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Chris James' research is in the fields of experimental hypersonics, hypersonic aerothermodynamics, and planetary entry. His research combines two important and intertwined parts of these fields: the development and understanding of hypersonic test facilities and the performing and analysing of experiments in them. Chris' 28 journal papers, 2 technical notes, and 59 conference publications cover the design, improvement, and simulation of high enthalpy hypersonic facilities such as expansion tubes and shock tunnels, the application and improvement of physical, optical, and radio-based techniques performed on these facilities, non-equilibrium radiation measurements for entry into many planets in the solar system, re-entry observation measurements, and impulse facility ablation testing.

Chris graduated from Mechanical Engineering at UQ in 2012. Following this, he completed his PhD in the Centre for Hypersonics at the University of Queensland (UQ).

During his PhD he developed very high speed Uranus and Saturn entry conditions which were used to perform the fastest experiments which have ever been performed in an expansion tube, as well as developing expansion tube simulation and analysis codes which are now widely used in the Centre for Hypersonics and around the world. He also enrolled in a cotutelle program with École Centrale Paris in Paris, France, and after being awarded an Eiffel Excellence Scholarship by the French government, he passed a year on exchange in Paris, France. In France, Chris was working on developing the capability to perform radiating simulations to support his experimental work at UQ.

Post PhD he was employed in the Centre for Hypersonics helping to develop the X3R reflected shock tunnel, while also supervising and conducting expansion tube research on the X2 expansion tube at UQ.

In 2020, Chris took on a lecturing position for the year and was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA early career fellowship to study Mars return conditions with heated test models at UQ from 2021 to 2023. He was the 2020 recipient of the UQ EAIT Faculty Early Career Researcher Award and in 2021 a paper he presented was awarded the 2021 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Ground Test Best Paper Award at the 2021 AIAA SciTech Forum.

in 2020 he participated in the University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) led re-entry observation mission of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Hayabusa2 re-entry over Woomera, South Australia and in 2022 he led the UQ contingent on the once again UniSQ led re-entry observation mission of the NASA OSIRIS-REx re-entry in the US.

He is now employed at UQ as a UQ Amplify Senior Lecturer where he continues to perform research in giant planet entry through an ARC Discovery Project which he received with his colleague Professor Richard Morgan and continues to develop and improve UQ's X2 expansion tube.

Chris lectures in the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering at UQ. He lectures both hypersonics and space engineering, covering varied topics such as high temperature gas dynamics, hypersonic test facilities, rarefied gas dynamics, orbital mechanics, rocket trajectories, spacecraft design, spacecraft thermal and power management, and planetary entry.

He has written six popular science article for The Conversation with a more than 200,000 combined reads, and has been interviewed for Youtube and radio many times. He has given invited talks at the University of Oxford and the Engineers Australia Continuing Professional Development seminar series.

Dr Azin Janani is a signal processessing and disease classification researcher at the University of Queensland. She received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in biomedical engineering from Amirkabir University (Tehran Poly-Technique), Iran, in 2008 and 2010 respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Flinders University, Australia, in 2019. She joined the Electromagnetic Research Group, The University of Queensland as a Postdoc Fellow in 2019. Her research interests include signal processing, arteficat removl, feature extraxtion, disease classification, electromagnetic imaging, and computer aided diagnosis system development. She has an extended experience in processig diffrent kinds biological and non-biological signals including Electrocardiogram (ECG), Phonocardiogram (PCG), Electroencephalogram (EEG), and electromagnetic signals. Azin enjoys programming and is professional in Python, Matlab, Java, and C .

She was also a recipient of the Australian Endeavour Postgraduate Scholarship, in 2016, for her Ph.D. studies.

Professor Janda is a NHMRC Leadership Fellow (2025-29), and serves UQ as the Director, Centre for Health Services Research, and Professor in Behavioural Science at the Faculty of Faculty of Health, Medicine & Behavioural Sciences.Professor Janda leads the NHMRC Centre for Reserch Excellence in Skin Imaging and Precision Diagnosis (2021-2025) and the NHMRC funded Synergy Roadmap Towards Melanoma Screening (2022-2026). She trained as a health psychologist and is a behavioural scientist with a research background in cancer prevention and quality of life research. Prof Janda has strong clinical collaborations, and a passion for consumer-centered digital interventions that make self-management of health-related issues easier for people. Her work focuses on applied health and clinical research problems, making a difference to cancer prevention, early detection and treatment outcomes.

