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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.

I am a comparative and environmental physiologist based at the University of Queensland. My research focuses primarily how the environment constrains the physiology of invertebrates, fish, amphibians and reptiles. I have a highly diverse research program that incorporates fundamental, curiosity-driven research and increasingly, a more applied research agenda in the emerging field of conservation physiology. Conservation physiology explores the responses of organisms to anthropogenic threats and attempts to determine the ecophysiological constraints dictated by current conditions and future environmental change. My research interests encompass the general areas of osmo- and ion-regulation, digestive and thermal physiology, environmental drivers of physiological function (specifically immune function and disease susceptibility) and animal performance in anthropogenically modified environments.

Dr. Laura Grogan is a qualified veterinarian, Senior Lecturer in Wildlife Science, Chair of the Wildlife Disease Association Australasian section, 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 and wildlife photographer, and supervises projects in other wildlife-related fields.

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:

• 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)

Primary Areas of Interest: Comparative Animal Physiology, Animal Welfare and Conservation Physiology

I embarked on higher education at the University of the South Pacific, where I earned a Ph.D. in Biology. I conducted research work in non-invasive reproductive and stress endocrinology tools for amphibians, unlocking the secrets of the reproductive hormonal cycles and stress hormone responses of Fijian ground frogs.

My postdoctoral research fellowships took me to institutions across four countries: New Zealand, Australia, India, and Canada. Each destination enriched my knowledge and expertise, adding diverse dimensions to my academic repertoire. In 2010, I joined Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, where I began research on the Conservation Physiology of wildlife in collaboration with leading WIldlife Ecologists. The postdoctoral research has yielded remarkable insights into the physiological regulation of stress in amphibians and I also had opportunity to develop hormone monitoring tools for iconic Australian wildlife such as koalas. This exposure generated my passion to conduct further research on the health and welfare of koalas. Over these years, I have been lucky to work with and supervise over 20 Honours, Masters, and Ph.D. students.

My current research program seeks to bolster animal resilience through a multifaceted approach, involving physiology, behavior, and management practices.

I returned to Australia in 2015 upon completing my international postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Saskatchwen, Canada. Prior to starting Faculty appointment at UQ, I have had the worndeful opportunity to teach at regional universities including Charles Sturt University (Wagga Wagga) and Western Sydney University (Hawkesbury Campus).

I am currently based in the School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability (AGFS) as academic member of the Animal Science Discipline Group. I teach primarily Animal Physiology & Anatomy and supervise a dynamic group of research scholars through the Stress Lab. I am Category B member of the UQ Animal Ethics Committee (NEWMA). I also represent the University of Queensland as a LINK member for the Universities Federation of Animal Welfare (UFAW).

International Engagement

In 2024, I was receipient of the Technical University of Munich Global Visiting Professor Fellowship Program and spent 6 weeks at the TUM School of Life Sciences (Bavaria).

https://global-partnerships.uq.edu.au/article/2024/08/university-queensland-and-technical-university-munich-partnership-brings-two-worlds-together

I have engagement through the European Union Funded ClearFarm Research which brings Animal Welfare standards to livestock products from a farm to plate approach, using Smart-Farm and Precision Ag Technologies.

UQ joins €13m project to bring technology to livestock sector

In 2023, my team of scholars from the Stress Lab organised and Chaired the 38th Australia and New Zealand Society for Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry (ANZSCPB) conference at the UQ, Gatton campus.

UQ Gatton hosts successful 38th ANZSCPB Conference

I have presented our research through Conversation Articles

How climate change will affect your pet – and how to help them cope

Testing the stress levels of rescued koalas allows us to tweak their care so more survive in the wild

What does a koala’s nose know? A bit about food, and a lot about making friends

Koalas can learn to live the city life if we give them the trees and safe spaces they need

With the right help, bears can recover from the torture of bile farming

Drop, bears: chronic stress and habitat loss are flooring koalas

Professor Eugeni Roura is a nutritionist by background with specific research interests in digestive physiology and chemosensory science. He joined the University of Queensland (UQ) in 2010 as a member of the Centre for Nutrition and Food Sciences, where he leads a research team active in the interface between basic and translational research aiming at industrial and societal applications. The main research interests include gut nutrient sensing mechanisms and appetite modulation (including taste and smell) relevant to humans, pigs and poultry. Recently, the research focus has evolved to include transgenerational nutrition studies including foetal development in pigs and “in ovo” applications in chickens. In 2011 he joined the UQ School of Biomedical Sciences as an Affiliated Lecturer.

Professor Roura graduated with a Veterinary Science degree from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) before pursuing post-graduate studies in Nutrition at the University of California (UC Davis). After finishing a Post-Doctoral position at UC Davis, he started a sixteen-year industry career working for the feed and food industries in R&D and market-focused technical services, culminating as Group Deputy R&D Director of Lucta S.A.

He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications, and he has been invited as keynote speaker to ca 50 scientific meetings. He is currently serving as a member of the National Committee for Nutrition of the Australian Academy of Sciences, International Steering Committee of the Digestive Physiology of pigs, R&D and Education Committee of the Australasian Pork Research Institute Ltd., expert evaluator of 1 international and 2 national research grant programs, and as Editorial Board of two scientific journals ("Journal of Animal Science and Biotechnology" and "Animals"). Main past positions include President of the Austral-Asian Chemosensory Society, Vice-Chairperson of the Board Specialty Committee of Mongolian Medicine, Standards Australia FT-022 Committee “Sensory Analysis of Food”, Master of Dietetics Studies Engagement Committee (UQ), AgriFutures Chicken Meat Advisory Panel, and the European Feed Additive Federation (FEFANA) amongst others. In addition, Professor Eugeni Roura has been involved in several national and international conference organizing committees including acting as leading co-Chair of the Digestive Physiology of Pigs 2018.

I am a biologist interested in the general question of how changes in developmental processes can lead to evolutionary variation and origin of complex traits (such as neural circuits). I study development and evolution of the brain of mammals. My doctoral thesis studied brain regions involved in olfactory and pheromonal communication in mammals. I discovered several events of parallel co-variation of sensory pathways in distantly related species sharing similar ecological niches, as cases of ontogenetic and phylogenetic plasticity. Currently, I study development and evolution of neocortical circuits by following two main lines of research: one aims to determine how early neuronal activity emerges during development and help shape brain connections, and the other one aims to understand what developmental processes led to evolutionary innovations in the mammalian brain. My research combines molecular development (electroporation, CRISPR), transcriptomics, sensory manipulations, neuroanatomy mapping (MRI, stereotaxic tracer injections, confocal and image analysis), optogenetics, and in vivo calcium imaging (multiphoton and widefield) in rodent pups and marsupial joeys.