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Dr. Laura Grogan is a qualified veterinarian, Senior Lecturer in Wildlife Science and Leader of the Biodiversity Health Research Team (https://www.biodiversity-health.org/) - a collaborative multiple-university research group focused on finding sustainable solutions for the most challenging threatening processes currently affecting biodiversity.

Dr. Grogan has a background in research on wildlife diseases, ecology and conservation. She's particularly interested in investigating the dynamics, relative importance, and impacts of infectious diseases among other threats affecting wildlife across both individual and population scales, to improve conservation management.

While she works across taxa and methodological approaches, her main study system currently involves the devastating amphibian fungal skin disease, chytridiomycosis, where at the individual scale she focuses on the pathogenesis and amphibian immune response to the disease, untangling the roles of resistance and tolerance in defense against infection. At the population and landscape scale she explores mechanisms underlying persistence in the face of endemic infection, focused on the endangered Fleay's barred frog. She also studies population and infection dynamics of chlamydiosis in koala using a mathematical modelling approach, exploring the relative benefits of different management approaches. In addition to working on amphibian and koala diseases, Laura is a keen birdwatcher, wildlife photographer and artist. She supervises projects across wildlife-related fields (predominantly vertebrates).

You can find out more about her research team here: www.biodiversity-health.org.

Dr. Grogan has been awarded around $1.3 million in research funding since 2018. In late 2019 she was awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA; DE200100490), worth $426,742. This project, titled "Understanding infection tolerance to improve management of wildlife disease", commenced in late 2020. Dr. Grogan was identified as one of the four top-ranked science DECRA awardees by the Australian Academy of Science’s 2020 J G Russell Award, and was also recipient of the highest award of the Wildlife Disease Association Australasia Section with their 2019 Barry L Munday Recognition Award.

PhD and Honours projects are now available in the following areas (plus many more areas - please get in touch if you have an idea):

• Can frogs be ‘vaccinated’ by antifungal treatment of active infections to develop protective immunity to the devastating chytrid fungus? (Principal Supervisor)
• Establishing the conservation status of south-east Queensland’s amphibians - occupancy surveys and species distribution models (Principal Supervisor)
• Tadpoles as a reservoir of the lethal frog chytrid fungal disease – measuring sublethal effects on growth, time to metamorphosis and ability to forage (mouthpart loss) (Principal Supervisor)
• Impacts of chytrid fungus on the survival of juvenile endangered Fleay’s barred frogs, Mixophyes fleayi, and importance for population recruitment (Principal Supervisor)
• Measuring the infection resistance versus tolerance of barred frogs to the devastating chytrid fungal disease to improve management outcomes (Principal Supervisor)
• Mapping the impacts of fire-fighting chemicals on endangered frog habitats (Co-Supervisor)
• Bowra birds: what do long-term monitoring data reveal about bird communities in the semi-arid region? (Co-Supervisor)
• Impacts of fire-fighting chemicals on endangered frogs: Implications for conservation and management (Co-Supervisor)

Dr Lisbeth Grondahl's research interests are in the areas of Biomaterials Science and Tissue Engineering. In particular, she works on the development of novel materials and on surface modification of materials for improved bioactivity.

Current projects include:

• Surface modification of biodegradable scaffolds for tissue engineering
• Production of drug delivery devices for accelerated bone regeneration
• Development of composite materials for use as bone biomaterials

Sarel Gronum is the Director of Teaching and Learning at the University of Queensland Business School and a passionate academic with more than 20 years international experience in leading large tertiary education program portfolios. He lectures and supervises in Innovation and Entrepreneurship and actively research in the areas of management education, innovation, network practices and business model innovation. His research has been published in top-tiered journals. As the UQ Venture’s Academic in Residence, consultant and executive educator, Sarel empowers entrepreneurs, corporate and public sector organisations to develop and implement innovative commercialisation and growth strategies.

• since 2023: Honorary Associate Professor, School of Mathematics and Physics, The University of Queensland.
• 2017-2023: Associate Professor, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland.
• 2003-2017: Deputy Director (Software), Earth System Sciences Computational Center (ESSCC) & School of Earth Sciences, The University of Queensland.
• 2001-2003: Computational Scientist, CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences Division, Melbourne, Australia.
• 2000-2001: Lecturer, Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences, Massey University at Albany, Auckland, New Zealand.
• 1996-1999: Research Fellow, Center for Mathematics and its Applications, School of Mathematical Sciences, Australian National University (ANU), Canberra.
• 1989-1996: Research Scientist, Computing Center, University of Karlsruhe/Germany.

Links:

• LinkedIn
• researchgate.net
• Editor: Geoscientific Model Development Journal (GMD), http://www.geoscientific-model-development.net & EGUsphere https://www.egusphere.net/
• Australian Mathematical Society, ANZIAM

Dr. Andrew Groszek completed his PhD in theoretical physics at Monash University in 2018, under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Tapio Simula. His doctoral research involved the numerical simulation of non-equilibrium superfluids, with a particular interest in vortices and turbulence in these systems.

From 2018-2020, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the group of Dr. Thomas Billam at Newcastle University, United Kingdom. Here he continued his research on far-from-equilibrium systems, with a focus on superfluids away from the zero temperature limit.

