Dr. Amelia R. Brown is Senior Lecturer in Greek History & Language in the Classics & Ancient History discipline of the School of Historical & Philosophical Inquiry, at the University of Queensland, Australia. She currently holds a Discovery Early Career Research Award from the ARC to research the impact of sailors and travellers on the development of ancient Greek religion and identity. Before coming to UQ in 2010, she was Hannah Seeger Davis Fellow in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. In 2008 she received her PhD in Ancient History & Mediterranean Archaeology from the University of California at Berkeley, with a dissertation on the history of Corinth in Late Antiquity. Her current research focuses on Late Antiquity, Greek religion and Mediterranean maritime history, particularly in Roman Corinth, Thessaloniki and Malta. She has excavated at the sites of ancient Halasarna (Kos), Messene, Polis (Cyprus) and Corinth, and is currently completing books on Corinthian history and Mediterranean Maritime Religion.
I studied archaeology at the University of Queensland, then completed my PhD at the Australian National University under the supervision of Prof Peter Hiscock and Distinguished Professor Sue O'Connor on Holocene technological and cultural change in Wardaman Country, Northern Territory. I then took up a postdoctoral Fellowship in the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolution at the University of Cambridge, working closely with Professors Robert Foley, Marta Mirazon Lahr and Michael Petraglia. I returned to UQ as an ARC Fellow in 2004 and then took up a lectureship in the School of Social Science in 2005. My teaching is centred on stone tools, ancient technologies, Anustralian Indigenous heritage, Human Evolution and other topics. My research involves working closely with Aboriginal people documenting their cultural heritage, understanding the evolution of our species and the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa and long-term change in many parts of the world, including East Timor, France, Africa, and India. I am currently working on Australia's oldest known site of Madjedbebe in close collaboration with the Mirarr and Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, and the site of Malangangerr with the Manilikarr, Njanmja Aboriginal Corporation and Kakadu National Park.
I research ancient agriculture, plant use and human environmental impact in Turkey, Italy (Pompeii) and Australasia via the analysis of archaeological plant remains (seeds, fruits leaves etc)
I started my archaeological career in 1988, working on the excavation of Blawearie Cairn in my native Northumberland (UK). I studies at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL (London) gaining BSc Archaeology (1991), MSc Bio and Geoarchaeology (1992) and PhD (2001), specialising in the study of plant macrofossil remains, such as seeds, fruits, leaves and wood, from archaeological sites to reconstruct past environments and economic practices. I also developed a large consulting portfolio, working as an environmental archaeologist for the Museum of London Archaeology Service (1993-1994) and UCL Geoarchaeology Unit (1992-1993) and as an independent contractor (1994-2001). From 1999-2001 I worked as a research assistant for the Catalhoyuk Research Project, based at Cambridge University and during that time moved to Australia. From 2001 - 2004 I worked at The Australian National University in Canberra as a research assistant to the Engendering Roman Spaces Project and then received a research fellowship at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. I moved to UQ in January 2006. My research interests are currently focused on the origins of agriculture in Central Anatolia (Turkey) and the later development of the region's state economies. I also work in Australasia where I have been developing plant macrofossil techniques to disentangle ancient tree-fruit use and the development of food production in Papua New Guinea.
Emeritus Professor Ian Lilley FSA FAHA (BA Hons, MA Qld, PhD ANU) is an internationally-renowned discipline leader whose interests focus on archaeology and heritage across Australasia, the Indo-Pacific and globally.
Ian is an archaeologist and heritage practitioner in the UQ School of Social Science, to where he moved in retirement in 2019 after 25 years leading the academic program in UQ's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit (ATSIS). From 2015, he was also the invited inaugural Willem Willems Chair for Contemporary Issues in Archaeological Heritage Management at Leiden University in the Netherlands, from which he retired at the end of 2022. Leiden is continental Europe's leading university in archaeology and among the global Top 10 in the discipline. Ian remains an Advisor to the Centre for Global Heritage and Development (Leiden University, Delft University of Technology and Erasmus University Rotterdam), based in Leiden's Faculty of Archaeology. In Australia, he is an Honorary Professor at the University of Southern Queensland, where he provides strategic advice to help build research capacity in the Centre for Heritage and Culture within the Institute for Resilient Regions.
