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Bec Jenkinson is health consumer advocate-turned-researcher, with more than 10 years’ experience as a leader in the Australian health consumer movement, advocating for high quality, respectful, person-centred care. She is also skilled qualitative and mixed methods researcher, writer, presenter and networker with a passion for consumer and community engagement in health services, and broad experience encompassing health policy, service delivery and evaluation, and education. Bec's PhD investigated the experiences of women, midwives and obstetricians when pregnant women decline recommended care. She went on to co-lead the development and implementation of Queensland Health's Guideline: Partnering with the woman who declines recommended maternity care. Now a Senior Research Fellow with UQ's Clinical Trials Capability Team (ULTRA), Bec works collaboratively with researchers, consumers and other stakeholders to enhance consumer and community involvement (CCI) in clinical trial designs and processes. She is particularly interested in the methodologies of research priority setting, and in how CCI can drive health equity in clinical trials.

I am interested in students' transition from high school to university mathematics, as well as the teaching and learning of first-year mathematics.

My main research area is the transition from high school to university mathematics. My 25+ years’ teaching experience on both sides of the secondary-tertiary transitional fence gives me an excellent understanding of student knowledge, allowing me to focus my teaching on specific, known problem areas such as algebra, calculus and contextual understanding.

I do not just rely on my background knowledge and communication skills, but also take a scholarly approach to generate new knowledge that informs my teaching. I use technology such as UniDoodle to gather data and then design innovative resources that support diverse student cohorts, including the SmartAss self-testing system. In 2015 I was awarded an OLT Award for Teaching Excellence. In 2010 I was awarded an ALTC Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning.

I have been successful in attracting competitive grant funding for teaching innovations. For example, I led an OLT Extension Grant on diagnostic testing. This grant saw the implementation of a unique diagnostic test system, GetSet, in four Australian universities. In 2008 I was part of a team that was awarded a UQ Teaching and Learning Strategic Grant to design the competency test (that is now GetSet) for first-year engineering students to assess knowledge of high school level mathematics, physics, and chemistry, and also the ability of the students to apply this knowledge. I was also a Chief Investigator on a Carrick Grant that developed a powerful and flexible electronic system called SmartAss that creates unlimited questions accompanied by fully worked solutions. This innovative system has been used with great success over a range of mathematics, science and business courses for the past 15 years. The system is also used in high schools.

I have also led numerous internally funded projects. These projects have developed a comprehensive range of new small-group learning resources for students in core engineering courses to complement a redeveloped student-focused mathematics learning space, an online diagnostic test with automatic correction and feedback to students and staff, numerous study guides for first-year mathematics courses, and a $99,000 Technology Enhanced Learning grant to update and improve SmartAss. All of these teaching innovation grants are aimed at improving students’ mathematical understanding along with their first-year experience.

I have been heavily involved in the work of the School’s Teaching and Learning Committee that has been responsible for improving the overall quality of teaching within the School. I mentor new staff, providing advice on teaching and assessment design.

I have also been involved in the development and review of the Australian Curriculum: Mathematics, and foster links between high school teachers and university lecturers through my role as Executive Committee Member and Treasurer of the Queensland Association of Mathematics Teachers.

I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a member of the UQ College of Peer Observers, and one of three members of the First Year in Maths National Steering Committee.

In my PhD I continued my research on subject selection and students’ mathematical understanding, which has allowed me to further improve my teaching.

Dr Elin Jennings is a postdoctoral research fellow in Mine Waste Geoscience at the W.H.Bryan Mining and Geology Research Centre within the Sustainable Minerals Institute. She currently works in the Mine Waste Transformation through Characterisation (MIWATCH) research group.

Elin's current research focus is on characterising legacy mine waste and Acid Mine Drainage in support to promote sustainable mining practices.

Before her PhD, Elin completed a BSc in Environmental Earth Science at Aberystwyth University. During her undergraduate years, she was awarded the Walter Idris Bursary for an independent research project on the adsorption and desorption of harmful elements on coal and ochre. Her dissertation focused on mapping potentially harmful elements around the Clydach nickel refinery in Wales, which contributed to the British Geological Survey’s urban geochemistry map of Swansea. She received the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland Award, and the Rudler Exhibition Prize for her academic achievements.

