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Wendy Goodwin is a clinical veterinary anaesthetist and academic at the School of Veterinary Science, University of Queensland since 2010. She received her veterinary degree and Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Queensland, with her doctoral research focused on 'Studies of Alfaxalone in Horses'. Wendy is a registered specialist veterinary anaesthetist and Fellow of the Australian & New Zealand College of Veterinary Scientists in Veterinary Anaesthesia and Critical Care, and additionally holds Membership in Equine Medicine.

Wendy is internationally recognized for her expertise with the anaesthetic molecule alfaxalone in various formulations across multiple species. Her doctoral research established foundational knowledge on alfaxalone use in horses, and she has continued to advance the understanding of this important anaesthetic agent through her ongoing research. This expertise encompasses both traditional and novel alfaxalone formulations, dosing strategies, and applications across species ranging from companion animals to large animals and laboratory species.

Beyond her alfaxalone expertise, Wendy is passionate about veterinary anaesthesia and analgesia, having dedicated the majority of her professional career to pursuing excellence in this field. Her clinical anaesthetic experience has covered a wide range of species including horses, small animal companion animals, farm animals, avian and exotic animals and animals used in scientific research. Her research portfolio spans veterinary anaesthetic safety culture, innovative pain management and total intravenous anaesthesia techniques, critical care, traumatic haemorrhage and injury, and translational large animal models for medical research.

Beyond traditional anaesthetic research, Wendy examines leadership and workplace culture in veterinary practice, investigating how leadership styles impact error disclosure and safety climate. She continues to publish in peer-reviewed journals and present at international conferences, demonstrating her ongoing commitment to advancing veterinary anaesthesia and improving both clinical outcomes and professional wellbeing.

Dr. Aswathi Gopalakrishnan is a dedicated bioengineer specializing in human stem cell-based disease models. Currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, she is working under the guidance of Prof. Stefan Thor and A/Prof. Michael Piper. Her research focuses on developing human hypothalamic organoid models to understand sleep and circadian disturbances in neurodegenerative disorders. With hands-on experience in tissue engineering and a deep understanding of cGMP protocols, Dr. Gopalakrishnan excels in optimizing tissue functionality and designing innovative research models.

Before her current role, Dr. Gopalakrishnan served as a Research Officer at the School of Chemical Engineering, University of Queensland, where she was involved in generating mesenchymal lineage cells from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs). During her doctoral research at the Australian Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, she developed an in vitro cardiac aging model using hiPSCs and specialized in 3D bioprinting of cardiac tissue. As an academic at UQ, Aswathi has also designed and delivered lectures, tutorials, laboratory practical lectures, and supervised assessments, contributing to the holistic growth of aspiring bioengineers.

Dr. Gopalakrishnan's academic journey is decorated with notable achievements, including the AIBN HDR International Travel Award (2022), The University of Queensland Career Development Award (2022), and the Wonder of Science Young Science Ambassador Award (2022). She holds an M.Tech in Molecular Medicine from Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences and a B.Tech in Biotechnology from the National Institute of Technology Calicut. She is a QLD ECR representative for the Australasian Society for Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering (ASBTE). Dr. Gopalakrishnan’s contributions to stem cell culture platforms and cardiac tissue engineering have been published in reputable journals, underscoring her commitment to advancing biomedical sciences.

Emily Gordon is a Consultant Geriatrician at the Princess Alexandra Hospital (PAH) and an Associate Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Queensland. In her clinical role, Emily leads multidisciplinary teams to provide comprehensive geriatric assessment and management to frail older adults in acute and subacute inpatient and outpatient settings. Her particular area of clinical interest is the care of patients with delirium and dementia.

As an academic, Emily is a member of the Australian Frailty Network executive leadership team and leads research programs in frailty, delirium and dementia. She has a special interest in outcomes of importance for frail patients and their caregivers as well as specialised models of acute cognitive care. She supports healthcare professionals, including Geriatric Medicine trainees, nurses and pharmacists, to pursue higher degrees in research. She also supervises junior medical officers to complete research projects and is actively involved in curriculum development and teaching at the University of Queensland.

