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Mitch Dunn is a Research Fellow within the UQ Composites group, in the school of Mechanical and Mining Engineering. He has interest in a wide range of material research activities, including functional composite materials, non-destructive evaluation, novel material systems, high-temperature applications, instrumentation, and novel RF/antenna applications in Defence.

Mitch received his PhD from UQ in 2018 for his work on the detection of laminar damage in composite laminates using nonlinear ultrasonic techniques. Recently, he has worked extensively on industry technology development and innovation projects focused around functional composite materials and conformal, load-bearing antenna structures.

Professor Gurgenci's current research interests include energy systems analysis; geothermal and concentrating solar thermal power plant technologies; development of intelligent tutoring and compterised assessment systems for teaching machine design.

Hal Gurgenci, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has many years of industry and academic experience in solar energy, manufacturing and mining. Professor Gurgenci is the Founding Director of the Queensland Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence (QGECE).

Dr Yuanshen Lu started his current position at UQ as a DECRA Fellow and lecturer in Sep 2019. Before that, he was a lecturer in mechanical engineering at Griffith University following a few years postdoc experience at UQ. He received his PhD degree in 2015. Dr Lu's current research interests are thermo-fluids, energy conversions in conventional and renewable energies, and hydrogen. He has extensive engagement with industries and has contributed to sectors including thermal power generation/power plants, coal seam gas, geothermal heat pumps, concentrated solar thermal energy, wind turbines, green metallurgy, etc. He is particularly passionate about innovations relating to energy conversion efficiency, power consumption, and energy savings for various renewable and green hydrogen applications. Dr Lu is the Deputy Director of the Centre for Multiscale Energy Systems (CMES).

Dr Ekaterina Strounina is a Solid State NMR facility manager in the Centre for Advanced Imaging. She has been working in UQ since 2002, specializing in high-field MRI applications and solid-state NMR spectroscopy.

Prof. Anand Veeraragavan's research interests are in supersonic combustion of hydrocarbons, hypersonic aerothermodynamics, advanced optical diagnostics for hypersonic flows and microcombustion based portable power. He is the Co-Director for UQ's Centre for Hypersonics. Since 2021, he is an Associate Editor for the AIAA Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, which is a Quartile 1 Journal in Aerospace Engineering (Scimago).

Prof. Anand Veeraragavan joined the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering as a mechanical engineering lecturer in 2012. He was an Mid-Career Advance Queensland Research Fellow (2017-2020) awarded for conducting research in the project entitled

Supersonic Combustion of Hydrocarbon Fuels for High-Mach-Number Axisymmetric Scramjets

Anand graduated with a B.Tech in aerospace engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-Madras) in 2002. He obtained his MS (2006) and PhD (2009) degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland. His Doctoral research, which focused on understanding flame stabilization in microscale combustors, won the best thesis award in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Maryland.

After his PhD, he took up a research appointment as a postdoctoral research associate in the Device Research Lab at MIT where he worked on thermophotovoltaics and nanofluid based volumetric solar absorbers. He next joined GE Energy as a combustion technologist in the US. At GE, he worked primarily on designing the next generation, land based, heavy duty, gas turbine engine combustors focusing on cost, operability, reliability and emissions and also completed his lean Six Sigma Greenbelt certification at GE.

He is currently undertaking world-leading research in the field of hypersonics and supersonic combustion sponsored by Australian DST, U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and U.S. Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development (AOARD). This includes leading the Australian effort in prestigious projects such as ground testing and simulations in support of the Boundary Layer Transition/Turbulence (BOLT II) flight test sponsored by the AFOSR.

His research interests include:

• Supersonic combustion of hydrocarbon fuels
• Hypersonic aerothermodynamics
• Optical diagnostics: PLIF for supersonic combustion, FLDI for hypersonic aerothermodynamics, high-speed schlieren
• Micro-combustion driven power systems
• Solar thermal and solar photovoltaic technology development