Professor Fiona Coyer has extensive experience as a leader in academic and research programs. In August 2012, she established the Intensive Care Nursing Professorial Unit at the Royal Brisbane & Women’s Hospital where she has developed a program of work focused on developing evidence-based approaches to nursing care and management of the skin integrity in the critically ill patient in intensive care.
Dr. Hanh Dao is an early-career nurse academic with over a decade of experience in clinical practice, university teaching, and health research across diverse cultures and contexts. Her research expertise spans outcome measurement, aged care, health promotion, and education. Driven by a strong commitment to improving healthcare services, Dr. Dao is particularly focused on addressing the needs of vulnerable populations, including but not limited to older adults, women, and immigrants.
Lori is an experienced intersive care nurse who has worked in a range of Intensive Care environments, and with an interest in advance mechancial ventilation, ECMO and VAD management. She completed her PhD in 2023, which investigated sleep monitoring techniques and sleep distruabnce among ICU patients, and impact of the clinical environment. Lori is the program lead in nursing at the University of Queensland and has an interest in how emerging technologies can be leveraged in nursing education and clinical simulation to enhance nursing students knowledge and critical thinking skills. Her career has focussed on providing high quality patient care to the critically ill, and undertaking clinical research to optimise patient care and outcomes.
Frederick Graham (BNurs, PhD) is a Clinical Nurse Consultant and a Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for Health Services Research at the University of Queensland. As an academic-nurse, Fred is clinical lead of a hospital-wide Dementia and Delirium Nursing Service at Princess Alexandra Hospital where he has worked as clinical expert in the care of people with dementia and delirium for more than 15 years. As a senior research fellow under the mentorship of Professor Ruth Hubbard, his research focuses on reorganising care environments and building workforce capacity to provide therapeutic care to this vulnerable cohort with a specific focus on accelerating knowledge translation in managing symptoms of agitation through innovative experiential learning, models of care, environmental design, leisure activity, and recognition of pain-related symptomology.
Fred qualified as registered nurse from The Queensland University of Technology and has worked in acute-care wards at Princess Alexandra Hospital. He has clinically led multiple quality initiatives focussed on improving acute-care for patients with cognitive impairment including education and change champion initiatives, models of specialised care, resource development to facilitate person-centred care and development of a chart for evaluating analgesic trials through monitoring pain-related behaviour. These initiatives led Fred to undertake his PhD with Professor Elizabeth Beattie at QUT, titled “Do hospital nurses recognise pain in older agitated patients with cognitive impairment. A descriptive correlational study using virtual simulation.”, which was awarded QUT Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award 2021. He has subsequently published his PhD results in the top gerontological and nursing journals in the world. Fred currently holds a Queensland Health Early Career Nursing Fellowship under the mentorship Professor Amanda Henderson, Nursing practice Development Unit PAH. He also has three Metro South Research Support Grant schemes including the Metro South Health Future Research Leader Fellowship under the mentorship of Professor Ruth Hubbard which will investigate pain-related phenotypes through a longitudinal response to treatment study.
As an emerging research leader and early career researcher, Fred is passionate teacher and encourages nurses to consider higher degree by research pathways in the clinical careers. He is currently supervising two higher research nursing students and a mentoring nurse practitioner student at UQ.
Theresa has over 30 years post-registration nursing experience in clinical practice, management, education, research, and academia across a variety of settings. She completed her doctoral studies in the area of stroke recovery and community reintegration and has presented and published research findings nationally and internationally. Theresa has clinically focused neuroscience-related research interests, which centre on quality patient care, evidence-based practice, reintegration and recovery, and the emerging fields of implementation science and improvement science. Theresa’s research studies encompass qualitative and quantitative paradigms, and mixed methods research. She collaborates with research scientists in nursing, computer-human interaction, biosciences, medicine, and allied health.
Dr Amy Johnston currently holds a conjoint senior research fellow/senior lecturer position between University of QLD and Metro South Hospital & Health Service, Department of Emergency Medicine (based at Princess Alexandra hospital) and senior lectureship in School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work. For the past 4 years she worked across the academic and healthcare environments to conduct her own research as well as supporting clinicians to develop the skills and confidence to participate in, and conduct research projects relevant to their clinical work. Amy is a neurobiologist and nurse with extensive teaching and research experience and a particular interest in Emergency Department service delivery and patient flow. Her wide experience has helped her develop a broadening national and international profile. She has co-authored in excess of 90 (96) publications, 143 abstracts, between awarded approximately $0.8million in grant funding, and supported 3 PhD candidates to completion with another 5 currently working towards their PhD qualifications. Her H-index is 23 (Scopus). Field weighted citation impact 2016-2019 = 1.62 (SciVal March 2020), with 16.7% of publications in the top 10% most cited worldwide, 28.6% of publications in the top 10% of journals and 21.4% demonstrating international collaboration.