Previousely, until 2017, she led the Health Determinants and Health Systems Theme at The Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation (IHBI), Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Before her NHMRC Leadership Fellowship, research was funded through an NHMRC Translating Research into Precatice Fewllowhip (2018-2020), NHMRC Career Development Fellowship Level II (2013-2017), NHMRC Career development fellowship I (2009-12) and NHMRC early career fellowship (2004-8). She was a research fellow for the Melanoma Screening trial with the Cancer Council Queensland before joining QUT in 2006.

My research interests span a broad range of topics, including biogeographic and macroecological studies, spatial ecology, invasion biology and the integration of these fields. I therefore have a general interest to understand the mechanisms, both biological and anthropogenic, that account for changes in environmental variables and that translate into altered patterns in the distribution of biodiversity. Understanding such patterns at different spatial scales while considering different taxonomic groups is in my opinion an important component of efficient conservation planning. I also have a major interest in topics related to conservation focusing on the identification of bioindicator species that may reflect some measure of the character of the habitat within which they are found. As coordinator of the Masters of Conservation Biology course, I will be responsible for the development and running of the course. I hold an Extra-ordinary Professor position with the University of Pretoria (Dept. Zoology & Entomology).

Course Coordinator and Lecturer in Work Integrated Learning (WIL) and Employability at the University of Queensland Business School, where I lead two key streams of work experience: internships and industry consultancy projects. Through years of involvement in these programs, I've built a network of industry and academic collaborators, shaping students’ WIL experiences into immersive, hands-on learning opportunities that foster both personal discovery and professional growth. My research and teaching interests focus on models for the persuasive articulation of personal value and successfully pitching business solutions. I hold a PhD from the University of Queensland and have published research articles related to this work.

Pieter studied Biomedical Health Sciences and Medicine at the University of Nijmegen (The Netherlands) and obtained his medical degree in 2005. After moving to Australia in 2012, he started physician training in 2013. He trained in teaching hospitals in Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane before attaining fellowship of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in 2017 in the subspecialty of Endocrinology. Pieter has a special interest in endocrine hypertension and studied the role of aldosterone and aldosterone blockade in hypertension as part of his PhD at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands). He also has a particular interest in medical education. He joined UQ as a teaching-focused academic in 2018 and has coordinated several courses in the UQ MD Program across different years, including the new Year 2 course in the MD Design in 2024. His current role is Deputy Head Year 3 for the South Learning Community.

Pieter is also a part-time staff specialist at the Dept of Diabetes and Endocrinology in the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane. His clinical interests have evolved around community-based models of care, improving health outcomes for Indigenous communities and reducing inequities in health care. He is the medical lead for the Diabetes Street Hub - a collaborative project between the Princess Alexandra Hospital and Micah Projects to improve diabetes care for people living in unstable housing which has received funding from the Queensland Department of Health to establish and further develop this community-based clinical service. In 2023, he received the Metro South Staff Award for Health Equity for his work on the Diabetes Street Hub.

Areas of expertise:

• The insurance protection gap on multiple perils including terrorism, climate change and major weather events such as bushfires, hurricanes and floods.
• Financial protection and resilience to disaster in both advanced and developing economies
• Insurance markets as underpinning the economy, including mortgages, credit and lending

Professor Paula Jarzabkowski is a global expert in the public-private mechanisms proliferating around the world to address the insurance protection gap. The insurance protection gap is the economic loss from catastrophic events that is not insured. In advanced economies, the burden of paying for recovery from disasters then falls upon the government and taxpayers. In low-income countries, disaster recovery sets back economic gains by decades affecting the lives and livelihoods of vulnerable people.

