Professor Abernethy is a first class Honours graduate and university medallist from the University of Queensland, a PhD graduate from the University of Otago, an International Fellow of the American Academy of Kinesiology and Physical Education, a Fellow of the Australian Sports Medicine Federation and a Fellow of Exercise and Sport Science Australia. He was the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences from 2014-2023 and is now Executive Director of UQ's Engagement with the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Professor Abernethy is a previous Deputy Executive Dean and Associate Dean (Research) within the Faculty of Health Sciences (2011 - 2013), Head of the School of Human Movement Studies (from 1991-2003) and from 2004 to mid-2011 was the Director and inaugural Chair Professor of the Institute of Human Performance at the University of Hong Kong.
His research interest is in the control and acquisition of skilled movement, with a particular focus upon understanding the processes underpinning the expert perception and production of patterns of human movement. The work is interdisciplinary and spans human movement and sport science, experimental psychology, neuroscience and medical and health sciences. Prof. Abernethy's research work has been supported by a range of agencies including those funding basic science, such as the Australian Research Council and the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, as well as those supporting more applied research, such as the Australian Sports Commission, the Australian Football League, the Australian Cricket Board, Worksafe Australia and the Motor Accident Insurance Commission.
Prof. Arnold studied at Macquarie University before taking up research positions at the University of Sydney and University College London. He took up a continuing position at the University of Queensland in April, 2006.
Stefanie was awarded a PhD in Cognitive Psychology / Experimental Psychology in 2007, from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and was subsequently awarded two awards for it (amongst them the National German Dissertation Award). She then took up a 1-year post-doc position with Prof Roger Remington at UQ. Subsequently, her work was supported by various fellowships from UQ and the ARC, allowing Stefanie to focus mainly on research from 2009 - 2018. Afterwards she was employed on a Teaching and Research position at UQ, where she is currently employed as an Associate Professor.
Research in the Bredy laboratory is aimed at elucidating how the genome is connected to the environment through epigenetic modifications, and how this relationship shapes brain and behaviour throughout life. The group is particularly interested in how epigenetic mechanisms, including DNA methylation, histone modifications. the activity of non-coding RNAs, and RNA modification regulate the formation and maintenance of associative fear-related memory.
Justin joined UQ Business School in 2020, after teaching at the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada. His teaching is focused on Organisational Behaviour, Manager Skiils and Communication, and Wise Leadership. Justin earned his Honors Bachelor of Science with a double degree in Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence and Psychology at the University of Toronto, and his Masters and PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Waterloo.
Justin's principle research interest is in understanding how people reason through complex social problems, with interest in reducing bias and developing and practicing wisdom and balance. Justin's work has been published in prestigious scientific journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Journal of Intelligence, Nature Communications, Social and Personality Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, as well as the latest edition of the renown Cambridge Handbook of Wisdom. These studies have examined wisdom at interpersonal, group, organizational, and societal levels, in topics such as cooperation, social economic status, teamwork, intergroup bias, and leadership. Ongoing projects include studies on the dynamics of wise leadership, training for wisdom (Business and Army Leadership), media attention and science denialism, prejudice in artificial intelligence, self-sabotage, and gender pay-gap denialism.
Justin has presented his research at international conferences such as the Academy of Management, International Association of Conflict Management, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and was presented with the Kellogg School of Management's Dispute Resolution Center Scholar Award. Justin serves as peer reviewer for journals such as Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Social Psychological and Personality Science, Journal of Intelligence, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology and Journal of Cognitive Development. Justin's work has been featured in popular media outlets such as TIME, NewsWeek, and Sciencemag.com, and one of his articles is in the top 10 most upvoted social psychology papers on Reddit.
***Applications for HDR/PhD student supervision are welcome***
Courses taught:
MGTS1601: Organisational Behaviour
MGTS2606: Manager Skills/Contemporary Business Communication and Organisation
Dr. Brownsett is a Speech Pathologist and neuroscientist. Trained initially in the UK as a Speech and Language Therapist, she advanced her expertise with a PhD in Clinical Neuroscience from Imperial College, London. Her doctoral research, employing functional brain imaging (fMRI), provided critical insights into the interaction between domain-general and language-specific brain networks, particularly in healthy older adults and individuals recovering from post-stroke aphasia. At the Queensland Aphasia Research Centre, she leads the ‘Imaging Predictors’ and ‘Aphasia TechHub’ groups, pushing the boundaries of research on neural markers and the use of technology in communication.
Dr. Brownsett's research interests are broad and impactful. She investigates the progression and extent of language difficulties in patients with brain injuries beyond stroke, including those with epilepsy and brain cancer. She explores the interplay between general cognitive brain networks and task-specific networks, seeking to understand and enhance recovery mechanisms. Her work also focuses on identifying neurobiological predictors of aphasia recovery, the effects of premorbid brain health on post-stroke language recovery, and the reorganization of language networks following neurosurgery.
Pioneering the integration of technology into therapy, Dr. Brownsett co-developed an innovative therapy application as part of the Listen-In trial, utilizing gamification to enhance engagement in high-dose aphasia therapy. She now leads the Aphasia Tech Hub, which supports individuals with aphasia to use and access technology. Her team, including those with lived experience of aphasia, adapts and creates communication-accessible guidance for using technology and provides tailored consultations to improve technology access.
