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Steven is a water leader with senior experience in research, industry, and government, developed through roles with The University of Queensland, CSIRO, Brisbane Water, Sydney Water, and private consulting. He has worked with urban water, wastewater, stormwater, and related energy and greenhouse gas issues since 1990. His work addresses urban water security, water-energy nexus, and circular economy . He creates collaborations, tools, models and knowledge to address all flows of water – and related energy - into, out of, and within cities. This enables evaluation and management of key concepts such as: (i) net zero carbon water cycle, (ii) hybrid, decentralised and integrated systems performance, and (iii) sustainable urban design and planning.

Steven’s work is enhancing performance benchmarking of cities, shaping development, guiding policy and infrastructure investment locally and internationally. He has secured and delivered over $8m funding for his research since 2005, most since 2013. This includes multiple international and national projects for the Asian Development Bank, Water Research Foundation (USA), and CRC Water Sensitive Cities.

He has authored over 60 Scopus-listed articles in high-quality journals, 20 books or major CRC public reports, 10 book chapters and over 67 conference articles (over 200 total articles). Steven is a long-term and regular funded plenary and invited keynote presenter to peak international forums including: World Water Forum, World Water Congress, World Water Week and Singapore International Water Week. Steven’s strong multi-disciplinary work spans environmental, chemical and civil engineering, natural resources management, and urban planning and design. He has developed urban metabolism theory, including its links to integrated water management and industrial ecology.

2025-Present Director, ARC Training Centre for Climate-Resilient Water.

2024-Present Deputy Director (ACWEB) – engagement.

2019-Present Executive member, Australian Centre for Water and Environmental Biotechnology (ACWEB), The University of Queensland (UQ) Research Committee co-rep, Faculty of Engineering Architecture and Information Technology (EAIT), UQ.

2016-Present Project Leader, CRC for Water Sensitive Cities.

2012-Present Research Group Leader, Water Energy Carbon, UQ.

2017-2023 Australian Research Council Discovery Fellowship (DECRA) and Amplify Fellow.

2013-2016 Australian Research Council (Postdoctoral Fellowship Industry).

2011-2013 Fulbright Scholar.

My research focuses on reef recovery following disturbances, looking at the interplay between biological, ecological and physical drivers of recovery. After diving in the Galapagos, my interest in the marine environment was piqued, and I began a PhD in reef recovery dynamics in 2016, receiving my doctarate in 2021. My work is interdisplinary, incorporating aspects of marine geology and hydrodynamics to the core focus of marine ecology. I have investigated how coral recruitment is affected by material legacies (rubble) on coral reefs, how these legacies are affected by the physical environment (mobilisation thesholds) and how marine invertebrates consolidate this material, contributing to reef recovery. My research focuses largely on natural recovery potential, but I also investigate the efficacy of reef restoration techniques in the marine environment, such as mesh netting and metal structures, and where they can speed recovery. My work has spanned multiple regions, including the Maldives, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Coral Triangle.

The aim of my research is to determine the underlying molecular interractions that occur between pathogens and their host and to use this information to develop novel avenues for therapeutic intervention.

Dr Kerr received his PhD from The University of Queensland in 2006, working with Associate Professor Rohan D. Teasdale on membrane trafficking. In 2011 he was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship to extend his skills into the host-pathogen arena at the Max-Planck Institute for Infection Biology. In 2013 he was awarded an ARC DECRA fellowship to return to the UQ Institute for Molecular Bioscience where he is working with Rohan again to exmaine how pathogens exploit mammalian endocytic pathways during infection.

Cognitive and decision-making problems associated with psychotic disorders like schizophrenia are considered the largest burden for these individuals. They also predict poor functional outcomes, such as maintaining work, social networks, and independent living. I am particularly interested in the relationship between decision-making problems and psychotic symptoms in these disorders; will improving decision-making also reduce psychotic symptoms? To that end, I focus on decision-making tasks that are reliant on brain areas and networks that are implicated in psychosis.

My work aims to understand how corticostriatal circuitry drives decision-making processes, and how this is altered in those with schizophrenia and psychosis. I have taken advantage of my collaborations with basic scientists and clinical researchers with a broad range of expertise to establish a cross-species program of research focussed on decision-making. My research is guided by two fundamental questions:

1. Do decision-making problems in schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders contribute to psychotic symptoms?
2. How can we leverage the mechanistic tools available in rodent neuroscience to identify causative common substrates underlying decision-making problems (and by proxy psychotic symptoms)?

