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A/Prof Stephen Bell is a senior social scientist, advisor and international development research consultant with 23 years’ experience tackling global health challenges in settings across South-East Asia, Africa, Western Pacific and Europe. He works respectfully with not-for-profits, public institutions, businesses and community organisations, using innovative, inclusive, people-centred approaches to identify sustainable solutions to critical health challenges and accelerate health equity.

As Principal Research Fellow and ‘Theme Lead - Social Science and Global Health’ at the Burnet Institute, Steve’s role includes:

• Research on young people's sexual, reproductive and maternal health, including adolescent-responsive health services and systems, contraceptive innovation, safe abortion, enabling socio-structural environments, and the intersections of health and climate change;
• Providing methodological expertise, technical support and mentoring in social science, co-design and community-based, community-led research practice across the Institute’s global health programs and business development across working groups and programs;
• Supporting a growing regional network of youth research, advocacy and thought leadership hubs across Asia and the Pacific;
• Managing and delivering consultancy, advisory and research work for institutional partners.

Steve’s work brings together lived experience, socio-ecological systems thinking and social theory to understand what works (or not) in global health and social development. He has researched and published widely on HIV, sexual and reproductive health, maternal health, neglected tropical diseases, TB and Indigenous health. He is particularly interested in understanding the socio-structural determinants of health and social inequities, and injustices associated with marginalisation due to gender, sexuality, age and geography. He has published two edited collections on interpretive and community-led approaches in research, design, monitoring and evaluation: ‘Peer research in health and social development: international perspectives on participatory research’ (2021), and ‘Monitoring and evaluation in health and social development: interpretive and ethnographic perspectives’ (2016). With international colleagues, he is working on a third edited collection called, ‘Lived Experience: Critical Perspectives in a Changing World’. Steve is currently taking on new PhD students who are interested in undertaking research in any of these areas, so please do reach out to him for a chat!

Steve is Commissioner on The Lancet Global Health Commission on People-Centered Care for Universal Health Coverage, Technical Consultant (Strategy and Insights) with PSI, and Member of the International Editorial Board at Culture, Health & Sexuality. Steve has served as a Senior Advisor to the Boston Consulting Group, and has worked in senior research and consultancy roles with international governments, NGOs, UNAIDS, UNFPA and WHO.

Paul is Professor of Digital Sociology and Social Policy. He is a Chief Investigator of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society (ADM+S), and Lead of the Social Services Focus Area in the Centre. Having degrees in sociology/social policy and computer science, and having worked in the public service, Paul has a unique insight into the intersection of digital technologies and their social implications.

For over 20 years, Paul's research has focused in the development, design, deployment and evaluation of digital technology, automated decision making and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in government and social services. Taking a multi-disciplinaray perspective, he explores the implications of automation and AI on policy, service delivery, service users and citizenship, governance and practices of power. His work considers the ethical, legal, social and pratical considerations of AI and automation.

Paul's research is regarded as influential in the development of Digital Welfare State and Digital Social Policy literatures. Past publications include Governing Electronically (Palgrave 2010), Performing the State (Routledge 2018), and Adminstering Welfare Reform (Policy, 2006). He is currently finalising Digital Government in an Age of Disruption with Professor John Halligan, which takes an international comparative, institutionalist approach.

His current research focus is on using critical social science to inform the development of practical digital and AI tools to advance pro-social outcomes,

• Data navigation for lawyers. Working with Economic Justice Australia and welfare rights community legal centres, Paul is working with colleagues to co-design and produce a data extraction and navigation tool. This tool will assist lawyers to better provide legal advice and support to clients who are contesting decisions by the Australian government's Services Australia and Centrelink.
• Trauma Informed Algorithmic Assessment Toolkit. Working with human service delivery agenies, this project is piloting a practical, online Toolkit to enable organisations to design and deploy AI and algorithmic enable services that is safe, responsible and avoids causing harm.

Gerhard has a BA in Social Anthropology and Politics/International Relations and an MA in Social Anthropology from the University of Kent at Canterbury and was awarded a PhD in anthropology and sociology from La Trobe University. From 2014-2017 he was an Australian Research Council DECRA research fellow. In 2023-2024 he is the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia 2024 spending time at the National University of Singapore and the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University.

He conducts research in development studies, on refugee and immigration policy and spiritual and existential security as well as religion and the state. He is a regular commentator in newspapers, radio and online media on topics of his research.

His first book entitled Modern Muslim Identities: Negotiating Religion and Ethnicity in Malaysia is published by NIAS Press. He is co-editor of a volume on human security and Australian foreign policy published by Allen and Unwin/Routledge as well as one on Urban refugees: Challenges in Protection, Services and Policy, published by Routledge.