She earned her PhD from the University of Exeter, Camborne School of Mines (UK), under the supervision of Prof. Karen Hudson-Edwards and Dr. Rich Crane. Her research, conducted in collaboration with the NERC-funded Legacy Waste in the Coastal Zone project, focused on the behaviour of Acid Mine Drainage (AMD)-related metal(loid) contaminants such as arsenic, copper, and zinc in the Carnon River (UK) and their interactions with changing hydrological cycles and seawater in coastal zones. Elin’s thesis, Sources, Pathways, and Sinks of Metal(loid) Contaminants in an AMD-Affected River System, combined geology, geochemistry, and environmental science. Her fieldwork involved extensive sampling and hydrological measurements, and she developed expertise in advanced analytical techniques, including synchrotron-based XAS, XRF, ICP-OES, SEM-EDX, QEMSCAN, and ferrozine assays. She was awarded a Diamond Light Source grant to study arsenic transformations in river sediments using beamline I18.

After her PhD, Elin entered a role as a graduate research assistant in the PAMANA project. Project PAMANA aimed to provide a holistic understanding of the legacy, present and future environmental and ecological impacts of mining on Philippine River systems. The project also aimed to lay the foundations for a novel catchment monitoring and management infrastructure that informs sustainable mining practice through more effective Environmental Impact Assessment. Her role in this project focused on creating a geochemical profile of soils in the Agno Catchment and understanding the controls of their distribution (i.e. land use and geology).

Paul Jensen is a research leader in the areas of anaerobic biotechnology and resource recovery at ACWEB; and leads projects in the areas of waste treatment with a focus on recovery of renewable energy resources, production of bio-fertilizers, bio-plastics and other high value products from wastes and other low value raw materials.

Complex challenges require multi-disciplinary thinking and Paul’s team incorporates engineering, biological sciences, modelling and information processing approaches to research and technology development for a range of partners across municipal, agricultural, animal and industrial sectors.

Paul and ACWEB are recognised as both national and global experts on biogas and resource recovery technologies. They actively contributes to over 12 research and consulting projects per year with applications across the product development cycle. Importantly, the team are having real world impact, and have contributed to a range of major wastewater infrastructure projects in the last 5 years.

I am a Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of Languages and Cultures, University of Queensland. My main research interests are the phonetics and phonology of prosody, primarily in languages of Australia and the Pacific. I am interested in how prosodic structure is realised by and affects speech segments, the use of prosodic cues alongside morphological and syntactic patterns to encode information structure, prosodic variation, and phonetic typology.

I received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Melbourne associated with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, and Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Linguistics from the Australian National University. Before I joined UQ in 2024, I held a postdoctoral Humboldt Fellowship, based at the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, and I was previously a postdoctoral researcher on an ERC Advanced Grant based at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

I enjoy making linguistics accessible and interesting for audiences outside of universities. I am a co-developer of the Linguistics Roadshow - an interactive showcase about the science of language for high school students.

After being awarded my PhD in 1997 from the University of Amsterdam, I took up a postdoctoral fellowship position at the University of Queensland funded by UQ, the Dutch Research Council (NWO), and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW), 1998-2001. I moved to Britain in 2001 and spend nearly 6 years at the University in Exeter. In 2007, I joined the University of Queensland again as a Research Fellow. After this, I was employed as an ARC Future Fellow (2012-2016), UQ Development Fellow (2017-2019), and I was recently awarded an ARC Laureate Fellowship (2019-2023).

Clara Jiang is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, the University of Queensland. Clara’s research focuses on using genomic and transcriptomic analysis to investigate the genetic basis of cardiovascular and psychiatric disorders, with a particular focus on female health, as well as using statistical genomic approaches to explore possible opportunities for drug repurposing. Clara graduated from the University of Queensland with Bachelor of Advanced Science (First Class Honours) in 2017, and was awarded the University Medal. Clara was awarded her PhD at the University of Queensland in 2021, where she utilised bioinformatic approaches and molecular experiments to decipher the genetic aetiology of breast cancer, specifically the regulatory role of transposons or ‘jumping genes’ in modulating the transcriptional landscape in the cancer state. Clara is also a UQ Wellness ambassador and an advocate for promoting equity, diversity and inclusion in academia.

