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Mayra is a geometallurgy specialist with extensive experience leading geometallurgical studies and developing predictive models for greenfield and brownfield mining projects. She has a strong background in process mineralogy, the design and management of metallurgical testwork programs, and process design, supporting process optimisation and project development.

Her experience includes working as a Senior Metallurgist at Transmin Metallurgical Consultants in Lima, Peru. She recently completed her PhD in Mineral Processing at The University of Queensland, where her research focused on understanding the effect of mineral textures on flotation performance. She is currently a researcher with the Flotation Chemistry Group at the Julius Kruttschnitt Mineral Research Centre (JKMRC), working on ore characterisation, process mineralogy, metallurgical testing, and flotation chemistry

Debbie is an experienced and passionate lecturer of accounting. A Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, she uses her background as an audit manager in a Big 4 accounting firm to teach accounting in a way that students find engaging and interesting. Her commercial roles in industry have led to her dedication to the teaching of financial accounting and auditing. She has a keen interest in Accounting Education and has led the development of new teaching materials and other teaching innovations on various technology platforms.

Anna Jenkins is a Senior Lecturer within the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Queensland and a Senior Staff Specialist in Psychiatry at The Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital. She also provides independent opinions for the Queensland Mental Health Court.

Anna completed her medical and psychiatric training in Queensland and Victoria and is an experienced psychiatrist and clinical teacher. She has worked in a range of contexts, from tertiary hospitals to remote islands in the Torres Strait, in the United Kingdom and internationally for Médecins Sans Frontières. She has a long history of association with the University of Queensland and Queensland Health. Her areas of interest and expertise include general adult psychiatry, forensic mental health and transcultural mental health.

Areas of expertise:

• The processes activities involved in creating high impact startups
• The development and evolution of startup ecosystems
• The impact firm failure has on small business owners’ well-being including their financial, and emotional well-being and how they respond to and cope with firm failure

Dr Anna Jenkins studies the startup process, the activities and processes which entrepreneurs engage in to explain why some startups emerge successful and growing and others either stagnate or fail. She currently holds an ARC Discovery grant for this project where she is leading a project following the development and trajectories of startups for over four years. She is also leading a research project on the development of startup ecosystems where the research team is conducting a longitudinal ethnographic study on how startup ecosystems emerge.

Her other area of expertise on how small business owners manage setbacks and failure. Her research focuses on how small business owners respond to failure, how they reduce the impact failure can have on their well-being, and the effectiveness of different coping strategies for their well-being and future employment. She was been awarded a number of prestigious research grants for this work including funding from The Swedish Retail and Wholesale Development Council and Swedbank.

She is familiar with a variety of research methods having conducted large scale longitudinal quantitative studies and narrative interviews with small business owners who have failed. As well as ethnographic field work and experiments.

Bec Jenkinson is health consumer advocate-turned-researcher, with more than 15 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 involvement in health and medical research, 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. More recently, Bec has been the academic lead of the RADIANT study, alongside a Lived Experience Lead. Aiming to addressing weight stigma in maternity care, RADIANT was recognised with two awards at the inaugural AccessCR Australian Consumer Partnerships in Research Awards in 2025. The study coproduce national, consensus-based Best Practice Principles for Weight Inclusive Maternity Care, which have now been endorsed by peak stakeholder organisations.

Bec is now a Senior Research Fellow with UQ's Clinical Trials Capability Team (ULTRA), working 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 currently leads a pilot study aiming to expand Australian researchers access to James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnerships. Bec is also interested in how innovative approaches can support more inclusive CCI, and 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 an environmental geochemist specialising in mine waste transformation, metal(loid) contaminants, and sustainable mining practices. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Sustainable Minerals Institute (SMI), University of Queensland, working within the Mine Waste Transformation Through Characterisation group and affiliated with the Centre for Environmental Responsibility in Mining. Currently, she is working on projects investigating the fate of indium in chalcopyrite (with successful Synchrotron Beamtime at ANSTO) and creating Metal-Organic Frameworks from Acid Mine Drainage (AMD). She also serves as project coordinator for the OreSand Knowledge Hub under the Global Centre for Mineral Security, where she leads communications, stakeholder engagement, and international collaboration.

Elin earned her PhD in Mining and Mineral Engineering from the University of Exeter’s Camborne School of Mines (2020–2025). Her doctoral research investigated the spatial and temporal fluxes of contaminants in acid mine drainage-impacted rivers, employing advanced analytical techniques including synchrotron-based XAS, SEM-EDX, ICP-OES, and GIS modelling. She has conducted beamline experiments at Diamond Light Source and ANSTO, receiving multiple competitive grants to explore critical mineral incorporation in chalcopyrite and arsenic transformations in sediments.

Following her PhD, Elin worked as a Graduate Research Assistant on the PAMANA project at the University of Exeter. This initiative examined the environmental and ecological impacts of mining on Philippine River systems. Her role focused on creating geochemical profiles of soils in the Agno Catchment, analysing how land use and geology influence contaminant distribution, and contributing to international collaborations on mining’s environmental footprint.

Her academic journey began with a BSc (First Class Honours) in Environmental Earth Science at Aberystwyth University, where she received the Rudler Exhibition Prize and the Mineralogical Society Student Award for outstanding achievement. She also secured the Walter Idris Bursary to conduct independent research on adsorption properties of coal and ochre.

Beyond research, Elin is passionate about teaching and outreach. She has taught hydrogeology and mine waste geochemistry at undergraduate and master’s levels, supervised student projects, and contributed to public engagement initiatives such as Engaging the Public with Environmental Science and Spark in STEM. She has presented at international conferences including Goldschmidt and MINEWA, and co-organised the Next Generation Resources conference, fostering collaboration among early-career researchers worldwide. She is also a collection editor for the special issue ES3 Geoscience and Circular Economy. In addition, she also works on the ECA committee at SMI.

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 areas are phonetics, phonology, and prosody, primarily in languages of Australia and the Pacific. I am interested in the interfaces of prosody to other aspects of language, prosodic variation, phonetic typology, and language documentation and description.

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.