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Dr Kathryn Fortnum is a Research Fellow at the Health and Wellbeing Centre for Research Innovation, a collaboration between the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences at the University of Queensland, and Health and Wellbeing Queensland. Her research speciality is on the role of physical activity in the management of chronic health conditions. Dr Fortnum is an Accredited Exercise Physiologist and has a particular interest in children and youth, and mental health. Dr Fortnum has worked clinically in inpatient and community settings for the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service WA, and supported children impacted by neurological disorders including spina bifida and cerebral palsy to engage in community-based physical programs.

Carl (Saibai Koedal) is a PhD Candidate studying the epidemiology of rheumatic heart disease in Queensland using linked hospital and administrative data. Currently, Carl holds an academic appointment (Lecturer, Physiotherapy) in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, the University of Queensland, and maintains a clinical role as a Staff Physiotherapist at The Prince Charles Hospital. Alongside research, Carl is also working to strengthen relationships between remote Torres Strait Islander communities and UQ to explore opportunities for education, student clinical placement and research partnerships.

Dr Cathy Franklin is passionate about improving the health of people with intellectual disability and those on the autism spectrum. Cathy is a psychiatrist who has specialised in the psychiatry of intellectual disability and autism in adolescents and adults since 2004. Her career focussed on clinical work and education until 2015, when she commenced a part-time research appointment, in addition to her clinical work. Cathy is the inaugural Director of the Mater Intellectual Disability and Autism Service (MIDAS), a state-wide clinical service established in 2018 that works to improve the health and mental health of adults with intellectual disability and those on the autism spectrum. Cathy is also Director of QCIDD, the Queensland Centre for Intellectual and Developmental Disability, a centre established in 1997 by Professor Nick Lennox, and best known for its many contributions to health of people with intellectual disability, including the CHAP health assessment tool and the AbleX massive open-online course that Cathy contributed mental health content to.

Cathy's research interests include health services research and the biological underpinnings and health sequelae of conditions occurring in this population. She is Chief Investigator on several projects, including the EASY-Health (Enhancing Access to Services for Your Health) Project, funded by the Australian Government NDIS ($2.3 million 2020-2024) and the NHMRC funded grant ($1.5M), Bridge to Better Health, investigating whether specialised support to primary care nurses can improve the health of people with intellectual disability attending their practice. Cathy also led MIDAS' successful application as a lead consortium member for the National Centre of Excellence in Intellectual Disability Health ($22.6M over 4 years; consortium led by UNSW). Cathy is a regular presenter at national and internaitonal conferences, often as an invited speaker. She has served on the committee of the RANZCP Section of Psychiatry of Intellectual Disability for over 10 years, is chair of the Qld Branch of the Section and also serves as Vice-President of the Australian Association of Developmental Disability Medicine (AADDM). In 2020 she was awarded the Mater Research Sister Regis Dunne award for Outstanding Contribution to research relative to opportunity.

Professor Ian Frazer is a clinician scientist, trained as a clinical immunologist in Scotland. As a professor at the University of Queensland, he leads a research group working at TRI in Brisbane, Australia on the immunobiology of epithelial cancers. He is recognised as co-inventor of the technology enabling the HPV vaccines, currently used worldwide to help prevent cervical cancer. He heads a biotechnology company, Jingang Medicine (Aus) Pty Ltd, working on new vaccine technologies, and is a board member of several companies and not for profit organisations. He was the inaugural president of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, and a member of the Australian National Science and Technology Council. He chairs the Australian Medical Research Advisory Board of the Medical Research Future Fund.

He was recognised as Australian of the Year in 2006. He was recipient of the Prime Ministers Prize for Science, and of the Balzan Prize, in 2008, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2012. He was appointed Companion of the Order of Australia in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2013.

