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Prof David Ascher is currently an NHMRC Investigator and Director of the Biotechnology Program at the University of Queensland. He is also Head of Computational Biology and Clinical Informatics at the Baker Institute.

David’s research focus is in modelling biological data to gain insight into fundamental biological processes. One of his primary research interests has been developing tools to unravel the link between genotype and phenotype, using computational and experimental approaches to understand the effects of mutations on protein structure and function. His group has developed a platform of over 40 widely used programs for assessing the molecular consequences of coding variants (>7 million hits/year).

Working with clinical collaborators in Australia, Brazil and UK, these methods have been translated into the clinic to guide the diagnosis, management and treatment of a number of hereditary diseases, rare cancers and drug resistant infections.

David has a B.Biotech from the University of Adelaide, majoring in Biochemistry, Biotechnology and Pharmacology and Toxicology; and a B.Sci(Hon) from the University of Queensland, majoring in Biochemistry, where he worked with Luke Guddat and Ron Duggleby on the structural and functional characterization of enzymes in the branched-chain amino acid biosynthetic pathway. David then went to St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research to undertake a PhD at the University of Melbourne in Biochemistry. There he worked under the supervision of Michael Parker using computational, biochemical and structural tools to develop small molecules drugs to improve memory.

In 2013 David went to the University of Cambridge to work with Sir Tom Blundell on using fragment based drug development techniques to target protein-protein interactions; and subsequently on the structural characterisation of proteins involved in non-homologous DNA repair. He returned to Cambridge in 2014 to establish a research platform to characterise the molecular effects of mutations on protein structure and function- using this information to gain insight into the link between genetic changes and phenotypes. He was subsequently recruited as a lab head in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Melbourne in 2016, before joining the Baker Institute in 2019 and the University of Queensland in 2021.

He is an Associate Editor of PBMB and Fronteirs in Bioinformatics, and holds honorary positions at Bio21 Institute, Cambridge University, FIOCRUZ, and the Tuscany University Network.

Shane Culpepper is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Queensland in St. Lucia, Australia. Before joining the University of Queensland in 2023, Professor Culpeper held a continuing academic position at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Melbourn in 2008. His research focuses primarily on building better Search and Recommendation Systems. Over his 16 year career, Professor Culpepper has supervised 19 PhD students and co-authored more than 120 peer reviewed papers with 127 different research collaborators on problems such as algorithm efficiency and scalability, new machine learning algorithms for search and recommendation systems, and evaluating search and recommendation engine quality. Professor Culpepper is also an active member in the international research community. In the last 5 years, he has been a program co-chair for international conferences such as SIGIR and CIKM, and co-organized conferences such as WSDM and SWIRL. Professor Culpepper previously held an ARC DECRA fellowship in 2013 as well as an RMIT Vice-Chancellor's Princpal Researcher fellowship in 2017. Before joining the University of Queensland. Professor Culpepper was the founding director of the Centre for Information Discovery and Data Analytics at RMIT University. In total, he has been a chief investigator on 11 reseach grants totalling ~$3.5 Million AUD. For more information, see his personal hoomepage.

Dr Kai Li Lim is the inaugural St Baker Fellow in E-Mobility at the UQ Dow Centre for Sustainable Engineering Innovation. Specialising in data science, engineering, and emerging technologies, Dr Lim focuses on real-time vehicle telematics, infrastructure management, and computer vision-based autonomous driving.

At UQ, Dr Lim's research centres on electric vehicle (EV) usage and charging patterns to inform adoption policies and strategies. His work includes examining trends for incentive design and assessing the environmental and economic impacts of EVs. Dr Lim's current focus is on charging reliability and addressing EV drivers' pain points. His research has been featured in academic, industry, and media publications, facilitating discussions with various stakeholders.

Dr Lim has published a range of articles, book chapters, and conference papers in reputable venues. He has delivered invited talks and appeared in media outlets such as ABC, Courier Mail, and The Conversation. Collaborating with various UQ schools, including Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Economics, and Environment, Dr Lim has secured funding for projects on topics like carbon emissions offset after EV uptake and evaluating price incentives for EV charging using real-time data.

In addition to his work at UQ, Dr Lim collaborates closely with the UC Davis Electric Vehicle Research Center, where he recently completed a six-month visiting fellowship on EV charging. He engages in speaking events and networking opportunities centred on sustainability and transportation innovation, delivering keynote speeches at conferences and industry roundtables.

Dr Lim holds a BEng (Hons) degree in electronic and computer engineering from the University of Nottingham, an MSc degree in computer science from Lancaster University, and a PhD degree from The University of Western Australia, supported by the Australian Government under the Research Training Programme.

I am currently a lecturer at the University of Queensland, where I conduct research in the field of Information Retrieval. My research focuses on efficient and effective representations for large-scale search engines, including indexing, compression, and retrieval. I am also interested in understanding how to measure improvements in the end-to-end search pipeline, including system-oriented effectiveness measurements and user behaviour analysis. I have a broad interest in empirical experimentation, operating systems, data structures, and algorithms.

