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Lisa is a speech pathologist and conjoint research fellow with Metro North Health and The University of Queensland and works with the Queensland Aphasia Research Centre (QARC). Her research focuses on examining experiences, determining priorities, and co-designing meaningful solutions with lived-experience experts, and improving consumer partnerships. Lisa’s PhD used a novel application of Experience-Based Co-Design, to co-design aphasia services for QARC, who have adopted her findings as a future focus of the centre.

Dr Arnautovska is a psychologist with 20 years' experience spanning clinical practice and research in mental health, with a focus on health behaviour change and neuroscience. Her research translates evidence into real-world care, closing the gap between what mental health treatments can achieve and what is sustainable in individuals' everyday lives and in health services more broadly.

Her work addresses a critical structural divide: clinicians who lack the time or resourcing to address lifestyle factors, health services organised around separate physical and mental health pathways, and people with complex mental illness or those with cognitive challenges who are rarely equipped with the tools to change health behaviours on their own. Dr Arnautovska's research is focused on embedding physical health care into routine mental health treatment, so that monitoring and supporting a person's physical health becomes as standard as supporting their mental state.

She led the development of SMART, a world-first SMS-based lifestyle intervention targeting metabolic health tailored to people living with severe mental illness, delivered without reliance on smartphones or app-based platforms. SMART was developed through a comprehensive co-design process with multidisciplinary experts, clinicians, and people with lived experience, and is now being implemented within routine care at four mental health services in metropolitan Brisbane.

Consumer partnership is central to Dr Arnautovska's approach to research; she facilitates the involvement of people with lived experience across all phases of the research cycle, from priority-setting and study design through to evaluation and implementation, while actively supporting the research capacity of lived experience partners.

Dr Arnautovska has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers and is a named investigator on projects attracting more than $14.5M in funding since 2021, including a $5M NHMRC Synergy Grant. Her contributions have been recognised through the Mental Health Australia General Clinical Trials Network (MAGNET) Emerging Leader Mid-Career Researcher award (2024), the UQ Rising Star Commendation (2024), and earlier BA and PhD Thesis awards (2017 and 2006).

Central to her research philosophy is the view that motivation and a person's agency are central elements of treatment outcomes and determine whether novel, health behaviour-focused interventions succeed and whether their impact is sustainable.

Dr Arnautovska grew up in Slovenia, where social justice and equality were formative family values that continue to inform her approach to health equity in her research today.

Dr Jonathan Davies is a chronic pain researcher working to improve how pain is understood, assessed and treated. His research focuses on pain phenotyping, precision pain care, and the psychological, physiological and contextual factors that shape pain and treatment response.

At UQ’s Centre for Innovation in Pain and Health Research, he contributes to DISCERN, an NHMRC Synergy-funded multidisciplinary research program developing and validating new approaches to pain assessment. A major focus of his work is DECIPHER PAIN, a standardised, multimodal tool designed to characterise the relative contributions of nociceptive, neuropathic and nociplastic pain and support more personalised care.

His research integrates clinical assessment, quantitative sensory testing, experimental pain methods, psychophysiology, digital health and population data. He is particularly interested in how physiological signals, behaviour, language, psychosocial context and real-world health data can be combined to better understand individual differences in pain and treatment outcomes.

His broader expertise includes placebo and nocebo effects, mindfulness, mental health, quality of life, health outcome measurement and population health. His work aims to support more precise, scalable and patient-centred approaches to pain research and care.

Dr Carl Francia (Saibai Koedal awgadhalayg) is a Torres Strait Islander physiotherapist and cardiovascular epidemiologist whose research focuses on improving cardiovascular health equity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through Indigenous-led, community-partnered research.

Based at The University of Queensland's Poche Centre for Indigenous Health, Carl leads research examining acute rheumatic fever (ARF), rheumatic heart disease (RHD), cardiovascular health, health services, and implementation of evidence into policy and practice. His work combines epidemiology, health systems research, and community partnership approaches to support prevention, early detection, long-term management, and elimination of RHD.

Carl currently coordinates the NHMRC Synergy-funded iPreventRHD program, a national Indigenous-led research initiative focused on life-course approaches to preventing and managing RHD. He is also a Chief Investigator on an MRFF-funded project exploring cardiovascular health among First Nations women and girls and is involved in community-led climate and cardiovascular health initiatives in the Torres Strait.

Research interests include:

• Cardiovascular epidemiology and population health • Acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease • Indigenous health and health equity • Implementation science and health services research • Climate change and cardiovascular health • Indigenous Data Sovereignty and community-led research

Carl welcomes enquiries from Honours, Masters, and HDR students interested in Indigenous health, cardiovascular disease prevention, epidemiology, implementation science, health systems research, and community-partnered research.

Dr Chris Papic is a Research Fellow in musculoskeletal injury at the RECOVER Injury Research Centre (University of Queensland) and a Clinical Exercise Physiologist (ESSA) with 10 years of experience in rehabilitation hospital settings. Chris co-leads the 'Knowledge translation, education and implementation' theme for the Centre for Innovation in Pain and Health Research (CIPHeR); CIPHeR unites groups of pain researchers across The University of Queensland to work collaboratively toward the single end of cracking the code on pain. Chris is an Early Career Network Collaboration Committee member for the International Association for the Study of Pain.

Chris' research and clinical passion is to optimise care for people with pain after traumatic injury. His research focusses on translation and implementation science projects including: development and implementation of Australian whiplash clinical guidelines with health professionals and insurers; upskilling physiotherapists in delivering integrated psychological and physical care for people after road traffic injury (https://cre-rfrti.centre.uq.edu.au/clinical-trials/picot-clinical-trial); adapting an integrated intervention for stress and pain management from primary care settings to hospital orthopaedic wards; development and evaluation of a simple text message intervention to support recovery after whiplash injury.