Dr Jenny Fung is a senior postdoctoral research fellow and lecturer of pharmacology course at the School of Biomedical Sciences (SBMS), UQ. She is an emerging researcher in the reproductive disease field with experience in molecular biology techniques, genetics, functional genomics, statistical and high-throughput computational skills, ex-vivo and in-vivo models of diseases, as well as industry engagement. In 2013, she was awarded a PhD at UQ and continued post-doctoral research in Professor Grant Montgomery's laboratory at QIMRB and IMB, in the field of genetics and genomics with a focus on functional genomics studies in complex diseases and a special interest in endometriosis. Her research has led to the seminal publication identifying the genetics of gene expression in endometrium and the role of gene regulation underlying endometriosis-related pathogenesis. In 2019, she joined Professor Trent Woodruff’s laboratory at SBMS, UQ to work on immunotherapy development for cancer through funding from Pfizer, where she performed immune cell functional assays and genomics analyses. Dr Fung is in a unique position to perform both the wet and dry lab components of multi-disciplinary research. She is currently co-leading multiple projects, where she is contributing her expertise on genetics and functional genomics on immunology to discover target genes and putative pathways underlying disease progression, with an ultimate goal to develop potential effective drugs for reproductive and brain disorders.

Sebastian is an expert on molecular pharmacology of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs - the largest class of cell surface recpetors and major drug targets). His lab has a particular interest in those involved in communication between the gastrointestinal tract and brain (the so-called gut-brain axis). Current foccusses include ghrelin, melanocortin 4, dopamine D2, and cholecystokinin receptors and the lab has also worked on the calcitonin, glucagon-like peptide 1 and other receptors. His lab is interested in answering complelling biological questions relating to physiology and pathophysiology of the gut-brain axis all the way down to the level of the receptor.

Sebastian is from Adelaide and received his BSc(Hons) and PhD. from the University of Adelaide, where he worked on the Aryl Hydrocarbon receptor in the lab of Murray Whitelaw. He then did postdoctoral research on haematopoitic stem cell differentiation in Kelly McNagny’s lab at the Biomedical Research Centre at the University of British Columbia before joining Patrick Sexton to work on G protein-coupled receptors at Monash University .

Sebastian is now an ARC Future Fellow with his own research program in the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Queensland. He remains an adjunct member of MIPS DDB as well as CCeMMP.

Sebastian has honours and PhD positions for motivated students who have a strong desire to assume ownership of a project and work independently.

Professor Gabrielli completed his undergraduate education at James Cook University in Townsville and PhD at La Trobe University in Melbourne. After two postdoctoral positions in the USA in the emerging field of cell cycle regulation, he was recruited to establish his own independent research at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, and then recruited to the Diamantina Institute in 2002, and Mater Research Institute in 2016. He is head of the Smiling for Smiddy Cell Cycle Group.

Research Interests

Mechanisms that regulate cell division, particularly progression into mitosis. These mechanisms are often mutated in cancers and are likely to be major contributors to cancer development. Identifying the genetic mutations that disrupt normal progression and particularly mechanisms, known as checkpoints, provides diagnostic and prognostic opportunities. It also provides potential new targets for chemotherapeutics as drugs targeting defective checkpoints have tumour selective cytotoxic potential.

Research Projects

• Identifying the molecular basis for defective checkpoints in melanoma.
• Targeting defective cell cycle responses to ultraviolet radiation, replication stress and TopoII inhibitors in melanoma, and investigating whether the same defects in other cancer types respond to similar targeting.
• Investigating means of identify very early changes in moles that drive progression to melanoma
• Targeting Aurora kinases in HPV-driven cancers

Marcus Gallagher is an Associate Professor in the Artificial Intelligence Group in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. His research interests are in artificial intelligence, including optimisation and machine learning. He is particularly interested in understanding the relationship between algorithm performance and problem structure via benchmarking. My work includes cross-disciplinary collaborations and real-world applications of AI techniques.

Dr Gallagher received his BCompSc and GradDipSc from the University of New England, Australia in 1994 and 1995 respectively, and his PhD in 2000 from the University of Queensland, Australia. He also completed a GradCert (Higher Education) in 2010.

