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Mehedi is a public health researcher with strong expertise in quantitative data analytics. He has over eight years of professional experience in developing and developed countries. He has built a distinguished career in public health research, focusing on critical areas such as reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health (RMNCH), nutrition, non-communicable diseases, mental health, sleep health, social determinants of health and health inequalities.

Mehedi completed his PhD from the University of Queensland in 2022. In his doctoral thesis titled “Future direction of maternal and child health in low- and middle-income countries”, he utilized data of over 4.3 million participants extracted from 284 national surveys conducted in 75 low- and middle-income countries to understand the future projections of maternal and child health-related indicators and gaps in progress, with geographical variations across countries. His doctoral research resulted six publications in reputed international journals and provided valuable insights for global and country leaders in their pursuit of achieving health-related Sustainable Development Goals.

Mehedi has a charming engagement with research community. He has reviewed manuscripts for eight international journals and published 45 peer-reviewed articles, many of which appear in high-impact journals. His work has gained media attention, with coverage of more than 15 research stories.

In addition to his research and professional activities, Mehedi is an active member of several professional international collaborative groups, including Global Burden of Diseases, the American Society for Nutrition, the International Health Economics Association, the Society for Research in Child Development, and Health Systems Global, where he collaborates with fellow experts and stays at the forefront of developments in his field.

Mehedi is a Global Change Scholar (2018 cohort) of the University of Queensland and a recipient of several prestigious scholarships and awards. He recently honoured with a national award in the Pregnancy Monitoring Innovation Challenge 2022 funded by the Aspire to Innovate (a2i), Bangladesh, recognizing his innovative contributions to maternal and neonatal health.

Mehedi’s current research focuses on unveiling environmental exposures in pregnancy and risk in adverse birth outcomes in Queensland, Australia.

Dr Kayoko Hashimoto is Senior Lecturer at School of Languages and Cultures, The University of Queensland, Australia. Her main research area is language policy with particular interest in construction of national and individual identities in fluid multicultural and multilingual contexts. She has been actively involved in national and international research and teaching collaborations in Australia, Japan, Vietnam, UK and Poland – a visiting fellow at Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo, Japan in 2024-2025 and an Erasmus+ mobility program scholar at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland in 2025. She is an editor/author of five books, including Rethinking the Asian Language Learning Paradigm in Australia (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), Japanese Language and Soft Power in Asia (2018, Palgrave Macmillan), and Beyond Native-Speakerism (2018, Routledge, with S. A. Houghton & D. J. Rivers).

Alex is Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology and Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland. His research focuses on the study of group and identity processes in organizational, social, and clinical contexts.

Together with colleagues, Alex has written and edited 15 books and published over 300 peer-reviewed articles on these topics. His most recent books are:The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power (2nd Ed. with Stephen Reicher & Michael Platow, Psychology Press, 2020), The New Psychology of Sport: The Social Identity Approach (with Katrien Fransen & Filip Boen, Sage, 2020),The New Psychology of Health: Unlocking the Social Cure (with Catherine Haslam, Jolanda Jetten, Tegan Cruwys and Genvieve Dingle, Routledge, 2018), andSocial Psychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies (2nd Ed. with Joanne Smith, Sage, 2017).

Alex is a former Chief Editor of the European Journal of Social Psychology and currently Associate Editor of The Leadership Quarterly. He has won a range of major awards from scientific organisations in Australia, Europe, the UK, and the US, including recognition for distinguished contributions to psychological science from both the Australian Psychological Society and British Psychological Society. In 2022 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia "for significant service to higher education, particuarly psychology, through research and mentoring".

I have worked in both the clinical and academic fields of clinical psychology, in Australia and the UK, before joining UQ in 2012. My research investigates the cognitive and social consequences of trauma and disease in neurological populations, and also on identity-cognition relationships in aging. In this work I have addressed questions about the integrity of cogntiive ability, notably memory, and its rehabilitation, but also the impact that impairment of these abilities have on personal andsocial identity.

My work aims to ensure all children have access to safe, stable, violence-free childhoods they need to thrive in childhood and across life. This spans from extensive work on evidence-based parenting programs to major national epidemiological work on child maltreatment, corporal punishment (smacking) & mental health & wellbeing. I am currently co-leading the Young Minds: Our Future study which is the Third Australian Child and Adolescent Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing (funded by the Dept of Health, Disability and Aging $8.3M) and I am part of the award-winning Australian Child Maltreatment Study (ACMS) team which generated the first nationally representative Australian data on the prevalence and mental health impact of the five types of child maltreatment in Australia.

In 2023, I was a ministerial appointee to the Child Death Review Board, which conducts systemic reviews of child deaths to identify areas to improve child safety in QLD. In 2024 the World Health Organisation appointed me to their International Technical Expert Group for Violence Against Children Estimations. I also serve on the Board of Directors for the Parenting & Family Researchers Alliance and on the editorial board of the Australian Journal of Social Issues a policy masthead.