Dr Gordon’s research is focused on the formation and maintenance of the blood and lymphatic vascular systems. Vessels form complex branched networks that supply oxygen and nutrients to all body tissues. The signals controlling blood vessel expansion, identity and migration are all downstream of a single, common complex at the cell surface, yet exactly how this diverse range of functions is differentially regulated, depending on the physiological need, remains unknown.

The specific focus of Dr Gordon’s research is to determine the precise molecular signals that control cell adhesion within the vessel wall the surrounding environment. If the signals controlling cell adhesion become deregulated, normal vessel growth and function is lost. This contributes to the progression of a wide range of human diseases, including cancer growth and metastasis, diabetic eye disease and stroke. Dr Gordon aims to use novel biological models, biochemical assays and imaging techniques to better understand vessel biology, which will enable improved treatment of disease and aid in the development of vascularised, bioengineered organs.

Dr Gordon received her Bachelor of Science (2005) and PhD (2011) from The University of Adelaide, after which she undertook six years of postdoctoral studies at Yale University in the USA and Uppsala University in Sweden. With the support of an ARC DECRA Fellowship, Dr Gordon relocated to IMB in 2017 to establish her independent research career as an IMB Fellow. In 2019, she was appointed as Group Leader of the Vessel Dynamics Laboratory.

Dr Caitlin Goss is a Lecturer at the TC Beirne School of Law, teaching in the Law of Evidence, Constitutional Law, and Public International Law. Dr Goss obtained her DPhil in comparative constitutional law at the University of Oxford, where she previously read for a Bachelor of Civil Law and an MPhil in Law. Her postgraduate study has been funded by a Rhodes Scholarship, and a Commemorative Fellowship from the Australian Federation of University Women- Queensland.

Dr Goss has worked as a Judge's Associate to the Hon. Chief Justice Catherine Holmes (then a Justice of the Queensland Court of Appeal), as a solicitor, and as a legal intern in the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia. At the University of Oxford, she served as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Public International Law, teaching on the undergraduate BA in Jurisprudence, and she jointly coached the Oxford Jessup Moot team. Her research interests are in comparative constitutional law, constitutional theory, international law, and in the law of evidence.

Dr Georgia Gosse is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Child Health Research Centre. Drawing on her background as a physiotherapist working with children in rural and remote settings, her research is grounded in the realities of clinical practice and service delivery.

As a practising clinician, Georgia remains closely connected to the everyday experiences of allied health professionals, ensuring her research addresses real-world challenges. She is passionate about translating evidence into practice and generating meaningful research that supports positive outcomes for children, families, and communities. Her methodological expertise spans a range of approaches, with particular interests in qualitative research and implementation science.

Professor Jürgen Götz (PhD, Dr. habil, FAHMS, GAICD) is Foundation Chair of Dementia Research, Director of the Clem Jones Centre for Ageing Dementia Research at the Queensland Brain Institute (University of Queensland), NHMRC Leadership Fellow and Ultrasound Team Leader. In 2023 he became the Lesleigh Green - Bill and Nancy Green Endowed Chair in Dementia Research. Jürgen Götz performed undergraduate studies at the Biocenter of the University of Basel, before joining the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Georges Köhler to obtain his PhD degree in immunology. Subsequently, he took up postdoctoral positions at UCSF (San Francisco) and Sandoz Ltd (now Novartis, Basel), and worked as Research Group Leader (venia legendi, Dr. habil.) at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). Before taking up his current position, Jürgen Götz was a Professor and Chair of Molecular Biology at the University of Sydney.

Jürgen Götz is a highly cited researcher (Clarivate) and an expert in basic and translational research in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), focusing on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of how Tau and Aβ cause neurodegeneration, using transgenic and cellular models, and exploring low-intensity ultrasound as a novel treatment modality for AD and other brain diseases (>220 publications, including in leading journals such as Science, Cell, Lancet and Neuron; h-index = 86, 27,800+ citations, Google Scholar). Jürgen Götz and his team have built a clinical trial-ready therapeutic ultrasound device and started a first-in-human safety trial in 12 Alzheimer patients (April 2023).