Maher Gandhi received his medical degree in the UK in 1989, and then trained as a haematologist, including a Fellowship in malignant haematology at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto. He was awarded a PhD in immunology at Cambridge University under Patrick Sissons. He moved to Brisbane and from 2003-2024 worked as a Senior Staff Specialist (Pre-Eminent Status) in the Haematology / Oncology Department of the Princess Alexandra Hospital. He leads his own laboratory group and has established an international reputation studying the tumour immune microenvironment in lymphoma and its manipulation, with continuous NHMRC/MRFF funding since 2005. He was Chair of Laboratory Sciences for the Australasian Leukaemia and Lymphoma Group between 2010-2016, won the prestigious Australian Society of Medical Research Clinical Research Award in 2010 and in 2012 took up the inaugural John McCaffrey Cancer Council of Queensland / Office of Health and Medical Research Clinical Research Fellowship. Between 2011-2014 he was privileged to serve as Chair of the Metro South Human Research Ethics Committee. In 2013 he was appointed Professor of Experimental Haematology, University of Queensland, based at the Translational Research Institute, in 2014 became the inaugural Leukaemia Foundation Chair of Blood Cancer Research at the University of Queensland Frazer Institute, and was appointed Cancer Program Head in 2016. In 2018 he became Executive Director and Director of Clinical Research at Mater Research. He also continues to head the Blood Cancer Research Group, which is based in Mater Research. In 2025 to current, he was appointed Chief Executive Officer of the Translational Research Institute and its manufacturing branch TM@TRI, to serve Queenslanders by transforming health through collaborative research.

Dr Elise Gane graduated with a Bachelor of Physiotherapy (Honours Class I) and a University Medal for academic achievement from The University of Queensland in 2008. She worked as a physiotherapist at the Princess Alexandra Hospital (2009-2013), a quaternary public hospital, treating complex patients across the continuum of care from Intensive Care and post-surgical wards to inpatient rehabilitation and outpatient services. In 2014, Elise commenced her PhD with The University of Queensland, focussed on measuring the musculoskeletal side effects at the neck and shoulder that result from neck dissection surgery for head and neck cancer. Following the awarding of her PhD in early 2018, Elise was employed as a post doctoral researcher at the RECOVER Injury Research Centre (UQ) exploring return to work and social roles after road traffic crash. Since January 2019, Elise has fulfilled the role of Physiotherapy Conjoint Research Fellow between the School of Health and Rehabiltiation Sciences (UQ) and the Princess Alexandra Hospital Physiotherapy Department. In this role, Elise mentors physiotherapists in health service-based research (both qualitative and quantitative) whilst also pursuing her own research interests, including a telehealth cancer exercise program. She teaches a research course in systematic review methodology to students in the Physiotherapy Graduate Entry Masters program.

Elise's areas of research interest include codesign, implementation science, allied health led-models of care, oncology rehabiltiation, lymphoedema, chronic disease, physical activity (particularly in rehabilitation settings, chronic disease, or the workplace), and musculoskeletal health.

Professor Coral Gartner is an international expert in tobacco control policy and the world's leading expert on electronic nicotine delivery systems (or e-cigarettes). She is the Director of the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence on Achieving the Tobacco Endgame (Tobacco Endgame CRE), an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, and the Chair of the Interdisciplinary Tobacco Endgame Research Network, the country lead Investigator for Australia with the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (ITC Project), and a Co-Investigator with the SewAUs Wastewater Epidemiology Project. She is currently the Director of Research at the University of Queensland's School of Public Health, the Regional Editor for Australasia for the BMJ journal, Tobacco Control, after serving as a senior editor from 2012-2018. She is the immediate Past President of the Oceania Chapter of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT-O).

She leads a multidisciplinary research team of international experts (located in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA, England, and the Netherlands) to develop the evidence base for tobacco endgame strategies and to identify the most promising policies that could end the cigarette epidemic in Australia, and beyond. Her research program includes consideration of how these policies could be implemented, while mitigating potential unintended impacts and increasing equity. Her research methods span cohort studies, clinical trials, policy analyses, simulation modelling and mixed methods research.

Professor Gartner joined the University of Queensland in 2006. With undergraduate qualifications in environmental health and a PhD in environmental epidemiology, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship on tobacco control policy and held a NHMRC Career Development Fellowship (2014-2018). In 2019, she led the development of UQ’s flagship cross-faculty postgraduate programs in Environmental Health Sciences.

Professor Gartner has published over 300 academic works, including journal articles, book chapters, and submissions to government inquiries, and has served as an expert witness to a number of government inquiries and consultations. She has also authored articles on tobacco control topics for The Conversation.

Professor Christian Gericke is Clinical Dean and Professor of Medicine at the University of Newcastle, Director of Research and Neurologist at Calvary Mater Newcastle, Honorary Neurologist at the John Hunter Hospital, and Adjunct Professor of Neurology at Fiji National University. He is the Convener of the Specialist Medical Review Council (SMRC), Australian Government, a Member of the Queensland Neurology/Neurosurgery Medical Assessment Tribunal, and regularly acts as an Independent Medical Expert for the Supreme Courts of Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia, and the Queensland Coroners Court. He consults privately in Brisbane.

