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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.

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.

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.

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 an NHMRC Investigator Leadership Fellow and Deputy Associate Dean (Research Partnerships) in the Faculty of Science at The University of Queensland. He also serves as Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics and Head of Computational Biology & Clinical Informatics at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute. Internationally, he sits on scientific advisory boards for A*STAR (Singapore), Fiocruz (Brazil) and the Tuscany University Network (Italy), and has been recognised with major honours including the Royal Society of Chemistry Horizon Prize.

A global leader in computational biology and personalised medicine, Prof Ascher develops advanced AI- and structure-based approaches to understand how genetic variation alters protein structure, function, and clinical outcomes. His group has built one of the world’s most widely used platforms for interpreting coding variants—over 90 computational tools, accessed more than 9.5 million times per year from 120+ countries. These tools underpin clinical diagnostics, guide drug development pipelines, and support international public-health responses to antimicrobial resistance and emerging infectious diseases.

His research has led to new molecular insights across infectious disease, rare disease, oncology and cardiometabolic health, and has been translated directly into practice—informing WHO policy, enabling early resistance detection in tuberculosis and leprosy, stratifying patients with hereditary cancers, and supporting vaccine design with partners including Pfizer. Many of his methods are embedded in globally used resources such as Ensembl VEP, PDBe, and the EMBL-EBI KnowledgeBase.

Prof Ascher has a longstanding commitment to interdisciplinary leadership and capability-building across UQ. As Director (Strategy) of the Biotechnology Programs and later as Deputy Associate Dean (Research Partnerships), he has driven initiatives to transform UQ’s biotechnology education, grow industry-embedded training, expand international partnerships, and diversify research income. He has led the development of UQ’s biotechnology–industry placement ecosystem, initiated new professional development programs adopted across multiple Faculties and Institutes, and established major collaborations with government, industry and global research organisations.

He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers (over half as senior author: FWCI 2.7), secured more than $30M in competitive research funding, and supervised over 60 HDR students who now hold leadership positions in academia, industry and government. His work appears in leading journals including Nature, Nature Genetics, Science, PNAS and Nature Microbiology, and is cited in over 100 policy documents and 40 patents.

Prof Ascher holds degrees in Biotechnology, Biochemistry, Structural Biology and Law. His research career has spanned Adelaide, Melbourne, Cambridge and Brisbane. After his PhD with Professor Michael Parker, he worked with Sir Tom Blundell at the University of Cambridge, where he led programs in structure-guided drug discovery and protein–protein interaction targeting. He established his independent laboratory at Cambridge and then at the University of Melbourne/Bio21 Institute, before moving to the Baker Institute in 2019 and joining UQ in 2021.

Insect host-pathogen interactions

In the evolutionary arm race between insects and their pathogens, insects as hosts continuously evolve traits to inhibit pathogen replication, and in turn pathogens evolve mechanisms to evade their hosts’ immune responses. In the Asgari Lab, we are interested in exploring these evolutionary adaptations, in particular in regards to mosquito-borne viruses such as dengue virus. The major areas of research in the lab are:

1. Exploring pro- and anti-viral factors in mosquitoes using molecular approaches, including next generation sequencing and bioinformatics analyses
2. Investigating the role of non-coding RNAs (including microRNAs) in insect biology and host-pathogen interactions
3. Understanding the effect of insect microbiome on replication of viruses

Muhammad Rashed Asger is currently working as a Teaching Associate (Associate Lecturer) in the Finance discipline at the UQ Business School. He teaches across both undergraduate and postgraduate programs, including Asset Pricing, Financial Management for Decision Makers, Portfolio Management, Corporate Finance, and Financial Risk Management.

Rashed brings substantial industry experience in both finance and accounting, which enriches his teaching through the integration of real-world applications and practical insights. Due to the strong commitment to student learning, his transition into academia reflects his love for teaching and his aspiration to create meaningful and positive learning experiences for students.

His research interests involve insider trading, shareholder activism, corporate governance, and corporate finance. His research outputs have been presented at the prestigious international conferences, including the Financial Management Association (FMA) Annual Meeting and the New Zealand Finance Meeting.

Rashed holds a Bachelor’s degree from Western Sydney University and a Master of Finance from the University of Technology Sydney.

Dr Melinda Ashcroft is a Research Fellow on Infectious Disease Epidemiology (Climate Change) in the Faculty of Medicine at The University of Queensland (UQ). Her current research focus is on Nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) and how NTM infections are associated with climate change and major weather events. Previously Melinda has worked at Monash University as a Research Fellow on the Sero-epidemiology of Klebsiella spp., at the University of Melbourne as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Genomic Epidemiology of Neisseria gonorrhoeae and as a Research Associate at UQ on the genomics and epigenomics of extraintestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli. Melinda was awarded a Bachelor of Applied Science (Biotechnology/Biochemistry) in 2004 from Queensland University of Technology and a Master of Biotechnology in 2013 from UQ. She then switched fields to Microbial Genomics and was awarded a PhD from UQ in 2019 for her thesis: Evolution and function of mobile genetic elements and DNA methyltransferases in extraintestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli.