Dr. Brownsett's dedication to involving people with aphasia in her research has earned her numerous accolades, including the National Health and Medical Research Council Consumer Engagement Award and the UK Stroke Forum Conference's Patient, Carer, and Public Involvement Winner award. She is a key member of the Living Stroke Guidelines initiative, ensuring clinical management of stroke is informed by the latest evidence. Through her innovative research and commitment to inclusive practices, Dr. Brownsett continues to contriute to advancing the field of aphasia recovery and neuroscience.
Jenny Burt completed her PhD in associative learning in animals in 1982 at the Univeristy of NSW and was a lecturer in psychology at UQ until 2017. Her research interests are in cognitive psychology, primarily visual word identification and spelling, as well as memory and attention, especially as they relate to word processing.
Dr Carys Chainey is a postdoctoral research fellow in parenting and family science with The University of Queensland Parenting and Support Centre and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Children and Families Across the Life Course (Life Course Centre). She holds the Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Parenting and Family Science from the Growing Minds Australia Clinical Trials Network (GMA; www.growingmindsaustralia.org), and is Social Engagement Strategist for the GMA Early and Mid-Career Researcher Network. Dr Chainey is the clinical trials manager for Family Life Skills Triple P, and operations manager for the Parenting and Family Research Alliance (PAFRA; www.pafra.org).
Dr Chainey's research investigates the links between adverse childhood experiences, parenting, and wellbeing, across the life course and across generations; and applying human centred design to improving the usability of evidence-based parenting programs. She has expertise in the design, implementation, and analysis of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research.
Her current research projects include analyses of large survey datasets (e.g. the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, National Health Survey) and novel survey datasets to explore how intergenerational adversity and parenting influence the wellbeing of children, adolescents and emerging adults. She is leading initiatives to support the next generation of parenting and family researchers, and is contributing to the "Every Family 2" Triple P population trial of Triple P. Dr Chainey is an accredited facilitator of the Triple P Positive Parenting Program and has contributed to a range of evaluations for the government including the development of the evaluation framework for the Queensland Government "Not Now, Not Ever" Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Strategy.
Professor David Copland is a Speech Pathologist conducting research in the areas of aphasia, language neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and neuroimaging of normal and disordered language. He is Director of the Queensland Aphasia Research Centre (https://shrs.uq.edu.au/qarc), Co-Director of the STARS Education Research Alliance (https://metronorth.health.qld.gov.au/stars/education-research-alliance), Co-Director of the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Aphasia Rehabilitation and Recovery (https://www.latrobe.edu.au/research/centres/health/aphasia) and Deputy Chair of the Research and Postgraduate Studies Committee of the UQ School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences.
My research focuses on Action and Attention in the human brain, examining neural activity underlying the preparation for voluntary movement and the recognition of others' actions
I am a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the School of Psychology, University of Queensland. My major research interests include understanding the brain processes involved in attention and the preparation and readiness for voluntary action, the "mirror neuron" system and how we perceive and understand the actions of others.
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology
Availability:
Available for supervision
Media expert
Please note: I am NOT taking any new Ph.D. students!
I am an Honorary Research Fellow at the UQ's School of ITEE, primarily focusing on Mixed Reality, Empathic Computing, and Human-Computer Interaction. Please visit my personal website for more details about me and my work.
I am a proponent of "for good" research with these technologies and aim to create a positive societal impact with my research. I believe in designing solutions for users and accordingly putting users ahead of the technology. Most of my work involves user research and statistics.
Before joining the University of Queensland in August 2018, I was a Research Fellow at the Empathic Computing Laboratory (UniSA) working with one of the world leaders of Augmented Reality Prof. Mark Billinghurst between 2015 and 2018. Earlier, I held postdoctoral positions at the University of Tasmania, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (USA), and James Cook University. Earlier I completed my Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Christian Sandor and Prof. Bruce Thomas at the University of South Australia with a thesis titled Perceptual characteristics of visualizations for occluded objects in handheld augmented reality. During this time I did a research internship at the TU Munich under the supervision of Prof. Gudrun Klinker. I regularly serve as an organizer and a peer-reviewer of multiple international conferences and journals related to my research interests.
Originally, I was born in Kolkata, India (and lived there for 25 years) and now live in Brisbane, Australia with my wife and daughter! When not working, I enjoy spending time with my family and playing Cricket in the summer.
Associate Professor Nadeeka Dissanayaka is a NHMRC Boosting Dementia Research Leadership Fellow. She is founder and director of the Dementia & Neuro Mental Health Research Unit at the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research. She is an honorary research fellow at Department of Neurology, Royal Brisbane & Women’s Hospital. Her expertise include multidisciplinary areas ranging from basic science (eg: pharmacology, genetics, cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging) to clinical science and medicine (eg: psychology, psychiatry, neurology, clinical trials and implementation science).
