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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. Manu P. Sobti is a landscape historian and urban interlocutor of the Global South with research specialisations in South Asia, South East Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Within the gamut of the Global, the Islamic, and the Non-Western, his continuing work examines borderland transgressions and their intertwinement with human mobilities, indigeneities, and the narratives of passage across these liminal sites. From his perspective, ‘land-centered’ and ‘deep’ place histories replete with human actors serve as critical and de-colonizing processes that negate the top-down master-narratives wherein borders and boundaries simplistically delineate nation states and their scalar range of internal geographies. He was previously Associate Professor at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee USA (2006-16). He has a B.Dipl.Arch. from the School of Architecture-CEPT (Ahmedabad - INDIA), an SMarchS. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge - USA), and a Ph.D. from the College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta - USA).

As a recognized scholar and innovative educator, Sobti served as Director of SARUP-UWM’s India Winterim Program (2008-15). This foreign study program worked intensively with local architecture schools in Ahmedabad, Delhi and Chandigarh, allowing students and faculty to interact actively, often within the gamut of the same project. He also set up a similar, research-focused program in Uzbekistan, engaging advanced undergraduate and graduate students to undertake field research at sites, archives and cultural landscapes. In partnership with the Art History Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and SARUP colleagues, Sobti also co-coordinated the Building-Landscapes-Cultures (BLC) Concentration of SARUP-UWM’s Doctoral Program (2011-13), creating opportunities for student research in diverse areas of architectural and urban history and in multiple global settings. He served as the Chair of SARUP's PhD Committee between 2014-16, leading an area of BLC's research consortium titled Urban Histories and Contested Geographies.

Sobti's research has been supported by multiple funding bodies, including the Graham Foundation of the Arts (USA), the Architectural Association (UK), the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (USA), the French Institute of Central Asian Studies (UZBEKISTAN), the US Department of State Fulbright Foundation (USA), the Aga Khan Foundation (SWITZERLAND), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (USA), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), the Centre for 21st Century Studies University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (USA), the Institute for Research in the Humanities University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), Stanford University (USA), in addition to city governments in New Delhi/Chandigarh/Ahmedabad (INDIA), Samarqand/Bukhara (UZBEKISTAN), Erzurum (TURKEY) and New Orleans (USA). He has also served as a United States Department of State Fulbright Senior Specialist Scholar and received 7 Research Fellowships at important institutions worldwide. He is a nominated Expert Member of the ICOMOS-ICIP (Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites) International Committee, responsible for debate and stewardship on contentious cultural heritage issues globally.