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Susan is an architect, educator and researcher at the University of Queensland with expertise in architectural design histories and theories, heritage and sustainability, and design governance and policy. Susan has experience in leading cross-disciplinary research involving stakeholders in academia, industry and government. She has been involved in large-scale national and international funded research projects and has ongoing collaborations at the University of Ghent, supported by the UQ-UGhent Strategic International Partnership. At UQ she is a member of the ATCH Research Centre (Architecture, Theory, Culture, History).

Prior to her academic career Susan worked in architectural practice for over 10 years in Australia and the UK, gaining experience on a range of project scales and types including community, civic, housing and urban design. She maintains strong connections to industry and is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Architects and has contributed to its education and gender equity committees, and regional and state awards programs in urban design, public architecture, residential design and art-architecture. She currently contributes to the AIA National Gender Equity Committee Research and Publication Taskforce.

Susan’s current research follows three themes, which are explained further under Available Projects:

• Material Values of the Built Environment: Heritage, Maintenance, Demolition, Salvage, Storage;
• Design Expertise, Design Governance and the Architecture Profession; and
• Quality in Architecture: Statements, Settings, Substance.

Susan is an author, editor or contributing author to 9 books. Her research and criticism is widely published in academic, professional and industry journals including Journal of Architecture, Interstices, European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes, AA Files, Leonardo, Fabrications and Architecture Australia. She regularly presents her research in national and international forums, including academic and industry conferences, at cultural institutions, and for continuing professional development. Susan has been an invited guest lecturer, guest critic and RHD guest critic at Ghent University, Monash University, and Griffith University. She has also been an invited chair and contributor to expert panels at the SCCI Architecture Hub Sydney, Museum of Brisbane, the UQ Art Museum and for the Committee for Brisbane. In 2012 Susan was a Visiting Professor in the VAMA (Visual Arts Media and Architecture) Masters Programme at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In 2013 she was an invited scholar at the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte in Paris. In 2018 and 2023 Susan was a visiting researcher at UGhent. Susan has extensive experience in research collaboration, research mentorship and research leadership, and she regularly co-authors with academic and industry collaborators and students.

Susan has been the recipient of a number of competitive awards and grants for her research. She was a Chief Investigator on the ARC funded Discover Project Is Architecture Art?: A history of categories, concepts and recent practices(2016-2022) which analyses the changing place of architecture in culture and cultural administration. This project produced three books: Pavilion Propositions: Nine Points on an Architectural Phenomenon (2018), Trading Between Architecture and Art: Strategies and Practices of Exchange (2019) and Valuing Architecture: Heritage and the Economics of Culture(2020), numerous academic and industry publications, and convened two conferences. Susan was also a Chief Investigator on the ARC funded Discovery Project Campus: Building Modern Australian Universities (2016-2020), which brought together experts from five Australian Universities in an inter-disciplinary team to research the landscape, architecture, planning and heritage of modern univeristy campuses in Australia. She is a contributing author to Campus: Building Modern Australian Universities (UWA Press, 2023). In 2021-24 Susan is leading research on the participation and career experience of women in design leadership roles in Australia, with support from the Australian Institute of Architects. Her ongoing research with UGhent collaborators has recieved support from the UQ Global Strategy and Seed Funding Scheme.

Susan has contributed extensively to the leadership of the Architecture, Design and Planning School at UQ, most recently as Chair of Research (2022), Chair of Teaching and Learning (2018-21) and Academic Advisor for the Master of Urban Development and Design Program (2021). Her research also informs teaching and curriculum development in the Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology at UQ. In 2021 Susan contributed to two projects to develop Indigenous and inter-cultural content for built environment and design education, as part of teams led by indigenous experts.

Awards

2023 UQ Global Strategy and Partnerships Seed Funding (with Ashley Paine and John Macarthur)

2019 UQ Promoting Women Fellowship

2010 David Saunders Founders Grant Award (SAHANZ) (with Jared Bird)

2000 QIA Medallion (Australian Institute of Architects, Qld Chapter)

2000 Board of Architects Prize (Board of Architects, Queensland)

Memberships

Registered Architect, Board of Architects Queensland

Fellow, Australian Institute of Architects (FRAIA)

Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ)

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.

Dr Jan Packer has a background in Psychology having completed a BA (Hons) at UQ in 1976. Her PhD (Education, QUT, 2004) focussed on motivations for learning in educational leisure settings. She has published broadly in the area of educational psychology over many years. The current major focus of her research is in applying the principles of educational, environmental and positive psychology to understand and facilitate visitor experiences in leisure settings such as museums and other tourist and leisure contexts. Jan was co-editor of the international journal, Visitor Studies from 2005 through 2011.

I am an Australian Research Council Future Fellow working in the field of bioarchaeology in Australia and New Guinea.

I am a scholar, curator, educator and designer.

My research is at the inter-section of cultural anthropology- material and visual culture- and museum studies with specialisms in the anthropology of art and design, and the 21st century 'ethnographic' museum. I research and publish on the role of colours as carriers of thought in art and in everyday creative design practices, and colours as local ecology and time. My additonal current research include Australian Indigenous art and the market; the role of museum management in institutional policy and history; digital imaging of museum objects and intellectual property; collection ecologies and bio-cultural materials; research led exhibtiions and contemporary exhibition curation and design. I have a long-standing association with the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (APY Lands) in South Australia where I carried out my doctoral fieldwork whilst a student at University College London, as part of the material culture group. I welcome doctoral students who wish to work on material and visual cultural research and musuem studies, or the interesction of these.

I have curated a number of research generated exhibitions including consultant curator for the 50th anniversary show of Ernabella Arts at Tandanya in South Australia, the retrospective of Kunmanara (Nyukana) Baker and, co-curated the touring show Art on a String with Object, and fifteen collaborative shows for the UQ Anthropology Museum.

I have directed the Master of Museum studies program at UQ for the last 5 years, commissioning a course in digital heritage and carrying out and implementing the recommendations of the academic program review. I continue to partner with GLAMs sector institutions for teaching and research. I am partnering with QAGOMA to collaborate on a new course about Learning and Outreach. I have taught Museum Theory and Practice, Collections, Museum Management, Exhibitions, Work Placement and convened the Masters Dissertation courses. Previously I taught Material and Visual culture and Museum Anthropology in the UQ Anthropology undergraduate program. I have taught at the Australian National University, Chelsea College of Art and University College London in the UK. I was first trained as an architect and worked in the UK construction industry as a designer and project manager.

As the first women to direct the UQ Anthropology Museum in its 75-year history I aimed to promote the work of women makers and artists in the museum’s collection and in the museum’s exhibition program. I am skilled at combining theory and practice, including teaching with objects, and at infrastructure implementation. I led the re configuring of the UQ Anthropology museum’s infrastructure transforming it back into a public institution with a rolling exhibition program generated by research of the museum’s collection. I led the creation of the first online publication of the collection to enable wide collection access. This included a purpose built digital catalogue and the creation and upload of more than 15,000 images of the cultural property cared for in the museum. The publication of the photographic collection in 2017 enabled these images can find new friends and family online. More than 60,000 people visited the UQAM’s new teaching, research and engagement facilities between 2012-2017. I raised more than AUS$1.1 million for the museum.