Dr Wenying (Wendy) Jiang taught at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Alberta in Canada and The University of Western Australia in Perth before taking a position at School of Languages and Cultures at The University of Queensland in Australia. She is a specialist in Applied Linguistics, a graduate of Qufu Normal University (BA 1988, MA 1998) in China, University of Luton (MA 2001) in UK and The University of Queensland (PhD 2006) in Australia. She taught English at Taishan Medical University in China for more than ten years before switching to teaching Chinese as a foreign language in English-speaking countries such as the UK, Canada and Australia. She has been publishing regularly in the fields of second language acquisition, language teaching and learning, and computer assisted language learning (CALL) since 1992. Her monograph "Acquisition of Word Order in Chinese as a Foreign Language" was published by Mouton de Gruyter in 2009. Her article "Measurements of development of L2 written production: the case of Chinese L2" appeared in the journal Applied Linguistics in 2013 is a widely cited piece of publication.

Dr. Jin is a mid-career researcher with expertise in organic photonics and electronics, with a focus on organic photovoltaics. She began her postdoctoral career at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland (2008–2010), before joining the Centre for Organic Photonics and Electronics at The University of Queensland in 2010. There, she led the development of large-area organic solar cells. Her current research focuses on organic and perovskite optoelectronic materials and devices, including transparent conductive electrodes for flexible applications.

Jenny is a Research Fellow at The University of Queensland-Mater Research Institute’s Centre for Health System Reform and Integration. Her research focus is evaluating the implementation of remote and digitally delivered health services, and diet and physical activity behaviour interventions. Between 2010 - 2020 Jenny was a researcher at The University of Queensland’s School of Public Health with the Cancer Prevention Research Centre conducting and evaluating broad reach, remotely delivered lifestyle interventions (e.g. delivered via telephone and text messages) to achieve and maintain weight loss and behaviour change in adults with complex chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes and cancer. Jenny’s PhD ‘Evaluating text message-delivered, extended contact interventions targeting healthy weight, diet and physical activity behaviour’ focused on a digitally delivered intervention with evaluation of outcomes important to informing translation into practice. Jenny has extensive experience in public hospitals, private settings and community sectors as an Accredited Practicing Dietitian working in maternal and child health, and chronic disease management.

I received PhD (with distinction) in 2014 from The Institute of Biotechnology at The University of Helsinki, Finland, studying membrane trafficking using advanced imaging techniques. In 2015, I relocated to The Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) at The University of Queensland (UQ), Brisbane, Australia for postdoctoral training and changed my research field from basic cell biology to neuroscience and super-resolution imaging. I was awarded a 3-year Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Fellowship (2016) and an ARC DECRA Award (2019) to study the role of a lipid modifying enzyme on neuronal function. In 2022, I became a UQ Amplify Fellow and Group Leader at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), UQ. My lab aims to understand two central biological questions: how lipid metabolism in the brain supports neuronal energy metabolism, cognition, learning and memory, and how bidirectional modulation of neuronal lipid functions can be used as a therapeutic strategy for inherited neurodevelopmental disorders, neuroparalytic disorders caused by bacterial toxins and infectious diseases cause by neurotropic and respiratory viruses.

Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Invertebrate Virology

Insects are commonly infected with viruses. We study the interactions between viruses and their insect or arthropod hosts.

Viruses are obligate parasites, that is, they are completely dependent on the host cell machinery to complete their replication cycle. During infection, viruses commonly cause pathology in the host. For these reasons, viruses and hosts are in a constant evolutionary arms race. The host evolves antiviral mechanisms to prevent virus infection, while the virus adapts to overcome these host responses. Insects are ideal hosts to understand both the host response and the virus mechanisms for controlling the host.

My research group investigates the interactions between viruses and insects, primarily using Drosophila as a model. In this model we can control the genetics of both the host and the virus to tease apart the contribution of each partner to the interaction.

We discovered that a bacterium, Wolbachia, mediated antiviral protection in insects. We have several projects investigating both the mechanisms that protect the insects from virus infection and the impact of this protection on virus transmission.