Before this, he was the Clinical Director of Neurology at The Prince Charles Hospital, Professor of Medicine at the University of Queensland, Executive Director of Medical Services, Director of Research and Consultant Neurologist at Cairns Hospital and Adjunct Professor of Medicine and Public Health at James Cook University. He also chaired the Far North Queensland Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC).

From 2013 to 2016, he led the Wesley Research Institute, a non-profit medical research institute based at the Wesley Hospital in Brisbane, as its CEO and Director of Research. In 2016/2017, he spent a sabbatical as Consultant Neurologist with a special interest in Epilepsy at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Since 2013, he has been an Honorary Professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Queensland.

From 2010 to 2012, he was Professor of Public Health and Honorary Consultant Neurologist at Peninsula Medical School, Universities of Exeter and Plymouth and Deputy Director of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care for the English South West Peninsula (PenCLAHRC).

From 2006 to 2010, he was Professor of Health Policy and Director of the Centre for Health Services Research at the University of Adelaide. He also held various roles for the Australian Commonwealth and State Governments, including as Medical Director for Safety and Quality for the State of Tasmania.

From 2003 to 2006, he was Senior Research Fellow /Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Health Systems Research and Management at Berlin University of Technology, one of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies hubs. He has experience working as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company and as an advisor to the European Commission, WHO, GIZ and the World Bank. His expertise and research interests are in health systems research and health policy, health services research, and the economic evaluation of health interventions. He initiated and directed a new Master's programme in Health Economics and Policy at the University of Adelaide. He is an Editorial Board Member of Frontiers in Neurology, Australian Health Review, Internal Medicine Journal and PLOS ONE.

Prof Gericke studied medicine at the Free University of Berlin and spent one year as a DAAD scholar at Tufts and Harvard Medical Schools in Boston, Massachusetts. He was awarded an M.D. research doctorate (magna cum laude) in cognitive neurology from the Free University of Berlin. After completing clinical specialist training in neurology, epileptology and clinical neurophysiology at the Charite University Hospital in Berlin and the University Hospitals of Strasbourg and Geneva, he studied tropical medicine at the University of Aix-Marseille, obtained an M.P.H. from the University of Cambridge, an M.Sc. in Health Policy, Planning and Financing from the London School of Economics/London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, an MBA from Deakin University, and a higher doctorate (Habilitation) in health systems research from Berlin University of Technology. He also holds an Advanced Diploma in Medical Law from King's Inns School of Law in Dublin and is a Certified Independent Medical Examiner (CIME) with the American Board of Independent Medical Examiners (ABIME).

He is a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (FRACP) in Neurology, the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine (FAFPHM), the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (FRCP Edin), the European Academy of Neurology (FEAN), the American Neurological Association (FANA), the American Academy of Neurology (FAAN) and Associate Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Medical Administrators (AFRACMA).

He is the Chair of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Neurologists (ANZAN) Therapeutics Committee, Chair of the Ethics Section of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN), and Chair of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP) Research Committee and a Member of the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) Standards and Best Practice Council. He also serves on the Federal Council of the Australian Medical Association (AMA).

Dr Giacomotto, NHMRC Emerging Leader, is a young group leader focusing on translational research, genes and diseases, imaging/automatic systems, drug discovery, chemical biology, and medical applications. His work focuses on translating little discoveries made in a single cell or in a model organism to applications or treatments for humans. He has already made discoveries that benefit human health, such as treatment for muscular dystrophies. He is working with a wide diversity of models, including cell lines and mouse models, but he recently spent a lot of time working with the zebrafish model. He believes that this small fish will have an important impact on the seek of treatments for neuromuscular and neurological disorders. Those diseases are very difficult to reproduce in a single cell, making the search for chemical treatments difficult. This fish opens a new avenue for the screening of bioactive compounds and for understanding the progression of these terrible disorders. He believes in translational research, the zebrafish is for him a fantastic complementary model to cell lines in order to recapitulate human diseases and run large-scale experiments. He is working on developing future therapeutical strategies to alleviate the suffering of human patients.

