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Associate Professor Jakob Begun is the IBD Group leader in the Immunity, Infection, and Inflammation Program at Mater Research University of Queensalnd, and has a basic and translational laboratory at the Translational Research Institute in Brisbane. He is an Associate Professor in the University of Queensland Faculty of Medicine. After completing his Bachelor of Science at Cornell University Jakob attended Cambridge University where he completed an MPhil in Biochemistry. He then moved on to Harvard Medical School where he completed his MD and PhD in genetics studying the host pathogen interaction using C. elegans as a model system. He completed his clinical training in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s hospital and went on to complete general gastroenterology training at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) as well as advanced training in the treatment of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD).

Dr Begun first joined Mater Research - University of Queensland in 2014, and at the same time received a clinical staff appointment in Gastroenterology at the Mater Hospital Brisbane. His clinical activities are focussed on the treatment and mangement of patients with IBD. He is the director of the IBD unit at the Mater Hospital Brisbane and at the Mater Young Adult Health Centre Brisbane .In January 2015 he was awarded the University of Queensland Reginald Ferguson Fellowship in Gastroenterology to support his research activity. He leads a basic and translational laboratory at the Translational Research Institute investigating the interaction between the innate immune system and the gut microbiome, as well as genetic contributions to disease. He also performs clinical research examining predictors of response to therapy, minimising barriers of care for adolescents and young adults with IBD, improving outcomes in pregnancy and IBD, and the use of intestinal ultrasound in IBD. He is the chair of the Gastroenterology Society of Australia-IBD Faculty and of the president of the Gastroenterology Network of Intestinal Ultrasound (GENIUS).

Evolutionary and ecological genomics of marine invertebrate animals.

My lab's research is driven by a fascination with genomes that carry within them endless, brilliant solutions forged by evolution over millions of years in response to a constantly changing ocean. We tap into this to learn how the genomes of coral reef invertebrates and their bacterial symbionts interact with each other, and with the environment, throughout their life cycle. We study these gene-environment interactions in evolutionary and ecological contexts, using genomic, molecular and cellular approaches combined with behavioural ecology in natural populations.

We work often with embryonic and larval life history stages of indirect developers, as these stages are crucial to the maintenance and evolution of marine populations. Our current focus is around larval settlement and metamorphosis in the holobiont of the coral reef demosponge Amphimedon queenslandica. In recent years, our work has extended to functional genomic approaches to identify noval ways to control the coral reef pest, the Crown-of-Thorns starfish.

When not immersed in the molecular or computer lab, we are lucky enough to be immersed in the ocean, often in beautiful places!

(she/her)

Dr. Laura Grogan is a qualified veterinarian, Senior Lecturer in Wildlife Science and Leader of the Biodiversity Health Research Team (https://www.biodiversity-health.org/) - a collaborative multiple-university research group focused on finding sustainable solutions for the most challenging threatening processes currently affecting biodiversity.

Dr. Grogan has a background in research on wildlife diseases, ecology and conservation. She's particularly interested in investigating the dynamics, relative importance, and impacts of infectious diseases among other threats affecting wildlife across both individual and population scales, to improve conservation management.

While she works across taxa and methodological approaches, her main study system currently involves the devastating amphibian fungal skin disease, chytridiomycosis, where at the individual scale she focuses on the pathogenesis and amphibian immune response to the disease, untangling the roles of resistance and tolerance in defense against infection. At the population and landscape scale she explores mechanisms underlying persistence in the face of endemic infection, focused on the endangered Fleay's barred frog. She also studies population and infection dynamics of chlamydiosis in koala using a mathematical modelling approach, exploring the relative benefits of different management approaches. In addition to working on amphibian and koala diseases, Laura is a keen birdwatcher, wildlife photographer and artist. She supervises projects across wildlife-related fields (predominantly vertebrates).

You can find out more about her research team here: www.biodiversity-health.org.

Dr. Grogan has been awarded around $1.3 million in research funding since 2018. In late 2019 she was awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA; DE200100490), worth $426,742. This project, titled "Understanding infection tolerance to improve management of wildlife disease", commenced in late 2020. Dr. Grogan was identified as one of the four top-ranked science DECRA awardees by the Australian Academy of Science’s 2020 J G Russell Award, and was also recipient of the highest award of the Wildlife Disease Association Australasia Section with their 2019 Barry L Munday Recognition Award.

PhD and Honours projects are now available in the following areas (plus many more areas - please get in touch if you have an idea):

• Can frogs be ‘vaccinated’ by antifungal treatment of active infections to develop protective immunity to the devastating chytrid fungus? (Principal Supervisor)
• Establishing the conservation status of south-east Queensland’s amphibians - occupancy surveys and species distribution models (Principal Supervisor)
• Tadpoles as a reservoir of the lethal frog chytrid fungal disease – measuring sublethal effects on growth, time to metamorphosis and ability to forage (mouthpart loss) (Principal Supervisor)
• Impacts of chytrid fungus on the survival of juvenile endangered Fleay’s barred frogs, Mixophyes fleayi, and importance for population recruitment (Principal Supervisor)
• Measuring the infection resistance versus tolerance of barred frogs to the devastating chytrid fungal disease to improve management outcomes (Principal Supervisor)
• Mapping the impacts of fire-fighting chemicals on endangered frog habitats (Co-Supervisor)
• Bowra birds: what do long-term monitoring data reveal about bird communities in the semi-arid region? (Co-Supervisor)
• Impacts of fire-fighting chemicals on endangered frogs: Implications for conservation and management (Co-Supervisor)

I am a computational biologist specialising in the integration of multi-omics data to study rheumatoid arthritis (RA). My research combines clinical data, serum proteomics, single-cell transcriptomics, and spatial transcriptomics to understand disease progression, patient trajectories, and flare events.

I am particularly interested in the immune landscape of synovial tissue and how spatial organisation of immune and stromal cells contributes to inflammation and remission. Through advanced statistical modelling and machine learning, including clustering and trajectory inference, I aim to identify predictors of flare and uncover mechanisms that drive differences in patient outcomes.

Alongside my work in RA, I also investigate the link between systemic inflammation and cardiovascular disease, applying spatial, single-cell transcriptomics, proteomics and bioinformatics approaches to explore how chronic inflammation contributes to cardiac dysfunction.

The overarching goal of my research is to improve early prediction of disease trajectories, support personalised management strategies, and contribute to the development of targeted therapies for patients with RA.