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Prof David Ascher is an NHMRC Investigator Leadership Fellow and Deputy Associate Dean (Research Partnerships) in the Faculty of Science at The University of Queensland. He also serves as Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics and Head of Computational Biology & Clinical Informatics at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute. Internationally, he sits on scientific advisory boards for A*STAR (Singapore), Fiocruz (Brazil) and the Tuscany University Network (Italy), and has been recognised with major honours including the Royal Society of Chemistry Horizon Prize.

A global leader in computational biology and personalised medicine, Prof Ascher develops advanced AI- and structure-based approaches to understand how genetic variation alters protein structure, function, and clinical outcomes. His group has built one of the world’s most widely used platforms for interpreting coding variants—over 90 computational tools, accessed more than 9.5 million times per year from 120+ countries. These tools underpin clinical diagnostics, guide drug development pipelines, and support international public-health responses to antimicrobial resistance and emerging infectious diseases.

His research has led to new molecular insights across infectious disease, rare disease, oncology and cardiometabolic health, and has been translated directly into practice—informing WHO policy, enabling early resistance detection in tuberculosis and leprosy, stratifying patients with hereditary cancers, and supporting vaccine design with partners including Pfizer. Many of his methods are embedded in globally used resources such as Ensembl VEP, PDBe, and the EMBL-EBI KnowledgeBase.

Prof Ascher has a longstanding commitment to interdisciplinary leadership and capability-building across UQ. As Director (Strategy) of the Biotechnology Programs and later as Deputy Associate Dean (Research Partnerships), he has driven initiatives to transform UQ’s biotechnology education, grow industry-embedded training, expand international partnerships, and diversify research income. He has led the development of UQ’s biotechnology–industry placement ecosystem, initiated new professional development programs adopted across multiple Faculties and Institutes, and established major collaborations with government, industry and global research organisations.

He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers (over half as senior author: FWCI 2.7), secured more than $30M in competitive research funding, and supervised over 60 HDR students who now hold leadership positions in academia, industry and government. His work appears in leading journals including Nature, Nature Genetics, Science, PNAS and Nature Microbiology, and is cited in over 100 policy documents and 40 patents.

Prof Ascher holds degrees in Biotechnology, Biochemistry, Structural Biology and Law. His research career has spanned Adelaide, Melbourne, Cambridge and Brisbane. After his PhD with Professor Michael Parker, he worked with Sir Tom Blundell at the University of Cambridge, where he led programs in structure-guided drug discovery and protein–protein interaction targeting. He established his independent laboratory at Cambridge and then at the University of Melbourne/Bio21 Institute, before moving to the Baker Institute in 2019 and joining UQ in 2021.

Shane Culpepper is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Queensland in St. Lucia, Australia. Before joining the University of Queensland in 2023, Professor Culpepper held a continuing academic position at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Melbourne in 2008. His research focuses primarily on building better Search and Recommendation Systems and is primarily interested how to responsibly integrate efficient and scalable generative AI models for search, recommendation, and question answering. Professor Culpepper’s work has applications in a number of downstream applications for Legal, Health, real estate speculation. He has been instrumental in founding the AI Research Network and the Research Center for Enterprise AI at the University of Queensland.

Over his 17 year career, Professor Culpepper has supervised 19 PhD students and co-authored more than 140 peer reviewed papers with 132 different research collaborators on problems that range from core basic research, such as algorithm efficiency and scalability, to practical real world problems on building and deploying new machine learning algorithms for search and recommendation systems. While often technical, his work is always user-driven as humans are the main consumers of this technology. This user-centric research focus has led to several papers on controlled user studies which guide the development of better evaluation techniques which model human behaviour. In the last 5 years, Professor Culpepper has been a program co-chair for international conferences such as SIGIR and CIKM, and co-organized conferences such as WSDM and SWIRL. Professor Culpepper previously held an ARC DECRA fellowship in 2013 as well as an RMIT Vice-Chancellor's Principal Researcher fellowship in 2017. Before joining the University of Queensland. Professor Culpepper was the founding director of the Centre for Information Discovery and Data Analytics at RMIT University. In total, he has been a chief investigator on 11 research grants totalling ~$3.8 Million AUD.

Dr Kai Li Lim is the inaugural St Baker Fellow in E-Mobility at the UQ Dow Centre for Sustainable Engineering Innovation. Specialising in data science, engineering, and emerging technologies, Dr Lim focuses on real-time vehicle telematics, infrastructure management, and computer vision-based autonomous driving.

At UQ, Dr Lim's research centres on electric vehicle (EV) usage and charging patterns to inform adoption policies and strategies. His work includes examining trends for incentive design and assessing the environmental and economic impacts of EVs. Dr Lim's current focus is on charging reliability and addressing EV drivers' pain points. His research has been featured in academic, industry, and media publications, facilitating discussions with various stakeholders.

