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Dr Kevin M. Koo is currently a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Investigator Fellow and Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia (PCFA) Future Leader Fellow at The University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research (UQCCR). Dr Koo was awarded his PhD (Dean’s Award for Outstanding Thesis) from the Australian Institute for Bioengineering & Nanotechnology (AIBN), UQ in 2018. His PhD research was on the molecular analysis of nucleic acid biomarkers in prostate cancer liquid biopsies (with a particular interest in fusion genes), and the development of associated nanotechnology-based biosensors to facilitate precision cancer treatment.

Post-PhD, he begun a productive postdoctoral career with dual industry/academia appointments: as the Head of Assay Development/Lab Director in XING Technologies Pty Ltd (a Brisbane-based biotech start-up) to undertake product development projects for commercialization of disease in vitro diagnostics, and as an Honorary Fellow/Principal Research Scientist at UQCCR to continue his academic research in precision cancer nanodiagnostics. His research skills and experiences are honed through dedicated career time spent in both academic research and regulated industry environments.

Dr Koo's research encompasses multi-disciplinary fields of molecular biomarker and nanobiosensor development, translation, and commercialization for precision disease management applications. Presently, he is working on the design and development of integrated multi-bioanalyte sensing technologies to resolve the various challenges around holistic disease pathway understanding and clinical biomarker profiling.

Dr Koo's research endeavours have been recognized by a Metrohm Australia-New Zealand Young Chemist Award (2018), Springer Thesis Award (2019) and Queensland Young Tall Poppy Science Award (2023).

Dr Arutha Kulasinghe is a Senior Research Fellow and leads the Clinical-oMx Lab at the University of Queensland. Dr Kulasinghe has pioneered spatial transcriptomics using digital spatial profiling approaches in the Asia-Pacific region, contributing to world-first studies for lung cancer, head and neck cancer, and COVID-19. His research aims to understand the underlying pathobiology by using an integrative multi-omics approach.

Dr Mostafa Kamal Masud is a CCQ Next Generation Cancer Research Fellow at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering & Nanotechnology (AIBN), the University of Queensland (UQ). In 2020, he received his PhD in Medical Biotechnology Diagnostics and Nanobiotechnology from AIBN, UQ. He received his MS and B.Sc. (Hons.) in Chemistry from Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST), Sylhet-3114, Bangladesh. After completing his PhD, he was awarded a prestigious JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship (success rate >10%) from Japan and served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Japan's National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS).He recently been awarded a highly prestigious ARC DECRA fellowship for the period 2024-2026 and a QLD Cancer Council fellowship for the period 2024–2028. His research focuses on the development of novel nanostructures and nanodiagnostic technologies to address critical issues in medical diagnosis. As an early career researcher, he has an excellent track record with more than 50 peer-reviewed publications in prestigious and high-impact journals in the area that achieve <2400 citations with an h-index of 26 (Scholar google link: https://bit.ly/2Vtv67l). He has developed new classes of superparamagnetic nanostructures and fabricated novel biosensors for the detection of disease-specific biomolecular targets e.g., for miRNA, DNA, exosome and protein biomarker detection that have proven to be easy and effective, allowing for rapid diagnosis with minimal equipment. He made a major contribution to nanotechnology integrated-analytical and diagnostic fields by providing analytical and technological input as well as developing key collaborations with clinicians and biologists for translational research. His strategy is to create nano-architecture point-of-care diagnostic technology for early diagnosis of cancer that could hopefully lead to a healthy and happier life for humans.

Dr Quan Nguyen is a Group Leader at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), The University of Queensland. He is leading the Genomics and Machine Learning (GML) lab to study neuroinflammation and cancer-immune cells at single-cell resolution and within spatial morphological tissue context. His research interest is about revealing gene and cell regulators that determine the states of the complex cancer and neuronal ecosystems. Particularly, he is interested in quantifying cellular diversity and the dynamics of cell-cell interactions within the tissues to find ways to improve cancer diagnosis or cell-type specific treatments or the immunoinflammation responses that cause neuronal disease.

Using machine learning and genomic approaches, his group are integrating single-cell spatiotemporal sequencing data with tissue imaging data to find causal links between cellular genotypes, tissue microenvironment, and disease phenotypes. GML lab is also developing experimental technologies that enable large-scale profiling of spatial gene and protein expression (spatial omics) in a range of cancer tissues (focusing on brain and skin cancer) and in mouse brain and spinal cord.

Dr Quan Nguyen completed a PhD in Bioengineering at the University of Queensland in 2013, postdoctoral training in Bioinformatics at RIKEN institute in Japan in 2015, a CSIRO Office of Chief Executive (OCE) Research Fellowship in 2016, an IMB Fellow in 2018, an Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship (2019-2021), and is currently a National Health and Medical Research Council leadership fellow (EL2). He has published in top-tier journals, including Cell, Cell Stem Cell, Nature Methods, Nature Protocols, Nature Communications, Genome Research, Genome Biology and a prize-winning paper in GigaScience. In the past three years, he has contributed to the development of x8 open-source software, x2 web applications, and x4 databases for analysis of single-cell data and spatial transcriptomics. He is looking for enthusiastic research students and research staff to join his group.