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Before joining the University of Queensland, Dave P. Callaghan held positions within industry including Parsons Brinckerhoff and Lawson and Treloar and research sector including Nederlands Instituut voor Ecologie and the University of Queensland. He is an observer of the Queensland Water Panel and active in the newly created Australian Hydraulic Modelling Association. He is the author of a book section and more than 50 other technical documents with applied and research applications. He is a consultant to private and government organisations. He has worked recently with private and government organisations to improve understanding of extreme coastal weather responses. He is recognised for leading edge research in coastal engineering including statistics of extremes, beach erosion from extreme events, physical and biological interactions of salt marshes and coral reefs, lagoon dynamics and wave propagation.

Learning a foreign language is hard. Studying overseas in a foreign language is even harder!

Universities in Australia have up to 40% international students, that's 400,000+ students and makes up a significant portion of the Australian economy. These students face immense struggles adapting to Australian culture, language and education style. Without help, these students get lost in the complexities of higher-education and cannot successfully graduate.

Shaun's work involves developing innovative solutions with partner universities across the greater Asian regions though contextualised development programs, workshops that highlight modern teaching, and assisting students in acclimatising to their study-life in Australia. Shaun works heavily with China, India, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Maureen Hassall is Professor and Director of the Sustainable Minerals Institute's Industrial Safety and Health Centre at the University of Queensland. Her expertises crosses the fields of industrial risk management, safety engineering and human factors. Maureen works collaboratively with industry professionals to develop better human-centred risk management and safety engineering approaches that improve companies’ operational performance and competitiveness. Maureen also develops and delivers process safety, systems safety engineering, risk management and human factors training, education and expert advice to students and to industry. Her industry-focused research is motivated by 18 years of industry experience working in a number of different countries and in a variety of roles including specialist engineering, line management, organisational change and business performance improvement roles.

Biography

Dr Juan P. Hidalgo is a Senior Adjunct Fellow within the School of Civil Engineering (honorary position) and is currently a Fire Safety Engineer at Airbus Operations GmbH.

Juan joined The University of Queensland in 2016 as the first of the three academic appointments in the Centre for Future Timber Structures to lead the research and teaching on the fire safety of engineered timber structures. His background is in fire safety engineering, building systems and timber construction. His research to date has primarily focused on the performance of building materials for sustainable and durable construction exposed to fire conditions. Juan's field of expertise comprises material thermal degradation and flammability, heat transfer, and fire dynamics, highlighting his vast experience in multi-scale fire testing. Juan is actively involved in multiple research projects focused on sustainable construction, such as timber, insulation materials, or composites, and studying the fire dynamics in modern buildings. At present, Juan contributes to supervision and research collaborations on fire safety for the built environment with the Fire Safety Engineering Research Group at UQ.

Juan completed his BEng-MEng in Industrial Engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain), a five-year degree equivalent to Mechanical/Civil Engineering in the UK with a final year specialisation with a particular focus on structural engineering. He also attained an MSc in Industrial Construction and Installations at the same University. During his MSc, Juan joined PBD Fire Consultants S.L., a Spanish company specialising in fire safety design for the built environment. He worked for this company for two years as a consulting fire engineer in multiple national and international projects. Following the completion of his MSc in 2011, Juan joined the University of Edinburgh (UK) to pursue his PhD in Fire Safety Engineering sponsored by Rockwool International A/S, which was completed in 2015 with the thesis entitled “Performance-Based Methodology for the Fire Safe Design of Insulation Materials in Energy Efficient Buildings”. He continued his academic career at the University of Edinburgh as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering, being involved in numerous research projects such as the FireComp project, and other projects focused on the fire performance of facades, timber construction, concrete and diverse construction systems.

Previous involvement in Teaching and Learning

During his appointment as academic staff at UQ, Dr Juan P. Hidalgo contributed to the teaching of Civil Engineering Bachelor and Masters programmes, including the BE-ME in Civil and Fire Safety Engineering (EA-accredited) and the MEngSc in Fire Safety Engineering. He was involved in the following courses:

• Introduction to Fire Safety Engineering (FIRE3700).
• Fire Engineering Design: Solutions for Implicit Safety (FIRE4610).
• Fire Dynamics (FIRE7620).
• Fire Dynamics Laboratory (FIRE7640).
• Structural Fire Engineering (FIRE7660).
• Fire Engineering Design: Explicit Quantification of Safety (FIRE7680).
• Research Thesis (FIRE7500).
• Design of Timber Structures (CIVL4334).

Since returning to academia from industry in 1998, Professor Lydia Kavanagh has become a leader in engineering education and has used her background as a professional engineer to design both curricula and courses for active learning by combining real-world projects and specialist knowledge. She has had a significant impact on the delivery of UQ’s undergraduate engineering program through creative new teaching pedagogies including the Flipped Classroom, innovative authentic approaches to assessment, and the introduction of multi-disciplinary courses. As Director of First Year Engineering for almost a decade, Lydia was responsible for a significant program of extra-curricular transition support for first year students and she co-coordinated two compulsory courses that delivered what could arguably be the world's largest flipped classroom for 600 students. Recently, she has set up a Leadership and Mentoring Program for all EAIT faculty students (undergraduate and postgraduates), and continued this into a Leaders@EAIT, an ongoing academy for these students to continue to develop leadership competencies.

Lydia is now the Deputy Associate Dean Academic (Curriculum Review and Teaching Innovation) for the Faculty of Science where she has overseen a faculty-wide overview of curriculum resulting in streamlined undergraduate and postgraduate offerings. She holds a concurrent fractional position with the Institute of Teaching and Learning Innovations, where she has developed frameworks and systems for UQ shorter form credentials.