Dr Lim has published a range of articles, book chapters, and conference papers in reputable venues. He has delivered invited talks and appeared in media outlets such as ABC, Courier Mail, and The Conversation. Collaborating with various UQ schools, including Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Economics, and Environment, Dr Lim has secured funding for projects on topics like carbon emissions offset after EV uptake and evaluating price incentives for EV charging using real-time data.

In addition to his work at UQ, Dr Lim collaborates closely with the UC Davis Electric Vehicle Research Center, where he recently completed a six-month visiting fellowship on EV charging. He engages in speaking events and networking opportunities centred on sustainability and transportation innovation, delivering keynote speeches at conferences and industry roundtables.

Dr Lim holds a BEng (Hons) degree in electronic and computer engineering from the University of Nottingham, an MSc degree in computer science from Lancaster University, and a PhD degree from The University of Western Australia, supported by the Australian Government under the Research Training Programme.

I am currently a lecturer at the University of Queensland, where I conduct research in the field of Information Retrieval. My research focuses on efficient and effective representations for large-scale search engines, including indexing, compression, and retrieval. I am also interested in understanding how to measure improvements in the end-to-end search pipeline, including system-oriented effectiveness measurements and user behaviour analysis. I have a broad interest in empirical experimentation, operating systems, data structures, and algorithms.

Previous Positions

• From February 2020 to January 2022 I worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on an ARC discovery project with Professor Alistair Moffat at the University of Melbourne.
• I completed my PhD at RMIT University under the guidance of Professor J. Shane Culpepper and Professor Falk Scholer.

Dr Evgenii Nekhoroshev is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Chemical Engineering and a member of the Pyrometallurgy Innovation Centre led by Prof. Evgueni Jak.

He graduated with a Master in Chemistry (chemical thermodynamics) from Lomonosov's Moscow State University, Deparment of Chemistry in 2012. His Master's Thesis was "Thermodynamic optimization of the NaOH-Al(OH)3-Na2SiO3-H2O system for applications in Bayer's process of bauxite treatment" as part of a bigger project initiated in collaboration with Rusal company aimed at utilisation/valorisation of red mud residues accumulated during the production of aluminium oxide from bauxite ores.

In 2019, he completed a PhD in Metallurgical Engineering at Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal, Canada within The Centre For Research in Computational Thermodynamics (CRCT), where he acquired expertise in FactSage software, multicomponent database development, and was included in the list of official collaborators of FactSage. His PhD thesis was "Thermodynamic optimization of the Na2O-K2O-Al2O3-CaO-MgO-B2O3-SiO2 system" sponsored by Glass Consortium including Corning and SCHOTT glass producers. The purpose of the database he developed was to assist the industry in designing new glasses with special properties: chemically hardened glasses (smartphones), technical glasses with high thermal and chemical resilience (boron-containing glasses), chemically inert glasses, etc.

Short after receiving his PhD, Dr Evgenii Nekhoroshev accepted a position at The University of Queensland as part of the Pyrometallurgy Innovation Centre's team where he has an official title of Theme Leader in Thermodynamic Computations, combining his broad expertise in metallurgy, chemical engineering, applied mathematics, and programming.

Dr Evgenii Nekhoroshev has always been passionate about formalisation and automation of big research tasks. He started working on developing an automated solver for thermodynamic optimisation during his PhD thesis which was improved and finalised using the ideas of Prof. Evgueni Jak about real-time derivative matrix optimization and sensitivity analysis applicable to large multicomponent systems. His contribution to the Centre allowed to make transition to a continuous optimization approach when experimental and modelling streams of work in the Centre are efficiently combined together. It allows to include the most recent experimental datasets into a self-consistent database update with minimal time delays.

Research interest: Monitoring ecosystem health of coral reefs and seagrass habitats, integrating field and remote sensing image datasets, and the developing applied cost-effective mapping and monitoring approaches. Developed approaches have been adopted as standard practice globally, making a difference in conservation of these valuable habitats. The long term monitoring studies at Heron and Moreton Bay formed the basis for the development of mapping and monitoring over time and space at local to global scale. See here major research impact

Major projects:

• Long term monitoring of benthic composition at Heron Reef (2002-ongoing).
• Long term monitoring of seagrass composition and abundance in Moreton bay Marine Park (2000-ongoing).
• Smart Sat CRC Hyperspectral Remote Sensing of Seagrass and Coral Reefs 2023-2027.
• Developement of Underwater Field Spectrometry and Benthic Photo Collection and Analysis
• 3D GBR Habitat Mapping Project 2015 - ongoing:
• Global habitat mapping project 2019-2023 Allen Coral Atlas .

Current position: Associate Professior in Marine Remote Sensing leading the Marine Ecosystem Monitoring Lab. . Academic Director Heron Island Research Station and affiliated researchers with Centre for Marine Science and Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science

Capacity Building and Citizen Science: Capacity: under/post graduate courses; Msc/PhD supervision, workshops/courses; Remote Sensing Educational Toolkit, and online courses (e.g. TNC).Strong supporter of citizen science based projects, as trainer, organiser and advisor for Reef Check Australia, CoralWatch, Great Reef Census and UniDive.