As both a clinical psychologist and a research academic, I use a prevention lens to target risk and protective factors to enhance child and family wellbeing to reduce the presence and impact of early adversity & mental ill health. This includes a focus on parenting stress, family violence and maltreatment, and issues associated with balancing work and life.

As a researcher, I have received >$10 million in research funding and published extensively in leading D1 & Q1 journals. I am a sought-after speaker & am frequently called on by the media for comment. My work has featured on the front page of The Australian, as well as on commercial and ABC television and radio programs.

A/Prof Sumaira Hasnain graduated with her PhD in December 2010 from The University of Manchester and is an Associate Professor at Mater Research with a team of eight researchers. A/Prof Hasnain was the first globally to demonstrate that immunity can modulate protein production in secretory cells in infection and chronic diseases. Her long-term vision has been to characterise these novel immune factors and manipulate them therapeutically using pre-clinical models of immune-driven pathologies.

A/Prof Hasnain holds a patent for targeted immunotherapy in metabolic disease which has led to the formation of a spin-off company, Jetra Therapeutics and venture capitalist funding. She has a rapid upward trajectory in research, evident by extensive body of high-quality publications including in Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Oncogene and Gastroenterology. She has been awarded more than $9 million in competitive funding and recently gained the National Health and Medical Research Council L1 Investigator Grant. A/Prof Hasnain has won 21 awards to date, including the Commercialisation award from The University of Queensland in 2022 and the Gastroenterological Society for Australasia; Lawrie Powell Award in 2023.

Maureen Hassall is Professor and Director of the Sustainable Minerals Institute's Industrial Safety and Health Centre at the University of Queensland. Her expertises crosses the fields of industrial risk management, safety engineering and human factors. Maureen works collaboratively with industry professionals to develop better human-centred risk management and safety engineering approaches that improve companies’ operational performance and competitiveness. Maureen also develops and delivers process safety, systems safety engineering, risk management and human factors training, education and expert advice to students and to industry. Her industry-focused research is motivated by 18 years of industry experience working in a number of different countries and in a variety of roles including specialist engineering, line management, organisational change and business performance improvement roles.

Dr April Hastwell is a plant molecular biologist with the School of Agriculture and Food Science at The University of Queensland, Australia. The focus of her research group is on roles of short signalling peptides in root development including in molecular networks controlling the beneficial legume-rhizobia symbiosis and nodule development.

Dr Anna Hatton is a Senior Lecturer in Physiotherapy within the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Originally from the UK, she was awarded both her BSc(Hons) in Physiotherapy and PhD in Rehabilitation Sciences from Teesside University (Middlesbrough, UK). Dr Hatton’s main research interests include the development and evaluation of novel footwear devices to enhance balance, mobility, foot sensory perception, and physical activity, in healthy and disease populations.

To date, Dr Hatton has attracted over $1.7 million research funding from major bodies including the British Geriatrics Society, Diabetes Australia, Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, and National Health and Medical Research Council. In 2010, she undertook a prestigious Australian Endeavour Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and Baroness Robson Travel Scholarship (Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, UK), within the ‘Falls and Balance Research Group’ at Neuroscience Research Australia (Sydney), under the mentorship of Professor Stephen Lord. In 2016, Dr Hatton received a high profile ‘Young Tall Poppy Science Award’ from the Australian Institute of Policy and Science, in recognition of her research excellence and novel work into plantar sensory stimulation.

Dr Hatton is Co-Director of the UQ Centre for Neurorehabilitation, Ageing and Balance Research, an Associate Editor for Gait & Posture, and (elected) Secretary for the Executive Committee of the Australian and New Zealand Falls Prevention Society.

Alesha Hatton is a postdoctoral research fellow specializing in statistical genetics and genetic epidemiology at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland. Currently, her research focuses on understanding the genetic and environmental aetiology underlying complex traits through use of Mendelian randomization and statistical genetics methodologies. Her PhD was in systems genomics, applying quantitative genetics methods to investigate the role of DNA methylation in complex trait variation. Alesha has a bachelor’s degree in medical mathematics from the University of Wollongong (2016) and previously was employed as a statistician at the South Australian health and Medical Research Institute.

Michael Haugh is Professor of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

His research interests lie primarily in the field of pragmatics, the study of the use of language in context, with a particular focus on studying the role of language in social interaction. He works with recordings and transcriptions of naturally occuring spoken interactions, as well as data from digitally-mediated forms of communication across a number of languages, as he is ultimately interested in the ways in which pragmatic phenomena have their distinct local flavours, both across and within languages and cultures. An area of emerging importance in his view is the role that language corpora and technologies can play in pragmatics and linguistics more broadly. He is currently leading the establishment of the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA) (https://www.ldaca.edu.au/) and the Australian Text Analytics Platform (ATAP) (https://www.atap.edu.au/), as well as being co-director of the Language Technology and Data Analysis Laboratory (LADAL) (http://ladal.edu.au).

