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Nature-based rehabilitation science and technology, with a focus on ecological engineering of mine wastes (e.g., AMD-waste rocks, tailings (coal tailings, magnetite tailings, bauxite residues (or red mud), Cu/Pb-Zn tailings)) into earth materials (e.g., soil, engineered rocks) and resilient landforms for cost-effective sustainable rehabilitation at mine waste landscapes.

Professor Huang is a full professor and the group leader of Ecological Engineering in Mining, in the Sustainable Minerals Institute, University of Queensland. Since 2010, Prof Huang has pioneered new concepts and technological framework to manage and rehabilitate mine wastes (e.g., tailings, acidic and metalliferous waste rocks), through putting pedogenesis in engineering nutshell, i.e., eco-engineering of pedogenesis in mine wastes. He is leading an industry-enaged and interdisciplinary research group that is partnered with leading mining companies and empowered by multidisciplinary knowledge and skills on: environmental molecular microbiology, environmental mineralogy, soil science, native plant rhizosphere (micro)biology, soil-plant relations, and bio-chemical engineering of environmental materials (e.g., functional carbon and mineral absorbents, environmental geopolymers).

He is highly experienced in industry-partnered research and translation of knowledge into field-based technologies for tackling large environmental challenges in the mining industry, for example, technologies for tackling global tailings problem. Since 2010, he has led many large and industry-partnered research projects attracting about $21M funding. The research aims to deliver transformative knowledge and practices (i.e., technologies/methdologies) in the rehabilitation of mine wastes (e.g., tailings, mineral residues, spoils, waste rocks) and mined landscapes for non-polluting and ecologically and financially sustainable outcomes. Prof Huang has successfully demonstrated innovative methodology and technology to achieve nature-based outcomes in treating and rehabilitating tailings and waste rocks. Prof Huang’s research program was featured in Rio Tinto’s media releases as one of the four most successful global R&D partnerships in 2024. Prof Huang led the development of the first field-feasible technology to treat and dealkalize alkaline bauxite residues for sustainable rehabilitation. His industry-partnered research was recognised in 2019 UQ’s Partners in Research Excellence Award (Resilient Environments) (Rio Tinto and QAL). Prof Huang is also developing new knowledge and technologies for achieving non-polluting and ecologically sustainable rehabilitation of, for example, coal mine spoils and tailings, Fe-ore tailings, bauxite tailings (from mining bauxite), and Cu/Pb-Zn tailings.

Membership of Board, Committee and Society

Professional associations and societies

2010 – Present Australian Soil Science Society.

2023 – Present AuSIMM

2015 – Present American Society of Mining and Reclamation (ASMR)

Editorial boards/services

2025 - present: Member of Editorial Board, Energy & Environment Nexus

2022 – present: Associate editor (Soil), Reclamation Sciences

Awards & Patent

2019 UQ’s Partners in Research Excellence Award (Resilient Environments) (Rio Tinto and QAL)

2017 SMI-Industry Engagement Award, University of Queensland

2015 SMI-Inaugural Bright Research Ideas Forum Award, University of Queensland

2014 SMI-RHD Supervision Award, University of Queensland

2015 Foliar fertilizer US 20150266786. In. (Google Patents). Huang L, Nguyen AV, Rudolph V, Xu G (equal contribution)

Dr Xiaodan Huang is a material chemist. His major research areas are functional materials and chemistry, focusing on the design of innovative materials and application functions. ​Dr Xiaodan Huang specialises in electrochemical energy storage and conversion systems, which primarily include rechargeable metal batteries and supercapacitors which are among the leading technologies that have been projected to provide the solution to the complex energy storage gridlock.

Dr Huang has an Honours degree in Science (Advanced Mathematics) from the University of Sydney, and a PhD (Statistics) from the University of Chicago on a McCormick Fellowship. He previously lectured at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Technology Sydney, before moving to the University of Queensland where he is currently the Statistics Major Convenor and Mathematics Honours Coordinator.

Yanshu is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course. She has a social psychology background and has research interests in tracking changes in gender role attitudes over time and public support for gender equality policies. Her other research interests include looking at the outcomes of family members of people living with chronic illness and disability. She has expertise in analysing longitudinal panel surveys and experience in analysing integrated administrative data. She has also been involved in various evaluations of parenting, public health, and health services.

Dr Huang's background is in environmental and analytical chemistry, with a research focus on developing and applying passive sampling techniques to monitor nutrients and heavy metals in water, sediment, and soil, as well as on understanding the biogeochemistry of pollutants in the environment. Dr Huang recently received a DECRA fellowship for the project "Major Hidden Source of Land-Based Nutrients Affecting Australian Estuaries."

Ruth E. Hubbard is a Consultant Geriatrician at the Princess Alexandra Hospital and in October 2020 was appointed as the Masonic Chair of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Queensland.

She qualified from St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London and trained in general internal medicine and geriatric medicine in Cardiff, Wales. As a clinical academic, she has always combined hospital practice with research and teaching. She has completed an MSc in Medical Education, an MD on pathophysiological changes in frail older people and a post-doctoral fellowship in Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia with Professor Ken Rockwood. Here, she was able to test hypotheses regarding the determinants and manifestations of frailty through the interrogation of large datasets. She has published widely on the inflammatory aetiology of frailty, the difficulties of measuring frailty in clinical practice and the relationships between frailty and obesity, smoking, socioeconomic status and exercise. Based on the impact of her publications, she is currently ranked number 4 in a list of frailty experts worldwide (http://expertscape.com/ex/frail+elderly).

In the last 5 years, she has generated $24.5M in grant income including as CIA on the following: MRFF Dementia Ageing and Aged Care Mission ($5M), a Centre for Research Excellence in Frailty ($2.5M), an Ideas Grant ($1.6M) and the NHMRC Targeted Call for Frailty Research ($1.5M). As Founder and Director of the Australia Frailty Network (AFN), she has established a team of consumer partners, multidisciplinary clinical academics, behavioural psychologists and statisticians answering critical questions relating to the measurement and management of frailty.

Amy is a specialist in Francophone autobiographies of exile and trauma. She is author of Hoarding Memory: Covering the Wounds of the Algerian War (U of Nebraska P, 2020), Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity and Exile (U of Nebraska P, 2015), and A la recherche d'un emploi: Business French in a Communicative Context (Hackett, 2017). She has co-edited several volumes including Places of Traumatic Memory - a Global Context (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), The Unspeakable: Representations of Trauma in Francophone Literature and Art (2013), and Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography (U of Nebraska P, 2011). She is currently working on her new project, Terrorism Testimony: French Narratives of Survival.

Dr Pie Huda is a protein engineer and research fellow at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), at the University of Queensland (UQ). Her research focus on development of antibodies, antibody fragments and antibody mimetics as targeting tools for nanomaterials, drugs and probes in applications such as radiopharmaceuticals. Pie is uniquely positioned at UQ, working under Professor David Owen who is the director of the Protein Expression Facility (PEF), enabling access to state-of-the-art instrumentation and specialised capabilities. She has collaborated with several Australian biotech industry partners and academic groups in the development of targeting biologics.

Communication Disability, Aphasia Rehabilitation, ICF

Kyla Brown is a speech pathologist within the Centre for Clinical Research Excellence (CCRE) in Aphasia Rehabilitation and the Communication Disability Centre at the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. Her primary research interests are in the areas of aphasia rehabilitation and applications of the ICF (with a focus on participation and environmental factors). Her PhD used a qualitative approach to explore the topic of "Living Successfully with Aphasia"

Nick is interested in fostering efficient, environmentally friendly animal production enterprises. He uses the data and capabilities provided by modern 'omics technologies to help improve breeding decisions and to inform other types of 'on farm' intervention.

Nick has a parallel interest in the development, physiology, metabolism and conservation of native Australian species, particularly frogs and butterflies.

Nick is a metabolic biochemist by training with research expertise in a) the handling and biological interpretation of large, complex data sets b) molecular technologies c) mitochondrial physiology and d) metabolic flux.

Nick enjoys teaching various aspects of biochemistry and molecular biology to both undergraduate and postgraduate students. He highlights the main themes using the comparative method and illustrates their importance through applied examples from agriculture and other areas of human endeavour.

Before taking his current position as a Teaching and Research academic in the School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability (AGFS) Nick worked for the CSIRO in a research intensive multi-disciplinary Systems Biology group.

Through this group he helped develop and apply bioinformatic methods that used metabolite, protein, RNA and DNA biotech to understand, model and predict phenotypes of commercial importance in cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens.

A research highlight from this time was the co-invention of a universal method for inferring causal molecules from genome-wide gene expression data (Hudson et al 2009. PLoS Comp Biol e1000382). This method has been applied across a diverse range of model systems including human kidney cancer and commercial traits in various agricultural species.

Following an undergraduate degree in Animal Biology at the University of St.Andrews, Nick was awarded his PhD through what was then the Zoology department of the University of Queensland, after travelling from England on a Britain-Australia Society funded Northcote Scholarship.

Francois research focuses on the neural control of movement in health and disease. He has developed a neural framework based on the non-invasive recording of motor neurons to reveal the modular organization of movement control at the spinal motor neuron level. He has published >200 articles in peer-reviewed journals and received > 3 000 000 € funding. François received his PhD in human movement sciences from Aix-Marseille university (France - 2003). As Full Professor at Nantes Université (France), he led a research Lab until he moved to Université Côte d’azur (France), in 2021. He is an honorary fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France and an honorary professor at the University of Queensland (Australia) where he spent >5 years since 2011. François is currently Professor (full) in Human Movement Sciences at the University of Côte d’azur (Nice, France). Francois serves on the editorial board of Journal of Electromyography and Kinesiology and Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sport. He is an expert for the Consensus for Experimental Design in Electromyography (CEDE) project, which is an international initiative which aims to guide decision-making in recording, analysis, and interpretation of electromyographic data.

From a PhD in 1994 at the University of Queensland, Phil Hugenholtz developed a career in microbiology and genomics in the USA and in Australia. Phil’s last position in the USA was as Staff Scientist (2004-2010) at the Department of Energy, Joint Genome Institute. In late 2010 Phil returned home to establish the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics (ACE) at the University of Queensland. He has contributed to the field of culture-independent analysis of microorganisms through the discovery and characterisation of numerous previously unrecognised major bacterial and archaeal lineages each with greater evolutionary divergence than animals and plants combined. Phil has played important roles in the development and application of metagenomics, the genome-based characterisation of microbiomes, which has revolutionised our understanding of microbial ecology and evolution. This has resulted in several discoveries in environmental and clinical microbiology sometimes overturning decades of misdirected culture-based studies. He has applied his interest in comparative genomics and metagenomics to develop a systematic genome-based taxonomy for bacteria and archaea, which is facilitating scientific communication and endeavour. Phil has published over four hundred papers on molecular microbial ecology and evolution.

As Professorial Research Fellow at UQ and Director of ACE, Phil has affiliate appointments with the Institute for Molecular Bioscience and the UQ Diamantina Institute, which supports collaborative research at ACE. Currently, Phil’s research interests include the microbial ecology and evolution of environmental and host-associated ecosystems including marsupial and insect guts, biomining, marine and genomic mapping of the microbial tree of life.

Current research includes:

- A Genome Taxonomy Database for the Kingdom Fungi

- Tracing the emergence of cellular complexity in the phylum Planctomycetota

- Dual-function ribonucleases: unexpected agents of antibiotic resistance

- Breaking critical barriers in soil formation of bauxite residues

- Changing the classification status quo with a global genome-based taxonomy

- GBR Microbial Genomic Database

In 2018, Phil co-founded a start-up company, Microba Life Sciences (microba.com), which is focused on metagenome-based diagnostics and therapeutics.

Phil received the Young Investigators Award from the International Society of Microbial Ecology (ISME) in 2016, was elected in 2012 as a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM), elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2017, is a Member of the International Scientific Advisory Board (Fachbeirat) of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Bremen and is the outgoing President (2024-2026) of the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME). Phil has been a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher since 2014 and one of only ~300 researchers worldwide to be highly cited in two fields (Microbiology and Biology & Biochemistry) from 2019-2024.

Associate Professor Karen Hughes lectures at undergraduate and postgraduate level in the areas of sustainable tourism and visitor management. Her research interests include interpretation and environmental education, wildlife tourism, heritage tourism, visitor behaviour and sustainable tourism. She is particularly interested in exploring how interpretation can be used across a range of contexts to attract, engage and inspire visitors.

Karen’s PhD studies focused on designing and evaluating the impact of support materials on families’ adoption of environmental behaviours following a visit to Mon Repos turtle rookery. She has also explored public responses to environmental campaigns, public perceptions of replica sites as conservation tools, and the potential use of technology in connecting with new visitor audiences. Her most recent work involves designing and evaluating the impact of values-based interpretation on visitors’ long-term environmental behaviour. Karen has supervised four PhD students, three Masters students and two honours students to completion in the areas of interpretation, experience design and environmental behaviour change. Associate Professor Hughes has also been a lecturer and researcher at James Cook University, Charles Darwin University and Queensland University of Technology.