Dr Keshvari is a postdoctoral research officer at Mater Research Institute-UQ. Her main research interest is to investigate the role of macrophages in metabolic disorders including acute and chronic liver diseases, obesity and type 2 diabetes. She was awarded her PhD titled “characterisation of two receptors for adiponectin” in 2016 and received the “2016 Dean’s Award for Outstanding Higher Degree by Research Theses”. She is the recipient of Australian Liver Foundation fellowship and is an NHMRC Emerging Leader Investigator. Her current project is focused on the beneficial effect of macrophage colony stimulating factor on resolving liver fibrosis and promoting liver regeneration and the role of macrophages on metabolic regulation in fat and endocrine system including pancreas.

Dr Charlotte Kessler is a transdisciplinary Design Researcher and Lecturer in Design. She sees design as a powerful change-making tool relevant to addressing complex issues, and applicable across a variety of contexts.

Charlotte holds a Bachelor & Master in Product & Service Design (ENSAAMA & Ecole Boulle, France), a Master in Design Futures (Griffith University), and a PHD (Queensland University of Technology) completed in 2022. Her thesis, Developing curricula that equip designers with capabilities to enact sustainable futures: A matter of ethos, draws from the voices of academics and graduate designers from four sustainability-focused design programs internationally to propose theoretical guidelines supporting design educators to develop, enable and sustain design programs that are responsive to a rapidly changing world, in turn equipping design graduates with relevant capabilities to create change towards sustainable futures.

Charlotte has worked on a range of sustainability-focused design and design research projects internationally. Her research is situated at the nexus between design, education, and sustainability. She believes that design education has an important role to play in situating design as key, change-making practice, in the context of sustainability transitions. She is interested in research that informs academics as they develop and implement sustainability-centred curricula and pedagogies, and that supports sustainability transitions in design practice. Charlotte has recently become involved in a research project on climate literacy in architecture in partnership with the Australian Institute of Architects, and the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia.

Charlotte is currently working as Lecturer in Design in the School of Architecture, Design, and Planning at The University of Queensland. Previously, she was the Program Convenor for Design and Educational Design Lead at Griffith College, where she coordinated the accreditation and curriculum development processes for the new design program. Charlotte has developed and coordinated sustainability-focused higher education courses in the design field across multiple universities. She has taught in award winning courses including Impact Lab 3 Studio - Planet (QUT) awarded Vice Chancellor Award for Excellence and Wharton - QS (London) Re-Imagine Education Award for Design for Transformative learning through transdisciplinary collaborations, along with the Spatial History Unit awarded QUT Faculty of Creative Industries Teaching Award for Teaching Innovation and Excellence. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). She specialises in developing sustainability-centred Higher Education curricula and professional development resources for academic staff.

Sarangan is a Psychiatrist at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital and is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research at The University of Queensland. He completed his MBBS at James Cook University, where he was also awarded a Master of Public Health. He is currently working towards a PhD focussing on veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder at The University of Queensland.

How to build a brain—2.0

For 25 years I was sole chief investigator on 17 NHMRC-ARC project grants that provided funding to decipher the molecular & cellular bases of brain development and regeneration in fish, frogs and mice. This work culminated in the discovery of how to genetically construct an evolutionary novel axon tract in the embryonic brain. This is what I now call an easy problem.

Now my lab has turned its attention to the hardest problem in the natural sciences—how does the brain experience subjective feelings?

Together with my collaborator Professor Deborah Brown (Professor of Philosophy at UQ) we have approached this problem through the sensation of pain and model organisms. We advance the framework of the brain as an inference machine that generates models of its own internal processes (Key and Brown, 2018). When hierarchically arranged, the outputs of these models represent progressive levels of awareness that are antecedent to feelings (i.e. the brain’s experience of its own neural activity). We have proposed a parallel forwards model algorithm and to date have found that fish and molluscs lack the required neural architecture to execute this algorithm and therefore do not feel pain.

Key, B. and Brown, D. (2018) Designing brains for pain: Human to mollusc. Frontiers in physiology 9:1027.

Dr Cathy Keys completed her doctoral studies in the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre in 1999. Her doctoral thesis ‘The Architectural Implications of Warlpiri jilimi’ was concerned with the People Environment relations of Aboriginal women living in Central Australia. She is committed to exploring the social and cultural properties of architectural space. Cathy has taught in Aboriginal Environments and architectural research and design making subjects in the School of Architecture, The University of Queensland.

Hadis is a materials researcher in the School of Mechanical & Mining Engineering and in the Centre for Advanced Materials Processing and Manufacturing (AMPAM) at the University of Queensland. She received her Ph.D. from the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute at the University of Wollongong for her research on the development of nano-filled bio-thermoplastics as print media for 3D additive fabrication.