He has published more than 150 papers and books, including Sociopragmatics of Japanese (2023, Routledge, with Yasuko Obana), Im/Politeness Implicatures (2015, Mouton de Gruyter), Pragmatics and the English Language (2014, Palgrave Macmillan, with Jonathan Culpeper), and Understanding Politeness (2013, Cambridge University Press, with Dániel Z. Kádár). He has also co-edited a number of books and special issues of journals, including Morality in Discourse (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, with Rosina Márquez Reiter), the Sociopragmatics of Emotion (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, with Laura Alba-Juez), Action Ascription in Interaction (2022, Cambridge University Press, with Arnulf Deppermann), the Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics (2021, Cambridge University Press, with Marina Terkourafi and Dániel Z. Kádár), and the Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness (2017, Palgrave Macmillan with Jonathan Culpeper and Dániel Z. Kádár). He was co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier, https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-pragmatics/) from 2015-2020, and is currently co-editor of Cambridge Elements in Pragmatics book series (Cambridge University Press, https://www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/elements/pragmatics).

Glenda is a lecturer in the Bachelor of Midwifery and Dual Degree (Nursing and Midwifery) in the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work at UQ. Glenda has experience in a Program Lead role, incorporating curriculum development with external engagement, program planning and management, with an interprofessional approach. Currently a member of the Australian Nursing & Midwifery Accreditation Council Assessment team. Glenda has an extensive midwifery and public health background, having worked internationally and in rural and remote settings in Australia. Glenda's research interests are: electronic health records with interoperability; interprofessional collaboration and technological approaches to simulation; improving student and new graduate experience and perinatal mental health. Available for HDR supervision.

Carmel Hawley MBBS, FRACP, M.Med.Sci, is a Senior Staff Specialist and Director of Haemodialysis Services at Princess Alexandra Hospital. In addition, she is an Associate Professor (A/P) of Medicine at the School of Medicine, University of Queensland and current (inaugural) Chair for the Australasian Kidney Trials network (AKTN) formed in 2005. Under A/P Hawley’s stewardship, AKTN’s research output is now recognised internationally for its quality and impact. This has driven major advances in the evidence base, that directly informs care and outcomes for people living with chronic kidney disease. A/P Hawley also holds a Master’s degree in Biostatistics, has expertise in trial management, methodology, design and conduct. She is currently involved in numerous industry-led and/or investigator initiated international and national clinical trials as either a Principal or Associate Investigator, providing leadership and direction to emerging early and mid-career researchers.

Dr Zachary Hawula is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Lymphoma Research Lab at the Frazer Institute located within the Translational Research Institute in Brisbane. Having completed his Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland in 2021 investigating genetic and chemical modulators of iron metabolism, haemochromatosis and anaemia. After Completing his PhD, Zach research interests changed to developing novel cell lines using CRISPR/Cas9 prime editing which mimic the rare inherited condition Wilson's Disease. A copper overolad disorder causes copper levels to build up in several organs, especially the liver, brain and eyes. Since begining his role in the Lymphoma Research Lab in 2022, Zachary is now focused on using cutting edge technologies such as single cell RNAseq (scRNAseq) to understand rare B cell lymphomas primarily focusing on Primary Central Nervous System Lymphoma (PCNSL) and Secondary CNS Lymphoma.

Chris is an Australian theatre and cultural historian teaching and researching in the Drama program in the School of Communication and Arts, currently working on an ARC DECRA-funded project about the origins of live performance subsidy in Australia between 1949 and 1975. In this work, as in all of his research, Chris is particularly interested in what funded cultural output can tell us about national pre-occupations and anxieties. Along with this historical focus, Chris is working on a book project about contemporary Australian mainstage theatre after the Kevin07 election, as well as the Australian component of a project on the cultural history of the Eurovision Song Contest outside Europe. Chris's teaching responsibilities at UQ include theatre history, performance production, and script analysis. Chris welcomes applications for higher degree research at MPhil or PhD level in any of these areas.

Chris joined UQ from the University of New England (UNE), where he was Lecturer in Theatre Studies in 2017 and directed UNE's major production of Spring Awakening in his own translation. Between 2014 and 2016, Chris was Associate Lecturer in Performance Practices at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), Sydney, where he taught into the theoretical components of the practice-led Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts degrees. Chris was awarded his PhD from the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, with a thesis entitled “Learning to inhabit the chair: Knowledge transfer in contemporary Australian director training”. This research was later published as the monograph Knowledge, Creativity and Failure (Palgrave, 2016). Chris currently serves as Vice-President of ADSA (the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies), an Associate Editor of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Deputy Editor of Performance Paradigm, and a Convenor of the Historiography Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR).