sophisticated chemical reagents to catalyse difficult chemical transformations. We are using artificial (or directed) evolution to engineer enzymes that are more efficient, robust and specialized than naturally occurring enzymes with the aim of selecting for properties that are commercially useful in the areas of drug discovery and development and bioremediation of pollutants in the environment. The approach we are using also allows us to explore the essential sequence and structural features that underpin all ~12000 known P450s so as to determine how they work.

Synthetic biology of enzymes for clean, green, solar-powered chemistry in drug development, bioremediation and biosensors. We have identified ancestral enzymes that are extremely thermostable compared to their modern counterparts, making them potentially very useful in industry, since they can withstand long incubations at elevated temperatures. They can be used as ‘off the shelf’ reagents to catalyse useful chemistry, such as in in drug discovery and development, fine chemicals synthesis, and cleaning up the environment. Working with drug companies, we are exploring how they can be best deployed in chemical processes and what structural features make them efficient, robust and specialized. We are also immobilizing P450s in virus-like-particles as ‘designer’ reagents that can be recovered from reactions and reused. To make such processes cheaper and more sustainable, we are using photosynthesis to power P450 reactions for clean, green biocatalysis in microalgae.

Biosketch:

After graduating from UQ with first class Honours in Biochemistry, Elizabeth took up a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Overseas Scholarship to pursue doctoral work at Oxford University then undertook postdoctoral work at the Center in Molecular Toxicology and Department of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine with Prof. F.P. Guengerich. She returned to UQ in 1993 to take up a position in Pharmacology and joined the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences in 2009 as a Professor of Biochemistry.