Dr Brett Hughes graduated from the University of NSW with a Bachelor of Medical Science and Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery in 1997. He completed his postgraduate training in Canberra and Brisbane and was admitted as a Fellow of the Australian College of Physicians as a Specialist Medical Oncologist in 2005.

Dr Hughes is currently a Senior Staff Specialist Medical Oncologist at the RBWH and TPCH. He is also an Associate Professor at the University of Queensland since 2015. As the previous Clinical Director of Oncology (201-2017) and current Cancer Care Services Research lead at TPCH, Dr Hughes has established both an independent TPCH Oncology unit and continuing TPCH’s reputation as a lung cancer research centre of excellence.

Dr Hughes is an active senior member of the Thoracic Oncology Group Australasia (TOGA) and the Trans Tasman Radiation Oncology Group (TROG). He is also heavily involved in many pivotal multicentre trials of cancer therapy at both TPCH and RBWH with his principal research interests in Lung cancer, Head & Neck cancer, Mesothelioma, cutaneous SCC and Thyroid cancer. He has published over 100 peer review papers. Dr Hughes is also involved in undergraduate and post graduate teaching in his fields of research interest.

Overview

Dr Adam Hulme studies complex adaptive systems and applies methods and models from the systems and complexity sciences to policy-resistant issues in various domains. His current interests lie in the areas of regional, rural and remote health and public health more broadly. Dr Hulme prefers to adopt a systems thinking or holistic perspective over a reductionist one, as doing so is to consider the whole system, or multiple interacting elements of it, as the primary unit of analysis. As an expert in systems modelling and analysis, Dr Hulme has applied an extensive list of over 20 qualitative and quantitative systems science approaches to address complex problems that threaten to disrupt performance and safety within various sociotechnical systems contexts. This includes the use of System Dynamics modelling and simulation, which is a relatively distinctive approach and practiced deeply by a select few inter/nationally. He is the #1 mid-career researcher in Australia (#10 nationally), for the topic ‘systems analysis’, placing him in the top 0.033% of 208,280 published authors worldwide on this topic (Expertscape).

Background

Dr Hulme is a Research Fellow and School Research Chair at Southern Queensland Rural Health (SQRH), Toowoomba, Queensland. He has qualifications in Sports and Exercise Science (BSc HONS; England), Health Promotion (MA; Australia), and obtained a PhD in Sports Injury Epidemiology and Systems Human Factors in August 2017 (Ballarat, Victoria, Australia). His doctoral program was completed at the Australian Collaboration for Research into Injury in Sport and its Prevention (Federation University Australia), which is recognised by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as a world leading research centre.

Following his PhD, Dr Hulme spent four years as a Post-Doctoral researcher at the Centre for Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems (CHFSTS) at the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC). In this role, he conceived, led, developed, and published the world’s first Agent-Based Model (ABM; complex systems microsimulation) of running injury causation in the sports sciences alongside an international multidisciplinary author team. Dr Hulme has also published multiple peer reviewed systems modelling and analysis applications to address various systems problems in leading international journals.

As a result of his achievements, Dr Hulme was offered employment as a full-time Research Fellow on an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery project though the CHFSTS. It was during this time that he worked on the theoretical development and testing of state-of-the-art systems-based safety management methods in an effort to overcome known limitations with traditional and reductive scientific approaches. Dr Hulme has applied systems-based risk assessment and incident analysis methods to multiple work domains, including defence, construction, healthcare, manufacturing, mining, sports, transportation (e.g., road, rail, aviation, maritime), and general workplace safety.

Current role

In his current role at SQRH, Dr Hulme is advancing the complexity science and systems thinking research agenda in the area of regional, rural and remote health. He is using conceptual-qualitative and computational-quantitative System Dynamics modelling to holistically map and analyse the behaviours that occur within complex rural health systems. Dr Hulme was recently awarded a highly competitive ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE 2024) to explore how climate change and extreme weather events may further impact the rural health workforce maldistribution crisis using systems science methodologies. He warmly welcomes collaborations with other researchers, both within and outside of the UQ network, and is readily available to discuss potential HDR projects that involve systems and complexity science applications to any problem in most domains.