Dr Giacomotto recently established his group at Griffith Research Institute for Drug Discovery (Discovery Biology, Griffith University) and remain an active honorary fellow of the Queensland Brain Institute (The University of Queensland). Dr Giacomotto is currently recruiting. Don't hesitate to contact him for further information.

Dr Giacomotto Laboratory Website

Professor Mike Gidley is Director of the Centre for Nutrition and Food Sciences (CNAFS) at the University of Queensland, Australia. The Centre is part of the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI) in conjunction with the Queensland Government. Prof Gidley’s research is focussed on structure – function relationships in biopolymer assemblies such as starch granules and plant cell walls. This has led to the detailed characterisation of starch and dietary fibre digestion/fermentation in vitro and in vivo, with the understanding generated leading to opportunities for optimising nutritional value of foods and feeds. He is also a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plant Cell Walls.

Professor Gidley was trained in chemistry at the Universities of London (BSc) and Cambridge (PhD), and worked on food-related research for more than twenty years in Unilever’s R+D laboratory at Colworth House in the UK, beginning as a research scientist and culminating as the Group Leader for Plant-based Foods and Ingredients, before joining UQ in 2003.

Professor Gidley’s major research interest is the linking of plant molecular structures to macroscopic properties with relevance to plant-based food properties. In particular, he is interested in investigating polysaccharide assemblies such as plant cell walls and starch granules, particularly the way these structures are assembled in nature and then disassembled during manufacturing and later during digestion. His field of research involves the use of spectroscopic, microscopic and materials analyses of natural materials and model systems. Insights into structure-property relationships are obtained, that can then be used to provide targets for raw materials and processes with enhanced food and nutritional properties.

The molecular evolution of cytochrome P450 Enzymes: biological catalysts of unprecedented versatility.

Cytochrome P450 enzymes (CYPs, P450s) especially those responsible for drug metabolism in humans, are the unifying theme of the research in our lab. These fascinating enzymes are catalysts of exceptional versatility, and functional diversity. In humans they are principally responsible for the clearance of a practically unlimited variety of chemicals from the body, but are also critical in many important physiological processes. In other organisms (plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, almost everything!) they carry out an unprecedented range of functions, such as defense, chemical communication, neural development and even pigmentation. P450s are involved in the biosynthesis of an unequalled range of potent, biologically active natural products in microbes, plants and animals, including many antibiotics, plant and animal hormones, signalling molecules, toxins, flavours and fragrances. We are studying how P450s have evolved to deal with novel substrates by reconstructing ancestral precursors and evolutionary pathways, to answer such questions as how did the koala evolve to live on eucalyptus leaves, a toxic diet for most mammals.

The capabilities of P450s are only just coming to be fully recognized and structural studies on P450s should yield critical insights into how enzyme structure determines function. For example, recently we discovered that P450s are present within cells in the Fe(II) form, a finding that has led to a radical revision of the dogma concerning the P450 catalytic cycle, and has implications for the control of uncoupling of P450 activity in cells. Importantly, the biotechnological potential of P450s remains yet to be exploited. All of the specific research themes detailed below take advantage of our recognized expertise in the expression of recombinant human cytochrome P450 enzymes in bacteria. Our group is interested in finding out how P450s work and how they can be made to work better.

Artificial evolution of P450s for drug development and bioremediation: a way of exploring the sequence space and catalytic potential of P450s. The demonstrated catalytic diversity of P450 enzymes makes them the ideal starting material for engineering sophisticated chemical reagents to catalyse difficult chemical transformations. We are using artificial (or directed) evolution to engineer enzymes that are more efficient, robust and specialized than naturally occurring enzymes with the aim of selecting for properties that are commercially useful in the areas of drug discovery and development and bioremediation of pollutants in the environment. The approach we are using also allows us to explore the essential sequence and structural features that underpin all ~12000 known P450s so as to determine how they work.

Synthetic biology of enzymes for clean, green, solar-powered chemistry in drug development, bioremediation and biosensors. We have identified ancestral enzymes that are extremely thermostable compared to their modern counterparts, making them potentially very useful in industry, since they can withstand long incubations at elevated temperatures. They can be used as ‘off the shelf’ reagents to catalyse useful chemistry, such as in in drug discovery and development, fine chemicals synthesis, and cleaning up the environment. Working with drug companies, we are exploring how they can be best deployed in chemical processes and what structural features make them efficient, robust and specialized. We are also immobilizing P450s in virus-like-particles as ‘designer’ reagents that can be recovered from reactions and reused. To make such processes cheaper and more sustainable, we are using photosynthesis to power P450 reactions for clean, green biocatalysis in microalgae.