Ageing, Mental Health, and Neurodegenerative diseases such as Dementia and Parkinson's disease are key areas of A/Prof. Dissanayaka's research. Her primary research themes include:
1. Evaluation and Treatment of Behavioural and Psychological Symptoms in Dementia (BPSD), with a special focus on anxiety and depression.
2. Development of a Mental Health Benchmarking Industry Specific Tool for Residential Aged Care (MHICare Project)
3. Pychotherapeutic Interventions including artificial intelligence, virtual reality and telehealth guided by biofeedback systems for persons with cognitive impairment and Parkinson's disease
4. Neuropsychiatric Manifestations in Parkinson's disease including anxiety, depression, cognitive dysfunction, sleep and impulse control disorders.
5. Neurobiological Underpinnings of Cognitive and Emotional Impairment in Dementia and Parkinson's disease (neuroimaging studies) and drug repurposing.
Dr Stephane Dufau is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Cognitive neuroscience within the Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland. Stephane is a Senior Research Fellow at Mater Research (Mater Epilepsy Unit Research group). He worked as a Research Engineer at CNRS, France (currently on unpaid leave).
Prof Paul E. Dux is a psychologist and neuroscientist who received his PhD from Macquarie University and then undertook a postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University. He has been faculty in the School of Psychology at The University of Queensland since 2009. Dux leads a group that uses cutting edge techniques to study the cognitive and neural underpinnings of human information-processing capacity limitations in health and disease. Specific interests are the mechanisms of attention and executive function and the efficacy of cognitive training and brain stimulation and how they change the brain to improve performance. Dux has published widely, received several research awards and attracted funding from both the ARC and NHMRC.
Dr Edwards is an Associate Professor in the School of Education where she is currently the Director of Research Innovation and Higher Degree Research. Her research spans education, psychology and medical education and her collaborators are national and international experts in these disciplines. Dr Edwards has an international reputation for contributing to understanding the link between anxiety, attention, and memory. Her work supports the notion that an inability to efficiently process information and maintain concentration, plays a critical role in the development and maintenance of emotional disorders.
Dr Edwards' latest work focusses on the translation of theory-driven, basic science into treatments for clinical problems, specifically for children and adolescents. For example, her research laboratory is currently conducting a series of studies investigating whether training the cognitive processes most vulnerable to anxiety and depression can in turn reduce emotional symptoms in children and adolescents. This work also seeks to understand the influence of cognitive training on academic achievement.
Dr Edwards completed a PhD and an honours degree in psychology (Bond University), and an undergraduate degree in education (Griffith University). For over two decades, she has worked as a primary classroom teacher, special education teacher, guidance counsellor, and psychologist. She has taught and supervised clinical, professional and research skills in education, psychology and medicine and worked in higher education in the United Kingdom and Australia. Dr Edwards joined The University of Queensland in 2020 to teach into the Master of Educational Studies (Guidance, Counselling and Careers).
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.
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.
Julie is a Professor in the School of Psychology at The University of Queensland, and is also an Affiliate Professor at The Queensland Brain Institute as well as The Mater Research Institute. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and of the Association for Psychological Science.
Julie leads a group that particularly focuses on how social cognition and prospection are disrupted by normal adult ageing and clinical illness. Social cognition refers to how we perceive, process, and interpret social cues in our environment. Good social cognitive skills are therefore key to mental health and wellbeing because they provide the foundation on which strong social relationships are built. Prospective memory plays a different but equally important role in our everyday lives, critical if we are to appropriately anticipate, plan and/or act with the future in mind.
Julie has published more than 250 peer‑reviewed papers which appear in prestigious outlets that include Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Annual Review of Psychology, Cognition, Psychological Bulletin, Cortex, Human Brain Mapping, Developmental Science, Psychology and Aging, Emotion, Brain, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, and Nature Reviews Neurology. Her work has been cited ~ 20,000 times in Scopus and > 36,000 in Google Scholar. In 2021 and 2022, The Australian identified 40 Lifetime Achievers who are “Superstars of Research”. These are “chosen for the consistent excellence of their work and the impact they had in their fields.” In both years Julie was identified as a Lifetime Achiever and one of the top five researchers in Social Science across all of Australia. Julie has also appeared on Stanford University’s list of the top 2% of science researchers in the world every year since the list was first published in 2019.
Julie has also received continuous prestigious and highly competitive research funding. This includes two ARC Fellowships and eight ARC Discovery Projects, seven of which she has led as first-named CI. Between 2011 and 2017, Julie was Editor in Chief of the British Journal of Clinical Psychology, and she is currently an Associate Editor for Psychology and Aging and sits on a number of Editorial Boards, including Journal of Aging & Social Policy. Julie has been the recipient of many prestigious awards. This includes the Research Higher Degree Supervision Award (2016) and the Research Mentorship Award (2022) from the Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences, competitive across the Faculty’s six schools and three research centres. In 2023, Julie was also the sole recipient of The UQ Award for Excellence in Graduate Research Training - Supervision, competitive across all UQ, for “outstanding and exemplary supervisory practice”.
Julie is Director of The Queensland Multidisciplinary Initiative for Neurocognitive Difficulties (The QLD MIND Project) and President of The Australasian Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
