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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.

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.

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"

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.

Associate Professor Hume’s current research interests include: Anthropology and the Senses; religion and dress; consciousness studies; autoethnography; convict women in Tasmania in the 1830s.

Associate Professor Hume holds the following qualifications: B.A., M.A. (Calgary), Ph.D. (Queensland) and is currently an Honorary Associate Professor in Studies in Religion.

She has taught in the areas of Anthropology of Religion: New Religious Movements, Aboriginal Religions, Women and Religion, Religion and the Body, and Alternative Spirituality.

She is on the editorial board of the following international journals: Journal of Contemporary Religion; Fieldwork in Religion; Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions; Australian Religion Studies Review.

In 2004, Associate Professor Hume co-edited (with Jane Mulcock) 'Anthropologists in the Field: Cases in Participant Observation'. New York: Columbia University Press.

The research interests of the Hume Laboratory centre on the biology of macrophages and osteoclasts. These are cells of haematopoietic origin that are closely related to each other but have distinctly different activities.

David Hume was a group leader at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (1988-2007) and subsequently Director of the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland from 2007-2017. He is currently a Professorial Research Fellow at the Mater Research Institute-UQ, located at the Translational Research Institute

Jacquelyn is an Associate Professor in finance and is the finance discipline convenor (department head).

Jacquelyn's research expertise is in sustainable finance/responsible investment i.e., how environmental, social and governance factors impact on investment decision-making for investors and corporations. She also has an active interdisciplinary research agenda in sustainability more broadly and a research interest in funds management. Jacquelyn has published in well-regarded international finance journals including Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Banking and Finance and Journal of Business Ethics, as well as in journals outside of finance including Nature Climate Change, Global Environmental Change and Journal of Cleaner Production. She has edited and written an open textbook, Sustainable Finance.

Jacquelyn's research is of great interest to the wider financial community, both in Australia and internationally. Her research has been cited by the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative, the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global, KPMG and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Jacquelyn has had numerous international invitations to speak about environmental, social and governance research and has led several research projects for the finance industry.

In teaching, she is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy(Advance HE), an accreditation which demonstrates advanced professional expertise in teaching and learning in higher education. Jacquelyn has received BEL Faculty awards for teaching and also for leadership.

Libby Humphries is a Lecturer, Research Fellow, and Education and Training Program Leader at the Minerals Industry Safety and Health Centre (MISHC), University of Queensland. With over 20 years of experience in health and safety, Libby has designed and delivered comprehensive health and safety management systems and risk management plans across high-hazard industries, including mining, smelting and gas sectors. Her work spans aluminium smelting, uranium mining and coal seam gas contracting across Australia, including Gladstone (QLD), Jabiru (NT), and Parkes (NSW).

Libby specialises in the development, implementation, and evaluation of effective health and safety management systems, ensuring they are practical, sustainable, and aligned with industry and regulatory standards. Her approach integrates a layered risk management framework, critical control verification, and continuous improvement processes to drive operational excellence and safer work environments.

As a qualified ISO 45001 auditor and an experienced Trainer and Assessor aligned with Registered Training Organisation (RTO) standards, Libby is skilled in developing and delivering nationally accredited training programs. She ensures learners meet industry and regulatory requirements while fostering practical skills for workplace application.

Libby is particularly passionate about enhancing health and psychosocial risk management through robust competency frameworks and targeted education. Her industry expertise ensures that training and risk management initiatives are practical, evidence-based, and tailored to the unique needs of high-hazard operations.

Dr Natasha Hungerford is an organic chemist and has extensive experience in natural products chemistry. She is a Senior Research Fellow leading the Natural Toxin group within the Centre for Animal Science, Queensland Alliance for Agricultural and Food Innovation (QAAFI) and is based at the Health and Food Sciences Precinct (Cooper's Plains). She joined QAAFI in 2016 and specialises in natural plant toxins and their impacts on livestock and human health, including food safety and regulations. Collaborative projects with government/industry have spanned mitigation of toxin impacts on cattle, to evaluation of toxins in honey (and health impacts). Subsequent examinations of stingless bee honey serendipitously led to the ground-breaking discovery of the rare sugar trehalulose as a major component of these honeys. Dr Hungerford continues to lead and manage projects to address agricultural industry challenges, including reducing methane gas emissions for a carbon neutral beef industry and international stingless bee honey development.

Dr Hungerford achieved her PhD in 1998, through the UQ School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, and subsequently conducted postdoctoral research in natural products chemistry and in synthetic organic chemistry, at the University of Oxford, Australian National University, The University of Sydney, Griffith University and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Professor Ian Hunter is currently pursuing two research themes, one concerns the history of early modern political and philosophical thought, and the other concerns the history of theory in the modern humanities academy.

Ian Hunter is a distinguished international scholar working on the history of early modern political and philosophical thought, and on the emergence of theory in the 1960s humanities academy. His Rival Enlightenments appeared in 2001 and his most recent monograph is The Secularisation of the Confessional State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). In collaboration with Thomas Ahnert (Edinburgh) and Frank Grunert (Halle), he completed the first English translation of Thomasius’s works: Christian Thomasius: Essays on Church, State, and Politics (Liberty Fund, 2007). He has recently edited and introduced two volumes for the German edition of Thomasius's Selected Works.

Recently published articles include ‘Kant’s Religion and Prussian Religious Policy’, Modern Intellectual History, vol. 2, 2005, 1-27; ‘The History of Theory’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 33, 2006, 78-112; ‘The Time of Theory: The Return of Metaphysics to the Anglo-American Humanities Academy’, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 10, 2007, 5-22; and 'A Jus Gentium for America. The Rules of War and the Rule of Law in the Revolutionary United States', Journal of the History of International Law 14, 2012, pp. 173-206. Recent book chapters include 'Natural Law as Political Philosophy', in Desmond Clarke and Catherine Wilson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 475-99; and 'Kant’s Political Thought in the Prussian Enlightenment', in Elizabeth Ellis (ed), Kant’s Political Theory: Interpretations and Applications, Pittsburg: Penn State Press, 2012, pp. 170-207.

He is currently working on the theme of the persona of the philosopher, and the intellectual history of 1960s humanities theory.