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Professor Paul Harpur OAM is a leading international and comparative disability rights legal academic, current Australian Research Council Future Fellow, leader in higher education reforms, an Associate with the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, and duel Paralympian. He competed in the Sydney 2000 Paralympics and the Athens 2004 Paralympics and has the Paralympics Australia Pin #614. Professor Harpur is a TEDx speaker (“Universities as Disability Champions of Change”). He is chair of the University of Queensland Disability Inclusion Group, as well as holding international posts, including as an Associate with the Harvard Law School's Harvard Project on Disability, an International Distinguished Fellow, with the Burton Blatt Institute, Syracuse University, and is a former Fulbright Future Scholar. Professor Harpur is active in university-wide and sector-wide higher education change. Illustratively he has chairred the UQ Disability Inclusion Group since 2016 and sits on a range of university-wide committees. At the sector-wide level, during 2023 Dr Harpur served on the Ministerial Reference Group for the Universities Accord. He also serves on the Higher Education Standards Panel (HESP), which is a statutory body under Part 9 of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Act 2011 (Cth). The HESP is charged to advise and make recommendations to the Minister and to the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) on the Higher Education Standards Framework and to TEQSA on matters including TEQSA’ strategic objectives, corporate plan, performance against that plan, reform agenda, streamlining of activities and resourcing requirements and its regulatory approaches. He also serves on the Advisory Board for the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success, formerly the National Center for Student Equity in Higher Education. In April the Univertas 21 (U21) Senior Leaders Group adopted the U21 Framework for Equitable and Inclusive Global Engagement to guide EDI across the 30 university Network. This Framework as a committee, the U21 EDI Management Committee, to which Professor Harpur was appointed in 2025. His transformational work and service has been recognised with numerous diversity and inclusion, human resources and leadership citations and awards. In the 2024 Australia Day Honours, Professor Harpur was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia by the Governor General of Australia (OAM). The citation for his OAM is “for service to people with disability”. Professor Harpur has published 220+ publications. Professor Harpur's recent publications include 2 books with Cambridge University Press • Discrimination, Copyright and Equality: Opening the E-Book for the Print Disabled (2017) • Ablism at work: disablement and hierarchies of impairments (2019)

Michelle is a sociologist and lawyer: her research focuses on decision-making and the operation of law and regulation in practice for people with disabilities and other impairments to communication and legal capacity. She has research interests in the sociology of law, decision-making (supported and substituted), legal personhood, the UNCPRD, disability law, legal and administrative transition to adulthood, communication impairments, and profound intellectual disability. Her work examines decision-making in practice in a range of areas, including health and aged care, banking and finance, income support, and the NDIS. Michelle is trained in both qualitative and quantitative methods, and has extensive experience in research development, design, and practice, as well as health consumer research and co-design.

Michelle works on the MRFF funded project: Unspoken, Unheard, Unmet: Improving Access to Preventative Health Care through Better Conversations about Care. She leads the experience gathering stage of the project, the co-design elements of the work, and the development of guidelines about communication, decision-making, and aged care.

Michelle is also a consumer and disability advocate, with experience in strategic policy development, implementation, and evaluation, including the co-design of state level strategy for transition to adulthood health care, and on Australia’s National Living Evidence Taskforce. She is also the consumer board Chair of Child Unlimited, a consortium of researchers, clinicians, and consumers working towards best evidence-based practice in health care for children and young adults with chronic ill health and disabilities, and co-chair of the consumer advisory committee for the ARC Centre of Excellence Life Course Centre.

Tamara Walsh is a Professor of Law and Director of the UQ Pro Bono Centre. She has degrees in both Law and Social Work, and her interest is in social welfare law and human rights. Her research examines the impact of the law on vulnerable people including children and young people, people experiencing homelessness, people on low incomes, people with disabilities, mothers and carers. Her research has spanned 20 years and has been widely published, both in Australia and internationally.

In 2008, Tamara designed and established the UQ Pro Bono Centre, along with Dr Paul O'Shea and Prof Ross Grantham. The UQ Pro Bono Centre facilitates student and staff participation in pro bono legal activities, particularly public interest research and law reform. It is now a flagship program of the UQ Law School.

In 2016, Tamara established the UQ Deaths in Custody Project, which she runs in partnership with Prisoners' Legal Service. This Project monitors deaths in custody across Australia, and administers a public website which is an important resource for researchers, coroners and members of the public: www.deaths-in-custody.project.uq.edu.au

In 2020, Tamara established the UQ/Caxton Human Rights Project, along with Bridget Burton at Caxton Legal Centre. This project is staffed by volunteer law students and makes information on every case that refers to the Human Rights Act 2019 (Qld) publicly available: https://law.uq.edu.au/human-rights-cases.

Tamara is currently undertaking an ARC Linkage project on human rights dispute resolution in Australia (2023-2025). She has recently completed an ARC Linkage project on the criminalisation of poverty and homelessness in Australia (2017-2021).

Tamara undertakes pro bono legal practice in the area of child protection, and she lectures in human rights law, and child and family law. Tamara also runs the UQ Law School's clinical legal education program.