Ian's pioneering Honours and Masters research examined the precolonial archaeology of Southeast Queensland. Following ground-breaking work in Papua New Guinea with the Australian Museum, Ian then did his PhD on ancient maritime trading systems which linked the New Guinea mainland and nearby Bismarck Archipelago. During his PhD, he took time out to lead a team in PNG's Duke of York Islands as a part of the international ANU-National Geographic Lapita Homeland Project. He then built on his PhD with a UQ Postdoctoral Fellowship, for which he independently won National Geographic funding to return to PNG. He has since undertaken archaeological and cultural heritage research, consultancies and advisory missions throughout Australia, in Asia and the Pacific Islands and in North and South America. Ian's current heritage research focuses on global issues regarding World Heritage, particularly in relation to Indigenous people and other traditional/ descendent communities. He is also an accredited Subject Matter Expert with the US Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). In this capacity, he provides strategic advice to the US Defense Department regarding the recovery of missing US service members from WWII to the present and oversees field missions to locate missing personnel. In that broad connection, he has recently completed a project with Dutch partners including the Netherlands Ministry of Defence and funded by the Netherlands Embassy, concerning the WWII headquarters of the Netherlands East Indies government in exile, which were located at Wacol just outside Brisbane. Ian has also supervised over 20 PhD and MPhil research projects to completion in many different schools across UQ as well as others at Leiden.
Ian is a Fellow and past International Secretary and Vice President of the Australian Academy of Humanities, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and a member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, a Federal statutory body. At UQ, Ian is a Senior Research Associate in the Centre for Policy Futures in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and an emeritus member of the UQ Centre for Marine Science. Externally, Ian is a member of Australia ICOMOS, an ICOMOS World Heritage Assessor and past Secretary-General of the ICOMOS International Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management (ICAHM). In these connections, he sits on the Conservation Advisory Committee for the Port Arthur World Heritage site complex and previously sat on the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Willandra Lakes World Heritage region. In addition, he is a member of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas and the IUCN Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy. In these capacities, he undertakes IUCN assessments of World Heritage cultural landscapes. He was also a member of the Advisory Group for a major IUCN-coordinated multi-agency project to reshape the assessment of protected area management effectiveness to include cultural as well as natural factors. ICOMOS and IUCN are the statutory independent Advisory Bodies to UNESCO on cultural and natural heritage respectively, and Ian is one of the few people globally who is a member of both world bodies. He is also immediate past Secretary-General of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association, the region's peak professional archaeological body, past Chair of the International Government Affairs Committee of the Society for American Archaeology, the world's largest professional archaeological body, and served three consecutive terms as President of the Australian Archaeological Association. Ian's other professional interests are archaeology and social identity, archaeological ethics, and the role of archaeology and archaeological heritage in contemporary society.
I'm a biological anthropologist specialising in bone histology of humans and other mammals. I work with modern, archaeological, and palaeontological samples. I have been an Honorary Senior Lecturer at UQ since 2021, a Correspondent Researcher at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden (The Netherlands) since 2022, and an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Kent in Canterbury (UK) since 2016. I have >60 publications and have secured ~$1.6 million in grants as a PI, including a 2019–2022 ARC DECRA (DE190100068) and 2025–2028 ARC Future Fellowship (FT240100030). As a CI/AI, I have featured on ~$1.7 million worth of grants, including a 2023–2027 ARC DP (DP230100440).
In 2022 I was a Martin & Temminck Fellow at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in The Netherlands. Until 2022, I spent almost 7 years at the Australian National University in Canberra working as an ARC DECRA Fellow (2019–2022), Senior Lecturer, and Lecturer. Between 2015 and 2016 I was a Research Assistant in medicine at Imperial College in London. Until 2014, I spent about 8 years at the University of Kent in Canterbury completing a BSc (2010), PhD (2014), and PGCHE (2014), and working in various teaching roles, including tutoring, lab demonstration, sessional lecturing, and lecturing. I was previously Treasurer of the Australasian Society for Human Biology, Editor (2022) and Associate Editor (2023) of The Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland, and Editorial Board Member (2022–2024) of Scientific Reports. I am currently Editorial Board Member of Anthropological Review and Review Editor (2023) of Human Bioarchaeology and Paleopathology (Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology).
Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology
Availability:
Available for supervision
Media expert
Dr. Manu P. Sobti is a landscape historian and urban interlocutor of the Global South with research specialisations in South Asia, South East Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Within the gamut of the Global, the Islamic, and the Non-Western, his continuing work examines borderland transgressions and their intertwinement with human mobilities, indigeneities, and the narratives of passage across these liminal sites. From his perspective, ‘land-centered’ and ‘deep’ place histories replete with human actors serve as critical and de-colonizing processes that negate the top-down master-narratives wherein borders and boundaries simplistically delineate nation states and their scalar range of internal geographies. He was previously Associate Professor at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee USA (2006-16). He has a B.Dipl.Arch. from the School of Architecture-CEPT (Ahmedabad - INDIA), an SMarchS. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge - USA), and a Ph.D. from the College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta - USA).