Biosketch:

After graduating from UQ with first class Honours in Biochemistry, Elizabeth took up a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Overseas Scholarship to pursue doctoral work at Oxford University then undertook postdoctoral work at the Center in Molecular Toxicology and Department of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine with Prof. F.P. Guengerich. She returned to UQ in 1993 to take up a position in Pharmacology and joined the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences in 2009 as a Professor of Biochemistry.

After completing his BSc and MSc (Hons) at the University of Canterbury (NZ), Dylan worked for five years as a Research Scientist at Antisoma Research Limited (London, UK), developing antibody-enzyme fusion proteins for cancer therapy. He returned to New Zealand to carry out his PhD research into antidepressant pharmacogenomics at the University of Otago. Afterwards, he continued working at the University of Otago as a Research Fellow, studying the biological function of genes involved with inflammatory bowel disease. Dylan moved to the United States in 2009 to perform postdoctoral training, researching the functional genetics of the VEGF-pathway and its relationship with cancer at the University of Chicago and, subsequently, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

In 2013, Dylan began working at QIMR Berghofer and has undertaken the functional follow-up of large-scale genetic studies of breast, endometrial and ovarian cancer to identify the likely causal variants and genes that mediate associations with cancer risk and survival. He has been awarded both internal and NHMRC grant funding to support these studies. Since 2019, Dylan has held an Honorary Associate Professorship at UQ

As of early 2021, Dylan has authored one conference report, two editorials, two book chapters, six reviews and 31 original research articles. He is first or last author on 20 of these publications and 27 of his publications have been cited at least 10 times. According to CiteScore, since 2010, 53% of his articles have been published in journals ranked in the top 10% and 19% of hispublications are in the 10% most cited publications worldwide.

Associate Professor Sjaan Gomersall is Associate Director and Principal Research Fellow at the Health and Wellbeing Centre for Research Innovation at School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences and a Teaching and Research academic in Physiotherapy at the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at The University of Queensland. Established in 2022, the Health and Wellbeing Centre for Research Innovation (HWCRI) is a collaborative, co-funded research centre by The University of Queensland and Health and Wellbeing Queensland. The HWCRI combines world class research expertise in physical activity, nutrition and health at The University of Queensland, with the reach and capacity of Health and Wellbeing Queensland to integrate, deliver and evaluate evidence-based programs that provide scalable, equitable access to improve the health and wellbeing of all Queenslanders (and beyond).

Associate Professor Gomersall is an expert in physical activity, sedentary behaviour and health. Her research has focused on understanding, measuring and influencing physical activity and sedentary behaviour using a variety of methods and with a range of populations, with a focus on adults, the prevention and management of chronic disease and physical activity promotion in healthcare settings. Sjaan has a strong track record for multi-disciplinary collaborations and industry partnerships, with specific expertise in partnering with healthcare organisations to build capacity in research and physical activity behaviour change, to evaluate the impact of healthcare services and to co-design and test innovative solutions to gaps in service delivery. Dr Gomersall is a nationally and internally recognised leader in physical activity and health. She is the President of the International Society for Physical Activity and Health, Co-Lead and co-founder of the Physical Activity in Healthcare Special Interest Group for the Asia-Pacific Society for Physical Activity, a Consultant for Physical Activity for the World Health Organisation and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Activity, Sedentary and Sleep Behaviours.

Dr Ana Goode is an implementation scientist, with expertise in designing, implementing and evaluating broad-reach (e.g. telephone, SMS, digital) health behaviour change interventions in applied 'real-world' settings. Her program of research brings together training and research experience in health psychology, health promotion and public health.

Her work focusses on the adaptation and translation of evidence-based health behaviour change (e.g. physical activity, dietary change and weight loss) programs into practice at a local, state and national level. She has a particular interest in end-user and stakeholder engagement and design thinking.

She is currently the lead implementation scientist of the BeUpstanding program; an evidence-based online program to reduce sitting time in the workplace.

Within her role she leads the Healthy Lifestyle Consultancy group, where she provides knowledge leadership in health promotion, including consultancy and training services to workplaces, health providers and practitioners.