Dr. Buning is a Senior Lecturer within the tourism discipline in the UQ Business School and the research lead for the UQ Micromobility Research Cluster. His research interests reside at the intersection of physical activity, travel, and events. Within this area, his research agenda is focused on how tourists are physically active as both a driver of tourism behaviour (i.e., active lifestyle sports) and during visitation (i.e., active transport). His research works on active lifestyle sports closely mirrors his passions in active sport tourism for mountain biking, cycling, running, rock climbing, hiking, and more. His work crosses over to active transport through bikeshare, eScooters, and more generally micromobility where he is focused on tourism usage and related impacts.
The outcome of his work enables communities, events, and organizations to efficiently market to and attract visitors, encourage physical activity generally, and improve the related impact to destinations as a form of sustainable tourism. Prior to academia, Dr. Buning worked in the running event industry managing race logistics and continues to work with physical activity focused organizations, events, and communities as a consultant in developing data driven business strategy. Although he is an expert in survey research design and analysis, his research methodology speciality is in mixed methods (i.e., combining data sources and types) tailored to the research question at hand. He is regularly featured in the media and publishes on the topics of active transport, sport tourism, and event management.
Interested in working on research, teaching, or consulting projects? Please get in touch!
Sara Dolnicar was born in Ljubljana (Slovenia), grew up in Vienna (Austria) and now lives and works in Brisbane (Australia). She holds university degrees in psychology and business administration.
Sara is an expert on Airbnb and Airbnb regulation, making hotels operate in more environmentallyb sustainable ways while reducing operating cost, public acceptance of recycled waster and social marketing more generally.
To date, Sara has (co-)authored more than 300 refereed papers and led 16 Australian Research Council (ARC) grants, including the prestigous QEII and Laureate Fellowships. She won more than 30 awards, including two lifetime achievement awards: The US-based Travel and Tourism Research Association (TTRA) Distinguished Researcher Award (2017) for ground-breaking research that positively impacts the tourism industry, and outstanding service to the tourism research community (in the association’s 48-year history this award has been given to only four people); and the Slovenian Ambassador of Science 2016, the highest honour the Republic of Slovenia bestows on expatriate Slovenian researchers in recognition of global excellence, impact, and knowledge transfer.
Judith is an expert on events and tourism impacts and legacy. Judith’s work aims to understand and enhance the positive impacts of tourism and events on the communities and societies which host them. She is working on a number of projects in fields including Olympic Games legacies, the links between events and social connectivity (including social capital, social cohesion and social justice) and assessing the potential impacts of climate change on the tourism and events sector. She received her PhD from the University of Strathclyde in 2005, focusing on decision-making in the context of academic conferences. She also completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at Victoria University, Melbourne, and worked in the Department of Management at Monash University, Melbourne, before coming to UQ in 2014.
Dr Jan Packer has a background in Psychology having completed a BA (Hons) at UQ in 1976. Her PhD (Education, QUT, 2004) focussed on motivations for learning in educational leisure settings. She has published broadly in the area of educational psychology over many years. The current major focus of her research is in applying the principles of educational, environmental and positive psychology to understand and facilitate visitor experiences in leisure settings such as museums and other tourist and leisure contexts. Jan was co-editor of the international journal, Visitor Studies from 2005 through 2011.
Richard previously practiced as a chef, predominantly managing foodservice operations in the prestige club, heritage facility and hotel sectors, before joining UQ in 2005. He has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in hospitality and tourism management and professional development. His expertise and scholarship in teaching and learning are recognized by awards and advisory appointments at state, national and international level. His research projects, often funded by competitive local, national and international awarding bodies, explore tourism, hospitality and culinary workforce policy and planning especially in relation to youth and MH&W, skills development, identifying ‘foodies’ consumer behaviours and designing and evaluating education programs. He holds an Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellowship, to develop a tourism workforce crisis resilience and recovery strategy in partnership with Queensland Tourism Industry Council.