Lydia is also heavily involved institutionally with training and mentoring academics and professional staff with teaching responsibilities through the development and implementation of the Graduate Teaching Assistant program (for PhD scholars and postdocs), Teaching@UQ (for staff new to teaching), and TeachingPlus@UQ (for emerging leaders in Teaching and Learning).

Lydia’s work was recognised with a Principal Fellowship of the HEA, an ALTC Excellence in teaching award in 2011 and she has lead and participated in Carrick/ ALTC/ OLT projects on teamwork, online learning, curriculum innovation (2x), preparing students for first year engineering, and Flipped Classrooms.

David Lange joined the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland in early 2018 as a lecturer in Structural Fire Engineering. His background is in Structural Fire Safety Engineering, including risk and performance based design methodoloiges and structural mechanics under high temperature. He has several years of experience working in the research and education sector in Europe, where he has participated in a wide range of projects including coordination of a Horizon 2020 research and innovation action and as principal or co-investigator in a variety of nationally and internationally funded projects in the field of fire safety engineering.

His research interests follow two main tracks: structural fire engineering and infrastructure resilience. In the field of fire safety, his work includes: the study of steel, concrete and composite structures exposed to fire; the response of modern engineeried timber structures to fire; studies of the fire performance of novel materials including load bearing glass and composite structures; travelling fires; uncertainty quantification and probabilsitic design. In the field of critical infrastructure resileince, he has studied the enrichment of risk management methodologies with the resiults of resilience assessment studies and the operationalisation of resilience to various infrastructure sectors and communities which may be exposed to natural disasters.

I study design as a collaborative process that materialises alternative social futures. Those futures are sometimes new products, systems, services, infrastructures and technologies. But they can also be social contracts, agreements, processes, ways of working and new possibilities for our collective lives together.

I currently lead research projects in three broad domains: designing advocacy, designing the materials of participation, and augmenting skill and expertise through design.

The designing advocacy project has worked with a range of stakeholders with reduced agency such as people with mental health needs, chronic illnesses, injured workers, and other stigmatised or at-risk groups. We have developed methods for the inclusion of their perspectives in design processes, insights about their specific conditions and needs, critical analyses of how they are conceptualised from the perspectives of technologists and service providers, and design proposals for services and technologies that amplify their agency.

The designing the materials of participation project develops formats and processes for participatory design—the inclusion of stakeholders in the design of systems that will affect the organisation of their work and life. In this project we study how technologies and systems are used in microanalytic detail, analysing how tools and materials shape people's interactions. We use this understanding as a basis for the design of new methods and processes (and sometimes new matierals) for involving people in the design process, and giving them greater autonomy over the systems they will use.

The augmenting skill and expertise through design project studies specialist work practices for the purposes of developing technology support for that work. We have worked with aeromedical teams, audiologists, passport officers, emergency first responders, quick service chefs, primary school teachers, and other professional contexts of use to understand the local and particular skills that enable those workplaces to function effectively and collaboratively. We use these understandings to inform the deisgn of technologies and work practices that support, and preserve, those core professional skills.

The constants across these projects relate to the design process—the methods used to understand people, identify design opportunities, facilitate collaboration between project stakeholders, champion users' contexts and requirements, prototype early solutions, evaluate concepts in the field, and build new technologies. This results in a variety of research contributions: new design methods and perspectives that have been tailored for specific contexts of use, identification of the potentials and limitations of different approaches to design and analysis, the discovery of context-specific issues for the design of new systems, new understandings of people, their work and contexts of use, and the design and evaluation of bespoke technologies.

Alice is a multidisciplinary Research Fellow in Professor Catherine Lovelock's Lab who models flows through wetland areas to identify opportunities to improve hydrological connectivity of sites including mangroves, saltmarsh and seagrass by restoring tidal flows. Her research interests include identifying and predicting hydrological restoration opportunities for coastal ecosystems and utilising coastal and marine ecosystems as nature-based solutions for coastal protection.

She completed her PhD (2021) in Environmental Engineering at the University of Queensland, combining the fields of Marine Ecology and Coastal Engineering. Her PhD investigated how interactions between and variability within physical conditions and seagrass characteristics affect each of the three mechanisms; 1) wave attenuation, 2) sediment stabilisation, and 3) sediment accretion, and highlight the implications for coastal protection by seagrass.

Prior to academia, Alice worked as a consultant drainage and coastal engineer for small and large-scale infrastructure projects. Alice is an Engineers Australia Chartered Environmental Engineer and Civil Engineer and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Alice is currently the Chair of the Early- to Mid-Career Research Committee for the Centre for Marine Science.

Dr T. Thang Vo-Doan is a Lecturer of the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering at the University of Queensland. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Biology I, University of Freiburg, Germany (2019-2023). He was also a Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore (2016-2018). He was awarded his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, NTU in 2016. He received his M.Eng. degree in Manufacturing Engineering and B.Eng. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, Vietnam in 2010 and 2008 respectively. He was awarded the prestigious Human Frontier Science Program Cross-disciplinary Fellowship (2019-2022).

He directs the UQ Biorobotics lab after joining in the University of Queensland. Current research activities of the lab focus on insect-machine hybrid robots, bio-inspired robotics, insect structures and functions, biomechanics, fast lock-on tracking, and brain imaging in untethered insects.

I have a multidisciplinary background in chemical and civil engineering, chemistry and materials science. Currently, I am the UQ leader of the National Centre for Timber Durability and Design Life, based at USC. I apply my expertise to understand the effects of fungal decay and moisture intrusion in timber connections, as well as the improvement of the fire performance of timber. I supervise 6 PhD students.