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Kyla is a speech-language pathologist and Research Fellow within the Centre for Living Experience Research (LEX) and the Queensland Aphasia Research Centre 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Leon Hugo is a medical entomologist conducting research into the biology of mosquitoes, host-parasite interactions and the development of novel control strategies against arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses). Dr Hugo is an Honorary Associate Professor through the School of Biomedical Sciences and is also the Academic Lead of the Mosquito Control Laboratory at QIMR Berghofer medical research institute, Brisbane. Dr Hugo has developed and applied experimental mosquito models of arbovirus infection for over 15 years to establish the risk of arbovirus transmission in Australia and new biological controls. Dr Hugo works with physical containment/biosecurity level (PC/BSL) 2 and 3 arboviruses, including dengue, Zika, Japanese encephalitis and chikungunya viruses and performs fundamental research on Wolbachia bacteria and Insect-specific virus (ISV) microbial control agents. Dr Hugo has published 60+ research articles with over 160 collaborators, from academic, medical, government and corporate sectors, across 18 countries. Topic areas his publications have had greatest impact were Japanese Encephalitis and Socioeconomic Impact, Wolbachia’s Role in Mosquito Population Replacement and Insecticide Resistance Mechanisms in Aedes aegypti.

Dr Hugo’s team maintains a living library of native and exotic mosquito species and conducts infection and transmission studies in state-of-the-art PC2 and PC3 insectaries. Research themes including mosquito vector competence, climate change impacts on mosquito-borne disease transmission risk, mosquito and arbovirus surveillance and genomics and novel control strategies, including biological control and the use of endectocides.

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 with research expertise in sustainable finance/responsible investment. Her interests are primarily in funds management where she investigates how finance can be accessed and mobilised to address the world's most pressing social and environmental issues. She also has an active interdisciplinary research agenda in business sustainability more broadly. Jacquelyn has published in well-regarded international finance journals including Management Science andJournal of Corporate Finance, as well as in journals outside of finance including Nature Climate Change, Global Environmental Change and One Earth. She has edited and written an open textbook, Sustainable Finance and is a member of the UQ Business School's Sustainable Business Research Hub and Digital Finance Research Hub.

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 sustainable finance research and has led several research projects for the finance industry.

She is the President of the Alliance of Finance Educators, a network designed to promote excellence in finance higher education across Australia. She is also 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 for leadership.

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.