Researcher ID B-2931-2010; ORCID 0000-0002-9979-997X
Associate Professor Lauren Kearney is a registered midwife and nurse and is employed as a Conjoint Associate Professor in Midwifery between the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, UQ and the Women's and Newborn Services, Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital. Lauren’s teaching expertise is within the postgraduate and higher degree by research areas. Her research track record is strongly focused upon maternal and child health; specifically, within the domains of evaluation of models of care (relating to the perinatal period and early years), intravenous fluid management and access during labour and birth, facilitators to promote a positive and physiological spontaneous vaginal birth, management of postpartum haemorrhage, and strategies for enabling closeness between mothers and infants in the postpartum period. Lauren has strong industry collaborations. The recipient of several competitive research grants in the maternal and child health area, Lauren is passionate about improving the experience of health care for women and children through translation of high-quality evidence into practice.
Gillian Ray-Barruel, RN PhD, is a Senior Research Fellow with UQ School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work and the Herston Infectious Diseases Institute (HeIDI), and she is Director of Education with the Alliance for Vascular Access Teaching and Research (AVATAR).
Following a successful and rewarding 15 year career as a critical care nurse in Brisbane and New York, Gillian engaged her passion for English literature and completed a doctorate in the field of literary disability studies. Her internationally respected research focuses on improving assessment and decision-making by bedside clinicians to prevent indwelling device-related patient complications and improve healthcare outcomes. Gillian has expertise in qualitative research, critical care nursing, patient assessment, professional editing, and project management. After identifying a gap between evidence-based guidelines and clinical practice, she created the I-DECIDED® device assessment and decision tool, which is now used in many hospitals worldwide. When she’s not writing and presenting, Gillian enjoys reading literary and classic literature, creative writing, and spending time at the beach with her family and Golden Retriever.
Jessica is a paediatric critical care nurse and researcher with more than 15 years of clinical experience and expertise. Her research themes to date have focused on ventilation strategies to reduce ventilator associated pneumonia and interventions to improve the safety and quality of care related to invasive medical devices. Jessica's developing research themes focus on enhancing health service surveillance using electronic health information in two major spheres: hospital-level surveillance for hospital-acquired complications and unit level surveillance for vascular access device complications and ventilator associated events. She is particularly interested in advances in infectious disease surveillance and tracking, using a combination of mature platforms and new electronic platforms. Jessica has experience leading international consensus studies using Delphi methods and is interested in clinical trials which embed hybrid strategies to enable the rapid and sustainable translation of research findings upon study completion. Jessica is passionate about growing clinician researchers and nurses’ capacity to lead and undertake research which contributes to practice change and better outcomes in our vulnerable patient groups including paediatrics and minority groups.
Children deserve the best of our healthcare. As Professor and Chair in Paediatric Nursing, conjoint between the University of Queensland (UQ) and Children’s Health Queensland, Amanda is working to optimise health service delivery for children in hospital, so they are able to receive the treatment they need, without complications. She also aims to improve the capacity, capability and excellence of consumer-focussed, powerful research across paediatric healthcare.
At UQ, Amanda leads the Paediatric Nursing and Patient Safety research group, which is based across the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work and the Children's Health Research Centre.
Amanda is also co-Chair of the Children's Inpatient Research Colloraborative of Australia and New Zealand (CIRCAN), which facilitates hospital-based paediatric research studies across metropolitan, regional and rural hospitals in Australasia. She is also Director of Child UnLimited, an Australian network of researchers, clinicians, advocates and families with a shared vision: to improve the clinical care and quality of life of children, adolescents and young adults living with a chronic illness or disability.
As a nursing informatics researcher, I believe in the power of digital health to improve the experiences of patients and clinicians, reduce healthcare expenditure, and improve population health. My research program focuses on safe, effective, and equitable digital transformation of the Queensland Health system. My previous experiences as a cardiac Clinical Nurse Specialist within the acute healthcare system and government official at the Australian Digital Health Agency, uniquely position me as a strong leader in my field, drawing on industry and government experiences to drive my translational research program. As a Fellow of the AIDH and emerging leader in the Australian digital health community and am often invited to present on digital health, clinician-led innovation and health services research. My work has been recognised by multiple awards; The University of Queensland's Promoting Women Fellowship; the Joan Edgecumbe Scholarship, the Health Informatics Society of Australia’s emerging health informatics leader award; Health Informatics Society of Australia Branko Cesnik Best Student Academic Paper award; the Moya Conrick prize for best submitted paper and presentation at the Nursing Informatics Australia Conference; and the Vice-Chancellors Leadership Award at the University of Tasmania. I remain passionate about clinician-led healthcare improvement and the advancement of nurses to lead change in research institutions, government and health services. I currently supervise PhD and Honours students, and conduct peer-previews for various academic journals that cross the domains of digital health and health services research.