Hebe Gouda is an epidemiologist with research experience in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Egypt. She has a Masters of Public Health and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. She currently focuses on three related streams of research including: 1) Measuring mortality and disease burden with a particular focus on the epidemiological transition in low and middle income countries; 2) Evaluating health systems approaches and responses to population health burdens and 3) Measurement, data and information: the ethics and epistemology of population health research methods.

Christina is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at The University of Queensland. She draws from philosophy and sociology to examine contemporary practices and policies in education. Prior to working at UQ, Christina held a prestigious McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at The University of Melbourne. She also has experience working in schools as both a humanities teacher and head of department.

I interrogate the borders and boundaries placed around a lot of educational thinking. I ask probing questions about why we do things in education the way we do, and I explore the consequences that can flow on from thinking one-dimensionally about schooling. This reflection enables me to research the current trends in education and unpack the assumptions about young people, school leaders and teachers often entrenched in education policy and practice. Whose interests are served by formulating education policy and practice in this way, and whose interests are left out? Importantly, I explore how we can rethink education to enable more equitable access. I ask - how can we think outside the square to innovate and generate more educational opportunity? Pushing the boundaries about what we know about education in order to generate productive conversations about where we are heading as a society is an important thread that flows through all of my research.

Dr Caroline Graham is an award-winning investigative journalist who specialises in narrative non-fiction storytelling across both traditional and new media formats, including podcasting, data-driven reporting and longform creative non-fiction. Caroline is the co-author of the Australian bestseller Larrimah (Allen & Unwin, 2021), which was shortlisted for an Indie Book Award, Ned Kelly Award and two Davitt Awards. Caroline is also the co-author and co-producer of the investigative true crime podcast series Lost in Larrimah (The Australian, 2018), which won a Walkley Award, an NT Media Award and was a finalist in the Quills Awards and the Australian Podcasting Awards. In addition to writing feature stories and creative non-fiction for a range of publications (including The Australian, The Weekend Australian Magazine and The Guardian), Caroline has co-authored Writing Feature Stories: How to research and write articles, from listicles to longform (Routledge, 2017). She has received a national Office of Learning and Teaching Citation for her approach to teaching data-driven journalism and has co-ordinated student-authored data-driven investigations for The Guardian, Crikey and New Corp Australia. In 2023, she co-wrote/co-produced the ABC Landline documentary Outback Musical, as well as an accompanying multimedia feature that won a Clarion Award. She has also investigated (for The Australian, 2023) access to education in remote parts of the Northern Territory, supported by a Meta/Walkley Foundation grant for public interest journalism. She also writes fiction, has worked as a consulting producer/script editor on podcast series and has written for or collaborated on a number of hybrid new media or cross-platform projects.

Caroline’s academic research interests centre around the application of journalistic ethics and traditions to emerging media formats, including data-driven reporting methodologies, the ethics of true crime podcasting, the evolution of narrative journalism formats, notions of subjectivity in a new-media landscape, regional, rural and remote reporting and the emerging solutions journalism movement. Through her work on the Larrimah projects, she also has an enduring interest in Northern Territory war and rail history, the myth of the outback, small towns, the Australian identity and missing persons cases. She is open to public-interest collaborations with industry or the not-for-profit sector, as well as cross-disciplinary research and practice opportunities.

Frederick Graham (BNurs, PhD) is a Clinical Nurse Consultant and a Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for Health Services Research at the University of Queensland. As an academic-nurse, Fred is clinical lead of a hospital-wide Dementia and Delirium Nursing Service at Princess Alexandra Hospital where he has worked as clinical expert in the care of people with dementia and delirium for more than 15 years. As a senior research fellow under the mentorship of Professor Ruth Hubbard, his research focuses on reorganising care environments and building workforce capacity to provide therapeutic care to this vulnerable cohort with a specific focus on accelerating knowledge translation in managing symptoms of agitation through innovative experiential learning, models of care, environmental design, leisure activity, and recognition of pain-related symptomology.