As a recognized scholar and innovative educator, Sobti served as Director of SARUP-UWM’s India Winterim Program (2008-15). This foreign study program worked intensively with local architecture schools in Ahmedabad, Delhi and Chandigarh, allowing students and faculty to interact actively, often within the gamut of the same project. He also set up a similar, research-focused program in Uzbekistan, engaging advanced undergraduate and graduate students to undertake field research at sites, archives and cultural landscapes. In partnership with the Art History Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and SARUP colleagues, Sobti also co-coordinated the Building-Landscapes-Cultures (BLC) Concentration of SARUP-UWM’s Doctoral Program (2011-13), creating opportunities for student research in diverse areas of architectural and urban history and in multiple global settings. He served as the Chair of SARUP's PhD Committee between 2014-16, leading an area of BLC's research consortium titled Urban Histories and Contested Geographies.
Sobti's research has been supported by multiple funding bodies, including the Graham Foundation of the Arts (USA), the Architectural Association (UK), the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (USA), the French Institute of Central Asian Studies (UZBEKISTAN), the US Department of State Fulbright Foundation (USA), the Aga Khan Foundation (SWITZERLAND), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (USA), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), the Centre for 21st Century Studies University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (USA), the Institute for Research in the Humanities University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), Stanford University (USA), in addition to city governments in New Delhi/Chandigarh/Ahmedabad (INDIA), Samarqand/Bukhara (UZBEKISTAN), Erzurum (TURKEY) and New Orleans (USA). He has also served as a United States Department of State Fulbright Senior Specialist Scholar and received 7 Research Fellowships at important institutions worldwide. He is a nominated Expert Member of the ICOMOS-ICIP (Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites) International Committee, responsible for debate and stewardship on contentious cultural heritage issues globally.
Tony is an expert mining structural geologist who applies his skills to problems of deep earth mass mining, giant open pits, near-mine exploration, and the local and regional lithostructural controls on complex metalliferous mineral deposits. As a Senior Research Fellow in mining and engineering geology at the University of Queensland, Tony’s pioneering research focussed on the geological modelling and data inputs required for planning deep cave mining operations, an area that had received little previous consideration from geologists. He led the Geology and Mass Mining Project (GMM), which examined the geoscientific inputs required for exploring, defining, establishing, and mining block and sub-level caving operations that were being developed on giant porphyry copper-gold systems and IOCG deposits. While much research was being done in Australia to explore the deep earth environment, very little was being done to model the geology of large and deep mineralized systems, and then to use the new data and models to plan and extract any large discoveries made. Tony’s pioneering work was some of the first and most comprehensive to be done in this field.
Fellow and chartered professional (geology) of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy
Fellow of the Society of Economic Geologists
Fellow of the Geological Society
Fellow of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists
Member, Geological Society of Australia
Member, Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology
Tony is presently a Principal Structural Geologist with a Brisbane-based geophysical and geological consulting group.
Professor Zhao (PhD, ANU, 1993; MSc, Univ Adelaide, 1989; BSc, Nanjing Univ, 1985) has ~30 years research experience in isotope geochemistry and geochronology, with research interests straddling across the fields of geological, geochemical, geographical, environmental, ecological and archaeological sciences. He developed the mass spectrometry U-series dating methods at UQ and applied them to dating coral reefs in the Great Barrier Reef and other parts of the tropical oceans, karstic deposits (stalagmites, stalactites, flowstones, etc) and calcite veins across different continents, as well as important hominid and fauna records in China, South East Asia, Australasia, Europe and Polynesia, which have received widespread recognition and public attention. Most recently, his team has been developing laser-ablation ICP-MS in situ U-Th and U-Pb dating methods for applications in earth, environmental and archaeological research. Since 1991, Zhao have authored >350 refereed publications, won more than 50 competitive grants and contracts, supervised or mentored more than 50 research high-degree students and early-career researchers, and received one ARC APD fellowship (1995), one ARC research/QEII fellowship (1998), one UQ research excellence award (2001), one Chinese National Science Foundation distinguished overseas young scholar award (2000), and the prestigious inaugural Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Outstanding Mentor of Young Researchers (2011).
The Radiogenic Isotope Facility (RIF) that Prof Zhao took charge since 2005 is a ~200 m2 HEPA-filtered, fully-automated, ultra-clean low-blank chemistry and mass spectrometer laboratory, housing two Nu Plasma multi-collector ICP-MS instruments, two Thermo iCap-RQ and one Thermo X-series II quadrupole ICP-MS instruments, and two ASI RESOlution SE laser ablation systems for high-precision radiogenic/metal-stable isotope and trace element analysis in both solution and in situ laser-ablation modes. The facility is unique in its design and capabilities in Australia, representing one of only a small number of establishments with its level of analytical sophistication, range and quality of mass spectrometers and proven ultra-low analytical blank performance. It is widely acknowledged by peers in the field as being among of the most advanced facilities of its kind in the world. It services a multidisciplinary research community on campus, nationally and overseas in traditional earth science research, palaeoclimate, palaeoenvironmental and palaeoecological research, coral reef research, environmental science research, archaeological research, and forensic research.
