Stephen is a physiologist with expertise in endocrinology. His laboratory examines the hormonal control of growth, metabolism, appetite, and reproduction. He seeks to unravel how hormones regulate physiological mechanisms in healthy individuals versus those that occur in disease states.
During his academic career Stephen has taught physiology to more than 40,000 students across biomedical science, animal and veterinary sciences, allied health, and medicine. Stephen has received numerous teaching accolades and was honoured with a national Australian Learning and Teaching Council Citation in 2009. From 2019 to 2024 Stephen was Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Biomedical Sciences. In 2020, Stephen received a UQ excellence commendation for leading his School's teaching response in COVID, and was awarded Academic Leader of the Year within the UQ Faculty of Medicine.
In biomedical education research Stephen is currently investigating how students develop capabilities during their undergraduate studies that support their future professional roles. He has a keen interest in metacognition of learning, self-regulation of learning, and lifelong learning.
Dr Cuffe is a systems physiologist focused on understanding the complex changes to maternal physiology that occur during pregnancy and the impact of pregnancy dysfunction of programmed cardiovascular, metabolic and renal disease in offspring. Dr Cuffe has a particular focus on understanding the role of the placenta and its hormones in mediating both maternal and offspring disease. He is most recognised for his research investigating how maternal stress, thyroid dysfunction, hypoxia or altered nutrition affect placental development and program disease in the mother after pregnancy as well as her offspring. Dr Cuffe has an exceptional track record and is excited to take new honours and PhD students into his research laboratory.
A life-long fascination in sciences provided me with the inspiration to graduate in exercise physiology (University of Sherbrooke, Canada, 2004), complete a PhD in physiology/biophysics (University of Sherbrooke, 2009) and continue in my current role as a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Biomedical Sciences (SBMS) of The University of Queensland. I am a physiologist first and foremost with a particular interest in understanding how skeletal muscle cell normally functions so as to try and elucidate what changes or factors contribute to various forms of muscle weakness with ageing, inactivity or various chronic diseases.
During my previous postdoctoral appointment at La Trobe University (Melbourne, 2010-2017), I have gained considerable experience using the "mechanically skinned muscle fibre" technique in animal muscle. Importantly, I have developed this technique for the first time in human muscle which allows the exciting opportunity to investigate cellular mechanisms of muscle weakness in different clinical population. This is vitally important since most of our existing knowledge on muscle function comes from studies on muscles obtained from animal models. This technical breakthrough has been recognized by editorials of different leading scientific journals in the field of Physiology. I’m now a world recognized expert of this technique which has immense potential for examining any number of physiological questions and even allows for biochemical analyses of any protein of interest in the same cell.
Dr Melanie White heads the Dynamics of Morphogenesis Lab at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), University of Queensland and is an ARC Future Fellow. She completed a PhD in Neuroscience at University College London followed by postdoctoral research at The University of Edinburgh. During this time Mel engineered viruses to modulate gene expression in the brain to investigate neuronal function and as a therapeutic approach for neurodegenerative disease. Her work was published in Neuron and PNAS, featured in Nature Reviews Neuroscience and received extensive international media coverage (including the BBC and The Guardian).
In 2012 Mel switched fields to apply quantitative imaging in developmental biology. Her work revealed key mechanisms driving the earliest morphogenetic events in mammalian embryogenesis and was published in Cell, Science, Nature Cell Biology, Developmental Cell and Nature Protocols. Her research was featured on the cover of multiple journals including Cell and she was awarded the inaugural American Society for Cell Biology Porter Prize for Research Excellence (2018).
In 2020, Mel joined the IMB where she will combine her passion for neuroscience and developmental biology to investigate the dynamics of neural tube morphogenesis.
Research overview
The brain and the spinal cord control most of the functions of the body and the mind, yet the dynamics of how they first form is poorly understood. Both structures arise from a common precursor, the neural tube, which forms very early in embryonic development. To generate the forces that sculpt and shape the neural tube, changes in cellular architecture must be tightly coordinated in space and time. These morphological rearrangements occur concurrently with biochemical signalling pathways that specify early neural cell fates.
Our research aims to understand how cellular properties and transcriptional regulators interact with mechanical forces in real time to direct vertebrate neural tube formation and neural cell fate specification. We study the dynamics of neural tube formation by applying advanced imaging technologies in transgenic avian models and human stem cell models.