Previous Positions

• From February 2020 to January 2022 I worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on an ARC discovery project with Professor Alistair Moffat at the University of Melbourne.
• I completed my PhD at RMIT University under the guidance of Professor J. Shane Culpepper and Professor Falk Scholer.

Dr Evgenii Nekhoroshev is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Chemical Engineering and a member of the Pyrometallurgy Innovation Centre led by Prof. Evgueni Jak.

He graduated with a Master in Chemistry (chemical thermodynamics) from Lomonosov's Moscow State University, Deparment of Chemistry in 2012. His Master's Thesis was "Thermodynamic optimization of the NaOH-Al(OH)3-Na2SiO3-H2O system for applications in Bayer's process of bauxite treatment" as part of a bigger project initiated in collaboration with Rusal company aimed at utilisation/valorisation of red mud residues accumulated during the production of aluminium oxide from bauxite ores.

In 2019, he completed a PhD in Metallurgical Engineering at Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal, Canada within The Centre For Research in Computational Thermodynamics (CRCT), where he acquired expertise in FactSage software, multicomponent database development, and was included in the list of official collaborators of FactSage. His PhD thesis was "Thermodynamic optimization of the Na2O-K2O-Al2O3-CaO-MgO-B2O3-SiO2 system" sponsored by Glass Consortium including Corning and SCHOTT glass producers. The purpose of the database he developed was to assist the industry in designing new glasses with special properties: chemically hardened glasses (smartphones), technical glasses with high thermal and chemical resilience (boron-containing glasses), chemically inert glasses, etc.

Short after receiving his PhD, Dr Evgenii Nekhoroshev accepted a position at The University of Queensland as part of the Pyrometallurgy Innovation Centre's team where he has an official title of Theme Leader in Thermodynamic Computations, combining his broad expertise in metallurgy, chemical engineering, applied mathematics, and programming.

Dr Evgenii Nekhoroshev has always been passionate about formalisation and automation of big research tasks. He started working on developing an automated solver for thermodynamic optimisation during his PhD thesis which was improved and finalised using the ideas of Prof. Evgueni Jak about real-time derivative matrix optimization and sensitivity analysis applicable to large multicomponent systems. His contribution to the Centre allowed to make transition to a continuous optimization approach when experimental and modelling streams of work in the Centre are efficiently combined together. It allows to include the most recent experimental datasets into a self-consistent database update with minimal time delays.

Research interest: Monitoring ecosystem health of coral reefs and seagrass habitats, integrating field and remote sensing image datasets, and the developing applied cost-effective mapping and monitoring approaches. Developed approaches have been adopted as standard practice globally, making a difference in conservation of these valuable habitats. The long term monitoring studies at Heron and Moreton Bay formed the basis for the development of mapping and monitoring over time and space at local to global scale.

Current projects:

1) Long term monitoring of benthic composition at Heron Reef (2002-ongoing). Annual photoquadrate surveys are being collected at Heron Reef, Southern Great Barrier Reef. Initiated to develop remote sensing mapping approaches and assess coral composition over time. The resulting Maps, photo quadrate and benthic data, spectral reflectance are accessible online.

2) Long term monitoring of seagrass composition and abundance in Moreton bay Marine Park (2000-ongoing). For Eastern Banks it included monitoring seagrass species, cover and biomass 15x times since 2004 using photoquadrate survey and satelite imagery and for Moreton Bay it included seagrass extent and cover (2004, 2009, 2015, 2021, 2022), all data accessible via Moreton Bay Research Station.

3) Smart Sat CRC Hyperspectral Remote Sensing of Seagrass and Coral Reefs 2023-2027. Collaborative effort with CSIRO, Adelaide University, DES Adelaide Coastal Waters.

4) 3D GBR Habitat Mapping Project 2015 - ongoing: Mapping and monitoring geomorphic zonation, bottom type and predicted coral type habitat for every Great Barrier Reef within the Marine Park.

5) Global habitat mapping project 2019-2023 Developed and implemention of global habitat mapping as part of the Allen Coral Atlas resulting in extent, geomorphic and benthic maps for reefs globally, funded through with Vulcan Philanthropies in partnership with; Planet; the Arizona State University and the National Geographic Society.

Other projects: Advisor for Reef Cloud Australian Institute of Marine Science and Coordinated Global Research Assessment of Seagrass System (C-GRASS).

Current position: Associate Professior in Marine Remote Sensing. Academic Director Heron Island Research Station and affiliated researchers with Centre for Marine Science and Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science

Capacity building: under/post graduate courses; Msc/PhD supervision, workshops/courses; Remote Sensing Educational Toolkit, and online courses (e.g. TNC)

Citizen science: Strong supporter of citizen science based projects, as trainer, organiser and advisor for Reef Check Australia, CoralWatch, Great Reef Census and UniDive.