He is a senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is also course director for World101x: Anthropology of current world issues, UQs fifth edX massive open online course. The course offers 9 weeks of anthropological episodes with an array of additional resources, including a host of interviews with fellow anthropologists. There is also a curated list of interviews with anthropologists and panels on the youtube and facebook channel.

Suri Li is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research, University of Queensland and the Centre of Excellence for Children & Families over the Life Course. Her current work centres on gender inequality and family dynamic across life course and explores the interplay of gender relations in the public and private spheres.

Prior to her current position, she holds a BSc and MSc in Finance, as well as an MA in Public Policy from the University of Edinburgh, the UK and a PhD in Sociology at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Her DPhil Thesis focus on the relationship between household resources and child wellbeing in Ireland, Australia and the UK using longitudinal data from birth cohort studies.

Rebecca Olson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Queensland, cutting-edge translational qualitative researcher, mentor and award-winning educator with expertise in the sociologies of health and emotions. As Director of SocioHealthLab, she leads an interdisciplinary collective of researchers, health professional educators and practitioners interested in doing health and healthcare differently: more socially aware, more relational, more inclusive and more just. As Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Social Science, she prioritises collaborative, reflexive, creative and emotions-centred practices in higher education. With over 75 scholarly publications – as well as news media and creative video productions – Rebecca is a prolific contributor to public debate. With research interests spanning medicinal cannabis and health professions education to climate anxiety, Olson is internationally renowned for bringing sociological insight to complex challenges related to emotions, wellbeing, healthcare and caregiving.

Cameron is an Australian Research Council Industry Fellow in partnership with Micah Projects.

His work examines multiple forms of exclusion and social harms. Cameron's research focuses on the nature and experience of poverty, homelessness, and domestic and family violence. He is interested in understanding what societies do to respond to these problems, and what societies ought to do differently to address them. In collaboration with researchers and partners from not-for-profit organisations, Cameron’s program of research seeks to identify how citizens experiencing exclusion and practitioners working with them can work with governments to bring about systematic societal change.

In his first book, The Homeless Person in Contemporary Society, Cameron sought to highlight how the representation of people who are homeless as distinct informs a policy and practice agenda that he characterised as a poverty of ambition. Cameron's second book with Andrew Clarke and Francisco (Paco) Perales, Charity and Poverty in Advanced Welfare States, takes on the question how can we be just by soothing the consequences of poverty without addressing the causes of poverty.

Cameron's most recent book published by Polity Press, Homelessness, demonstrates that homelessness is a punishing, predictable, yet solvable social problem.https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=9781509554492

Dr Stefanie Plage is a Research Fellow with the Life Course Centre at the School of Social Science at UQ. Her expertise is in qualitative research methods, including longitudinal and visual methods. Her research interests span the sociology of emotions, disadvantage and health and illness. Stefanie has taught introductory and advanced courses in sociology and medical sociology, research design and qualitative inquiry, including the use of software for qualitative research (i.e. NVivo). Her work is multi-disciplinary. She completed her PhD at the Centre for Social Research in Health at The University of New South Wales. In her study she employed a mix of longitudinal qualitative interviews and visual elicitation methods to explore the lived experience of people with cancer. Currently, her research seeks to understand and improve the interactions of families experiencing social disadvantage with the social and health care systems.

I am an urban sociologist and an expert in urban community in all its forms. My research encompasses the outer suburbs in Australia, the gentrifying inner city and informal communities in cities in the Global South. My work focuses on how different urban places and spatial logic in the city impact our opportunities to form attachments to neighbourhoods and each other.

Internationally, I have written extensively on urban poverty in Bangladesh, India and Indonesia and I am currently involved in work on climate change and its effects on the urban poor in collaboration with colleagues in Indonesia, Brazil and Solomon Islands. My latest research concerns the impact of climate change and natural disasters on the urban poor. More than 1 billion people live in informal urban settlements or slums. These people are among the most vulnerable to the impact of climate change. However, adaptation and mitigation policies are being formulated at multiple scales, often without considering the voices of the poor.

I am the Bachelor of Arts Sociology program convenor and an award-winning teacher. I teach courses at all levels in our undergraduate sociology program, including Introduction to Sociology (SOCY1050), An Urban World (SOCY2340) and Advanced Studies in Social Thought: Getting the Big Picture (SOCY3345).

I am also an award-winning photographer (you can see some of my work on my Flickr page.

I am open to proposals from potential Honours and PhD students who share my passion for understanding the social life of cities. Whether you're from Australia, the Global South, or anywhere else in the world, I look forward to the possibility of working together.