Dr. Buning is a Senior Lecturer within the tourism discipline in the UQ Business School and the research lead for the UQ Micromobility Research Cluster. His research interests reside at the intersection of physical activity, travel, and events. Within this area, his research agenda is focused on how tourists are physically active as both a driver of tourism behaviour (i.e., active lifestyle sports) and during visitation (i.e., active transport). His research works on active lifestyle sports closely mirrors his passions in active sport tourism for mountain biking, cycling, running, rock climbing, hiking, and more. His work crosses over to active transport through bikeshare, eScooters, and more generally micromobility where he is focused on tourism usage and related impacts.
The outcome of his work enables communities, events, and organizations to efficiently market to and attract visitors, encourage physical activity generally, and improve the related impact to destinations as a form of sustainable tourism. Prior to academia, Dr. Buning worked in the running event industry managing race logistics and continues to work with physical activity focused organizations, events, and communities as a consultant in developing data driven business strategy. Although he is an expert in survey research design and analysis, his research methodology speciality is in mixed methods (i.e., combining data sources and types) tailored to the research question at hand. He is regularly featured in the media and publishes on the topics of active transport, sport tourism, and event management.
Interested in working on research, teaching, or consulting projects? Please get in touch!
Sara Dolnicar was born in Ljubljana (Slovenia), grew up in Vienna (Austria) and now lives and works in Brisbane (Australia). She holds university degrees in psychology and business administration.
Sara is an expert on Airbnb and Airbnb regulation, making hotels operate in more environmentallyb sustainable ways while reducing operating cost, public acceptance of recycled waster and social marketing more generally.
To date, Sara has (co-)authored more than 300 refereed papers and led 16 Australian Research Council (ARC) grants, including the prestigous QEII and Laureate Fellowships. She won more than 30 awards, including two lifetime achievement awards: The US-based Travel and Tourism Research Association (TTRA) Distinguished Researcher Award (2017) for ground-breaking research that positively impacts the tourism industry, and outstanding service to the tourism research community (in the association’s 48-year history this award has been given to only four people); and the Slovenian Ambassador of Science 2016, the highest honour the Republic of Slovenia bestows on expatriate Slovenian researchers in recognition of global excellence, impact, and knowledge transfer.
Judith is an expert on events and tourism impacts and legacy. Judith’s work aims to understand and enhance the positive impacts of tourism and events on the communities and societies which host them. She is working on a number of projects in fields including Olympic Games legacies, the links between events and social connectivity (including social capital, social cohesion and social justice) and assessing the potential impacts of climate change on the tourism and events sector. She received her PhD from the University of Strathclyde in 2005, focusing on decision-making in the context of academic conferences. She also completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at Victoria University, Melbourne, and worked in the Department of Management at Monash University, Melbourne, before coming to UQ in 2014.
Dr Faith Ong's research focus lies in the role of events, tourism and hospitality as tools of social change. Thus, she researches into the social impacts of events and tourism on communities. Her work explores how different forms of festivals, community gatherings and targeted events impact the social inclusivity of places. Volunteering is also one of Faith’s areas of expertise, determining the impacts of volunteering in tourism and events on the individual.
Faith is interested in enabling full and inclusive participation of communities across a broad spectrum of events and travel. In particular, her work has focused on communities that are sexually and culturally diverse, as well as people with disabilities. She continues to explore the signals of inclusion and exclusion at occasions that are meant to bring communities together.
Dr Sun’s research addresses tourism sustainability, focusing on economic impacts and environmental footprinting. Her work on tourism economic impacts is to use the input-output modelling to provide quantitative estimates on jobs, income and GDP with respect to changes in national tourism policy, market development or special events and disasters. In addition, she also works on the environmental perspectives of travel behaviour, quantifying the tourism carbon footprint and tourism water footprint. She successfully constructed and analysed tourism impacts for individual countries (Taiwan, China, Japan, United States, and New Zealand) and provided the first detailed estimate of the global travel impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
She worked closely with federal and local administers, including Statistics Norway, Indonesia Ministry of Finance, Taiwan Ministry of the Interior Construction Agency, Taiwan Forestry Bureau, and the US National Park Service. Her research projects include cases with national tourism carbon emission inventory, tourism employment vulnerability, tourism marketing programs, and national park management.
Dr Sun has published in top academic journals including Nature Climate Change, Tourism Management, Journal of Travel Research and Journal of Sustainable Tourism. Before joining UQ from Taiwan in 2018, She had 9 consecutive research projects with the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) (equivalence to Australia Research Council), and 4 governmental grants. Dr Sun is currently the lead CI of the ARC Discovery Project that will set up the global tourism carbon emissions database and identify enablers for tourism decarbonization.
