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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 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, educational outcomes, outcomes of social services, and health policy evaluation. She has expertise in analysing longitudinal panel surveys and experience in analysing integrated administrative data. She is also passionate about teaching newbies in quantitative statistics.

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."

Professor Longbin Huang, a full professor and the group leader of Ecological Engineering in Mining, in the Sustainable Minerals Institute, is widely recognised for global leadership at the interface of ecological engineering, environmental microbiology, and mining sustainability, with influence spanning industry, academia, and policy. He is a world-leading architect of nature-based, microbially driven ecological engineering systems that transform mining wastes into sustainable ecosystems—bridging fundamental science, industrial application, and global environmental solutions. Professor Huang's research leadership is chracterised by

✅ Conceptual innovation → Engineering soil formation (pedogenesis)

✅ Systems thinking → Integrating microbes, minerals, plants, and engineering

✅ Translation to practice → Field-scale deployment in mining operations

✅ Industry engagement → Long-term global partnerships

✅ Sustainability impact → Turning waste into ecosystems

Professor Huang leads cutting-edge research in: Geo-microbial ecology, Mineral bioweathering, Microbially and rhizosphere driven soil formation from Tailings Minerals.

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 $23M 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 – 2025 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)

Helen Huang is a Professor and the Discipline Leader for Data Science in the School of EECS at The University of Queensland. She received her BSc degree from Department of Computer Science, Tsinghua University, China, and her PhD in Computer Science from School of EECS, The University of Queensland in 2001 and 2007 respectively. Helen's research interests mainly include multimedia indexing and search, computer vision, recommender systems, social data analysis and knowledge discovery. She has published 200+ papers in prestigious venues, and has served as an Associate Editor for The VLDB Journal, ACM Computing Surveys, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM), Pattern Recognition Journal, etc and also a member of the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees. Helen has been elevated to IEEE Fellow for her contributions to multi-modal data management and ACM Fellow for contributions to large-scale multimedia content understanding, indexing and retrieval.

Helen Huang has received 2016 Chris Wallace Award from Computing Research and Education (CORE) Australasia for a notable breakthrough or a contribution of particular significance in Computer Science, and Women in Technology (WiT) Infotech Research Award 2014, Queensland. She was also a recipient of the Excellence in Higher Degree by Research Supervision Award, University of Queensland, 2018.

Professor Ruth E. Hubbard is the leading frailty expert in Australia, with dual clinical and research leadership roles.

As the Director of General and Geriatric Medicine & Consultant Geriatrician at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane, Queensland, she has led the establishment of frailty-focused models of care including a peri-operative geriatric medicine service, geriatrician-led care in the Emergency Department and specialised dementia care wards for people with challenging behaviours.

As Masonic Chair of Geriatric Medicine at The University of Queensland, she created the Australian Frailty Network, a national partnership of researchers, clinicians, professional associations and consumers, with the vision of delivering a national response to frailty that enables frailty-informed care for all older Australians.

Prof Hubbard has generated $43mill funding, more than 200 publications, 100 conference appearances, eight book chapters and Consensus Statements supporting national and international policy.

She qualified from St. Mary’s Hospital, London and trained in Cardiff, Wales, completing an MSc in Medical Education and an MD on frailty pathophysiology before undertaking a post-doctoral fellowship in Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia.

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.

Nick’s research focuses on improving the efficiency and environmental sustainability of animal production systems. He uses modern omics technologies and quantitative analysis to support genetic improvement, inform management decisions, and enhance on-farm interventions that improve productivity while reducing environmental impact.

In parallel, he studies the physiology, metabolism and conservation of native Australian fauna, with particular interest in frogs and butterflies. His work applies comparative and systems-based approaches to understand how animals function across diverse ecological contexts, including very challenging environments such as the arid zone.

Trained as a metabolic biochemist, Nick’s expertise spans the interpretation of large and complex biological datasets, molecular technologies, mitochondrial physiology, and metabolic flux. His research integrates molecular data with whole-animal function to better understand how biological systems convert energy and information into phenotypic outcomes. Within production science Nick focusses on feed conversion efficiency as it is of both commercial and environmental importance, as well as being mechanistically complex.

Before joining the School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability (AGFS) as a Teaching and Research academic, Nick worked within a multidisciplinary Systems Biology group at CSIRO. There he helped develop and apply bioinformatic approaches that integrate metabolite, protein, RNA and DNA data to model and predict phenotypes of commercial importance in cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry.

A highlight of this work was the co-development of a universal method for inferring causal regulatory molecules from genome-wide gene expression data (Hudson et al., 2009, PLoS Computational Biology). This approach has since been applied across diverse systems, including human kidney cancer and commercially important traits in livestock species.

Nick’s broader research contributions reflect an interest in complex biological function across scales. His publications have addressed mitochondrial systems biology, metabolic adaptation and hibernation physiology, population genetics methodology, and the physiological basis of economically important traits such as beef marbling and feed conversion efficiency. He has also led interdisciplinary work exploring information processing in biological and cognitive systems and the interpretation of educational data.

Nick completed his undergraduate degree in Animal Biology at the University of St Andrews and was awarded his PhD through the Zoology Department at The University of Queensland after travelling from England on a Britain–Australia Society Northcote Scholarship.

He teaches biochemistry and molecular biology to undergraduate and postgraduate students using a comparative approach that draws on both wildlife and production species. Core biochemical principles are illustrated through applied examples from agriculture, biomedicine, sports science and environmental systems, helping students understand how molecular processes scale to whole-organism function and real-world outcomes.

Kyla is a speech-language pathologist and Research Fellow within the Queensland Aphasia Research Centre and the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at The University of Queensland. Her main research interests are in aphasia rehabilitation, communication within aged care and qualitative health consumer research/ co-design. Her research focuses on understanding the lived experiences of individuals with communication disability to inform and develop meaningful interventions that focus on real-life outcomes.

She is an advocate for designing research processes that are communicatively accessible and inclusive of individuals with communication disability.

François received his PhD in human movement sciences from Aix-Marseille university (France - 2003). His 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 >220 articles in peer-reviewed journals and received > 2.5 M€ funding as PI. 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 a senior fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF, 2025-2030). François is currently Professor (full) in Human Movement Sciences at the University of Côte d’azur (Nice, France) where he leads the LAMHESS lab. Francois serves on the editorial board of Journal of Electromyography and Kinesiology, Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sport, and Journal of Applied Physiology. 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.