Fred qualified as registered nurse from The Queensland University of Technology and has worked in acute-care wards at Princess Alexandra Hospital. He has clinically led multiple quality initiatives focussed on improving acute-care for patients with cognitive impairment including education and change champion initiatives, models of specialised care, resource development to facilitate person-centred care and development of a chart for evaluating analgesic trials through monitoring pain-related behaviour. These initiatives led Fred to undertake his PhD with Professor Elizabeth Beattie at QUT, titled “Do hospital nurses recognise pain in older agitated patients with cognitive impairment. A descriptive correlational study using virtual simulation.”, which was awarded QUT Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award 2021. He has subsequently published his PhD results in the top gerontological and nursing journals in the world. Fred currently holds a Queensland Health Early Career Nursing Fellowship under the mentorship Professor Amanda Henderson, Nursing practice Development Unit PAH. He also has three Metro South Research Support Grant schemes including the Metro South Health Future Research Leader Fellowship under the mentorship of Professor Ruth Hubbard which will investigate pain-related phenotypes through a longitudinal response to treatment study.

As an emerging research leader and early career researcher, Fred is passionate teacher and encourages nurses to consider higher degree by research pathways in the clinical careers. He is currently supervising two higher research nursing students and a mentoring nurse practitioner student at UQ.

The overarching goal of Dr Sarah Grainger's research is to identify factors that place individuals at risk of social withdrawal and disconnection, and to understand how these risks can be mitigated across the lifespan. A central focus of her research program is understanding how social cognitive functioning – broadly defined as our ability to perceive, interpret and respond to social and emotional cues – changes from adolescence through to very old age. Sarah's research adopts a multidisciplinary approach, investigating the psychological, neural, hormonal, vascular, genetic and lifestyle factors that contribute to individual differences in social functioning.

Sarah is the Founder and Director of the Social Cognition in Ageing Longitudinally (SoCiAL) Project, Australia's first longitudinal study dedicated to understanding how social cognitive functioning changes in older adulthood. The SoCiAL Project aims to follow more than 800 older Australians over the next decade to identify factors that contribute to social cognitive decline and resilience, and to better understand how and why people experience loneliness and social disconnection in later life.

Sarah has secured more than $3 million in competitive research funding, including an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) in 2021 and an ARC Future Fellowship in 2026. She is Associate Editor at Gerontology and serves on the Editorial Board at Psychology and Aging. In 2024, she was recognised as a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science (APS) for her innovative contributions to social cognitive ageing.

I am a Lecturer in Small Animal Surgery at The University of Queensland with expertise in veterinary oncology, cancer immunotherapy, clinical trials, and veterinary surgical education. My work integrates clinical practice, research, and teaching to improve animal health outcomes while advancing veterinary training.

My research focuses on comparative oncology, translational cancer research, and veterinary education innovation. I am involved in clinical trials investigating novel immunotherapies for naturally occurring cancers in dogs and collaborate with academic and industry partners to develop new approaches to cancer diagnosis, treatment, and biomarker discovery.

A second area of focus is veterinary surgical education. I develop and evaluate simulation-based learning tools, low-fidelity surgical models, and curriculum innovations that support clinical skills training while promoting the ethical use of animals in teaching.

Current areas of interest include:

• Cancer immunotherapy
• Comparative oncology
• Clinical trials
• Canine and feline cancer
• Cancer epidemiology
• Veterinary surgical education
• Simulation-based learning
• Clinical skills training
• Surgical outcomes research
• Veterinary curriculum development

I coordinate major surgical courses within the Bachelor of Veterinary Science program and supervise undergraduate and HDR students in projects spanning oncology, epidemiology, clinical research, and veterinary education. I am particularly interested in research that creates opportunities for student training, industry engagement, and translational impact.