Hadis has an interest in a wide range of materials research activities, including additive manufacturing, nanocomposites, polymer processing, thermal conductivity, tribological properties, and electrochemical corrosion. Recently, she has worked on a technology development project focused on advancing flexible printed zinc-ion batteries, supporting innovation in next-generation flexible devices.

I completed my PhD in 2013 and I am currently a Senior Research Fellow and the Managing Director of the Soils of Science (S4S) Program at the University of Queensland. I am recognised as an emerging leader in antibiotic biodiscovery research. I have multidisciplinary research skills and expertise spanning the fields of organic chemistry and microbiology. I have made a significant contribution to the field of microbial biodiscovery employing high-throughput, high efficiency, natural product discovery to explore the chemical and biological properties of natural products produced by Australian marine and terrestrial microbes. I have identified and evaluated >40 new drugs targeting infectious diseases that attracted >$3M in research funding. I have led multi-year projects with industry, targeting animal health (ELANCO) and crop (NEXGEN Plants) and microbial chemical diversity (Microbial Screening Technologies; BioAustralis). I am a co-inventor on a UQ pending patent application documenting a new soil microbiome-inspired crop protection agent. This invention has attracted industry investment (NEXGEN Plants), to establish its potential, ahead of licensing and commercialisation. Therefore, I have co-led a project with industrial partner NEXGEN Plants, to investigate a new natural product that activates innate plant immunity defences against significant pathogens (patent pending). Since 2015, I have established the antibiotic biodiscovery capability at IMB targeting multidrug resistant (MDR) human pathogens and developed new approaches that have had significant knowledge impact in the antibiotic development and host defence research areas directed to combat MDR pathogens. This has resulted in the establishment of the Biodiscovery@UQ facility, a university-wide networking initiative designed to support excellence in biodiscovery research across UQ. I have secured funding from UQ to develop a new antitubercular drug lead (CIA), an ARC Linkage grant (LP19, CIB) to develop new anthelmintics and a grant from the University de La Frontera (collaborator), Chile to discover new antibiotics from Antarctic microbes, Marine CRC fund (CIA) to map the chemical diversity in Australian marine microbes and ARC LIEF grant. I co-led THE FIRST citizen science initiative, S4S, including developing the APP, website and running regional public workshops, with the aim of increasing public awareness about the role of soil microbes in antibiotic discovery. This initiative has attracted ~$1M in institutional and philanthropic support.

Prof. M. Adil Khan, has been working as an adjunct staff at the School of Social Sciences, since 2010. Prior to taking up the adjinct position at the School, he worked as Chief of Socio-Economic Governance and Management Branch of the Division for Public Administration and Development Management, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), New York. Prof. Khan retired from the United Nations in 2008.

Prof. Khan possesses more than 35 years of working experience in international development - his varied job experiences in 'development' include but not limited to public policy manager the planning ministry of Bangladesh (1973-1988), consultancies for international aid agencies such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the United Nations (1988-1994), research director on sustainable development at the University of Queensland (1994-1997), senior development advisor of UN in Myanmar and Sri Lanka (1997-2002) and senior policy manager at the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations HQs.His core expertise includes but not limited to public policy, pro-poor development and participatory governance.

In recent times Professor Khan was engaged by (i) AusAid as Course Director of Enhancing Policy Making Capacity Building in Ministries of Women Affairs (2012) and (ii) by the Department of Foreign Affairs and TRade, Australia the course on International Development Policy for Australian and foreign diplomats (2016)

Prof Khan has been a guest lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School (2006), University of Pennsylvania (2007), and University of Ottawa (2012). He also served as a visiting professor at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea where he introduced and taught the graduate certificate course on "Global Governance and national challenges: a UN perspective".

Prof. Khan has published extensively on issues of poverty, climate change, governance, corruption, monitoring and evaluation etc. He is also the Principal Author of the 2008 United Nations World Public Sector Report, “People matter: civic engagement in public governance” and the founder Editor-in-chief and currently a editorial board member of the international journal, Sustainable Development, Wiley. He is also the editorial board member of the New York based journal, South Asia Journal

For his unique management initiatives at the United Nations, Prof Khan was awarded the UN Manager of the Year Award in 2005 and for his pioneering work on participatory governance a Plaque of Recognition by the UN Committee of Experts on Public Administration in New York, in 2008.

Prof. Khan has a Master degree in Economics, a Master degree in Social Planning and Development and a PhD in Political Economy

Prof Khan is married to Yasmin and they have no children. His hobbies include cooking, reading, writing and music.