In 2020, he joined the group of Prof. Matthew Davis at the University of Queensland, and is currently based in the ARC Centres of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems (EQUS) and Future Low-Energy Electronics Technology (FLEET). He is currently investigating periodically driven quantum systems, as well as providing numerical modelling for the Bose-Einstein condensate experiments located on campus.

Professor Joseph Grotowski completed his Bachelor of Science with Honours in Mathematics at the Australian National University in 1985. He then moved to New York for postgraduate studies in Mathematics, and completed an MS in 1987 and a PhD in 1990 at the Courant Institute, NYU.

He held a number of positions in Germany, and completed his Habilitation at the Friedrich-Alexander Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg in 2001. He took up a position as an Associate Professor at the City College of New York of the City University of New York in 2003, and returned to Australia to take up a position as a Senior Lecturer at UQ in 2005. He was promoted to Associate Professor from 2010, and Full Professor from 2013.

His main research area is geometric and nonlinear partial differential equations.

He served as Head of the Mathematics Discipline from 1 January 2010 until 30 April 2014. From 1 May 2014 he has been Head of the School of Mathematics and Physics. As Head of School, he is responsible for ensuring that the School delivers a high standard of research and teaching, as well as engagement with the broader community, across our disciplines of mathematics, physics and statistics. He is also responsible for providing and fostering strategic leadership within the School, as well as for financial management of the School’s budget and management of the School’s resources.

He is a former Board Member of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, and serves on the advisory Board of the MATRIX Research Insitute. He has been active in CSIRO Mathematicians in Schools for a number of years.

My research interests are in coral reef ecology and marine parasitology.

I also incorporate other fields in my research including evolutionary biology, molecular biology, parasitology, and animal behaviour. I use field observations to generate hypotheses which are tested using field and laboratory experiments.

Currently, I have research programmes at Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef.

Specific projects include:

The ecological significance of cleaning behaviour in reef fishes

The direct and indirect effects of cleaner fish on the coral reef community

Dr. Wenyi Gu’s early education was conducted in China which include his undergraduate and master’s degrees in veterinary medicine. In 1996, he migrated to Australia and pursued his PhD study in biochemistry & molecular biology at the Australian National University (ANU). After a short period of work at John Curtin Medical School ANU as a junior scientist, he moved to Brisbane in 2001 for his post-doc at the University of Queensland and currently a post-doctoral research fellow at AIBN. He held a Peter Doherty Fellowship (2006-2009) and was further supported by NHMRC to spend 7 months at Harvard University as a visiting fellow in 2008. Since his post-doctoral research he has been working in the area of using RNAi to treat viral diseases and cancers. He also has a strong background in immunology and vaccine development.

Dominic Guanzon is a research fellow at the University of Queensland within the Salomon Lab, and supported by the Lions Medical Research Foundation. His expertise lies in the fascinating realm of extracellular vesicles where he is the genomics leader. Dominic’s research involves developing nucleic acid blood tests to diagnose disease. His primary research focus is on predicting chemotherapy response in women diagnosed with ovarian cancer, specifically distinguishing between individuals who respond positively to chemotherapy and those resistant to it (chemoresistance).

I lead a research program with extensive expertise in immunology, particularly in natural killer (NK) cells, focused on developing innovative approaches for treating hard-to-cure diseases like metastatic cancers. Our mission is to improve patient outcomes and extend lives. Recognized as an international leader in my field, I've been instrumental in identifying novel regulators of our immune functions, and developing NK cell-based immunotherapies.

My dedication to my field has been recognized through numerous peer-reviewed grants as sole-CI or CIA/Principal Investigator, including a NHMRC ECF Peter Doherty Fellowship, an NHMRC Project Grant, an US DoD, a MRFF EMCR among others. Since 2009, I've amassed an impressive portfolio of 115 publications in renowned journals like Blood, Cell Death Dis, JEM, Molecular Therapy, Nat Comms, and Nat Immunol with an H-index = 45. My body of work and contributions have been acknowledged with awards such as the 2019 Researcher of the Year by CCA, 2020 QLD Young Tall Poppy Science, 2020 UQ Frazer Institute's Rising Star, 2022 Frazer Institute's Mentor of the Year, 2023 TRI - Connecting with the Clinic, the 2025 Dr. Jian Zhou Foundation Award for Translational Medicine among others.

Committed to translating fundamental discoveries into real-world therapies, I co-founded the venture-backed biotechnology company Sicario Tx, focused on advancing NK cell-based immunotherapies. I have also served as a scientific consultant and collaborator for national and international biotech companies, including Biotheus (now part of BioNTech's oncology pipeline), Prescient Therapeutics, Microba Life Sciences, among others, contributing to their development programs.

At present, I am a Group Leader / Principal Research Fellow & Associate Professor with the University of Queensland's Frazer Institute. My research group is based at the Translational Research Institute (TRI). Here, I lead a high-performing research team with a keen focus on developing and innovating immunotherapy approaches for a spectrum of diseases.

Dr. Guix researches how tourism and hospitality organizations approach change to integrate sustainability considerations and report on their progress for external accountability. Her work focuses on corporate social responsibility and grand challenges such as modern slavery and climate change.

She worked on projects funded by the European Union, the United Nations Environmental Program, and the Inter-American Development Bank to run life and online stakeholder consultations for sustainable tourism policy and assess industry disclosure and progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.

Dr. Guix regularly publishes in top academic journals, including Tourism Management, Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, and International Journal of Hospitality Management.