The insurance protection gap is rapidly increasing due to climate change, yet climate-driven risk is not insurable because it is systemic, meaning frequent, correlated, and severe. Global insurance markets rely on highly-diversified risks, in which premiums on many different risks pay for the losses on a few risks in any country at any one time. Climate change, be that through more severe and frequent Caribbean hurricanes, Australian bushfires, and European floods, compounds global losses, generating a systemic effect of spiralling premiums, withdrawal of insurance, and unprotected assets that create the insurance protection gap.

Currently, Paula is researching the changing nature of terrorism risk and how we can remain financially resilient to risks such as civil unrest, cyber attack, explosive threats, or lone attacker events; how we can reconfigure the insurance market around sharing the risk of climate change, with a particular Australian focus on flood and cyclone risk; and how innovations in disaster risk financing, such as disaster liquidity insurance, can be used to support climate adaptation and response.

Paula is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management and a Fellow of the British Academy. Paula is a member of the Expert Advisory Group, Pool Reinsurance Company UK; a Board Member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) High Level Advisory Board for the Financial Management of Catastrophic Risks; and has been Co-Chair of the Expert Advisory Group of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office, Centre for Global Disaster Protection.

Amal specialises in investigating the therapeutic aspects of focused ultrasound assisted gene therapy for neurodegenerative diseases. He completed his PhD (2016-2020) at CAI/AIBN (UQ) under Prof. Kristofer Thurecht, studying the effect of different ligand densities on the distribution of nanocarriers in vitro and in vivo. He joined Prof. Terry Rabbitts’s lab at the Institute of Cancer Research London as a Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2022), working on an intracellular antibody-assisted small molecule discovery project funded by Blood Cancer UK and by the Kay Kendall Leukemia Fund. His current research focuses on the therapeutic aspects of focused ultrasound-mediated gene therapy for neurodegenerative diseases funded by the FightMND Foundation, in collaboration with Professor Kris Thurecht, Dr. Kara Vine-Perrow, Prof. Justin Yerbury, and Prof. Anthony White at the University of Queensland and the University of Wollongong.

Dr Dilki Jayasinghe is a Biostatistics Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Services Research, with expertise in statistical analysis using imaging data, validation and application of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in dermatology and melanoma epidemiology. She completed her PhD in 2023 on statistical modelling of the natural history and spatial distribution of naevi (or moles, the strongest phenotypic risk factor for melanoma) using 3D total-body photography.

Anjana Jayasree is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Queensland's School of Pharmacy, specializing in the development of innovative nanomaterials for biomedical applications. Her current research focuses on designing metallic and polymeric nanoparticles/microparticles to combat antimicrobial resistance, addressing a critical global health challenge. She was awarded the Dean's Award for Outstanding HDR Theses for her exceptional PhD work from the University of Queensland in December 2023.

Previously, Anjana's research included the development of nanoengineered titanium implants to enhance bioactivity for osseointegration and soft tissue integration. She has also worked on creating polymeric scaffolds for bone and tendon tissue engineering and innovating therapeutic bandage systems for diabetic wound healing. These contributions demonstrate her expertise in applying advanced materials to solve complex biomedical problems.

Anjana's expertise extends to advanced microscopy, nanomaterial characterization, and bio-fabrication techniques. She is dedicated to translating her research into practical applications that improve animal and human health, with a strong emphasis on combating antimicrobial resistance.

Dr Dinesha Jayawardana is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Queensland. Her research focuses on quantitative genetics, statistical modelling, and data-driven solutions in agriculture and animal science. She specialises in mixed model approaches in plant and animal breeding experiments, as well as genomic, phenotypic, and pedigree data analysis. She has extensive experience in animal and plant breeding, genetic analysis, and experimental design across livestock, aquaculture, and crop production systems, with a strong emphasis on genetic improvement and sustainable production practices. She is currently working as a statistician for the Analytics for Australian Grain Industry project, providing statistical data analysis support for initiatives across the Australian grain sector. Dinesha received her PhD in Quantitative Genetics from Massey University, New Zealand, a Master of Science in Biostatistics, and a Bachelor of Science in Statistics from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. She has also been recognised with multiple national and international awards for research excellence.