Neal M. Ashkanasy OAM, PhD is an Emeritus Professor of Management at the UQ Business School at the University of Queensland in Australia. He came to academe in after an 18-year career in water resources engineering. He received his PhD in social/organizational psychology from the same university. His research is in leadership, organizational culture, ethics, and emotions in organizations, and his work has been published in leading journals including the Academy of Management Journal and Review, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, and the Journal of Applied Psychology. He is Associate Editor for Emotion Review and Series Co-Editor of Research on Emotion in Organizations. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Organizational Behavior and Associate Editor for the Academy of Management Review and Academy of Management Learning and Education. Prof. Ashkanasy is a Fellow of the Academy for the Social Sciences in the UK (AcSS) and Australia (ASSA); the Association for Psychological Science (APS); the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP); Southern Management Association (SMA), and the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences (QAAS). In 2017, he was awarded a Medal in the Order of Australia.

Cognitive educational psychology, Classroom-based instruction strategy training and problem solving, Intellectual disability, Learning difficulties, Aging and disability, Inclusion, Adolescent reading and writing habit, Issues relating to victimised youth, Creative Writing.

Professor Ashman completed his Bachelor of Arts degree with honours in Applied Psychology. He continued his studies at the University of Alberta, Canada and was granted a Master of Education (Counselling) and a PhD in the area of cognitive educational psychology. He has taught at the universities of Alberta, Regina, and Newcastle and came to the Schonell Special Education Research Centre in 1987. He has published widely in the area of cognitive psychology, special education and disability and has authored or edited over a dozen volumes in these areas. He is past national President of the Australian Society for the Study of Intellectual Disability, and past President of the International Association on Cognitive Education.

Dr. Aditya Ashok is a distinguished early career researcher and expert in flexible inorganic nanoarchitectured devices by precisely engineering the material parameters for energy conversion, optoelectronics, catalysis, and biosensing applications. As a Postdoctoral Fellow at Prof. Yusuke Yamauchi's group, UQ-AIBN, his research focuses on fabricating porous multimodal inorganic heterojunction for opto-catalysis and biosensing applications. His long-term research vision is to bridge the gap between fundamental materials science and real-world biomedical and energy solutions through nanoengineered materials and flexible electronic devices.

Dr. Ashok secured a bachelor's in electrical and electronics engineering in 2016 and a master's in nanotechnology and renewable energy in 2018. In 2024, he graduated with his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Biomedical Engineering under Prof. Yusuke Yamauchi's group from the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), The University of Queensland, Brisbane. Immediately after his PhD, he was offered to join a postdoctoral research associate at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, at the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering and the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering. His research at the UNSW focused on developing multimodal flexible electronics and flexible mesoporous 3D buckling electrodes for organoid studies.

My research focuses on the application of remote sensing technologies for vegetation monitoring, crop yield estimation, and agricultural decision support. I employ a combination of multispectral, hyperspectral, and radar satellite data, together with UAV imagery and field-based measurements, to better understand crop biophysical and biochemical dynamics. My work integrates advanced spectral analysis and machine learning techniques to enhance the accuracy and transferability of predictive models across diverse agro-ecological environments. In addition to developing and validating innovative approaches for yield estimation, I have designed several automated methods for crop monitoring, including the development of new vegetation indices that effectively capture canopy quality, structure, and stress conditions. These methods contribute to improving the efficiency of large-scale agricultural assessments and promoting sustainable management practices. Overall, my research aims to advance precision agriculture through data-driven insights derived from multi-source remote sensing and artificial intelligence integration.

Dr Elham (Ellie) Assadi Soumeh is a Senior Lecturer in Animal Science and Production at the School of Agriculture and Food Science, University of Queensland. She holds a BSc in Animal Science, an MSc in Animal Nutrition, and a PhD in Animal Nutrition and Physiology, with a focus on monogastric species, particularly poultry and swine.

Dr Soumeh completed her PhD at Aarhus University in Denmark, where her research focused on the requirements and metabolism of branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) in weaned pigs and the metabolic profiling of high-performing pigs fed optimal BCAA levels. Following her PhD, she worked as a Senior Scientist at Cargill BV in the Netherlands, leading customer-focused research in monogastric nutrition. Her work there spanned nutrient metabolism, gut health, and nutritional strategies aimed at improving production efficiency.

Her current research explores the role of nutrition in modulating gut microbiota composition and function, and how these microbial shifts influence host metabolism, health, and productivity. She is particularly interested in the interplay between dietary components, gut microbial ecology, and the physiological responses of monogastric animals.

Dr Soumeh's work addresses practical and emerging challenges in animal nutrition, with an emphasis on sustainable feeding practices and precision nutrition. Her research findings have been widely published in high-impact scientific journals and presented at leading international conferences and symposiums.