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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 Lisa McHugh is a perinatal and infectious diseases epidemiologist at the UQ School of Public Health (SPH). A Level C Senior Research Fellow and NHMRC Emerging Leader (EL1) Investigator Grant recipient, Lisa leads her own small team of researchers through her 5-year program ‘VaxiMums’, which is evaluating the uptake, effectiveness and equity of maternal vaccinations and respiratory infections.

Lisa is a CI on a national study evaluating RSV hospitalisations in children <5yrs of age, and a CI on a Qld Health project looking at the acceptability of new RSV strategies among parents.

Lisa is currently leading a pilot study investigating pregnancy loss after receiving influenza and COVID-19 vaccinations in early pregnancy-the first of its kind in Australia, and one of only a few internationally. Lisa’s extensive collaborations involve Primary Health Care Networks, First Nations midwives, maternal and child health nurse immunisers, consumers, Queensland Health, and national and international experts in the field.

Lisa has supervised 3 MEpi students to completion-all with the highest GPA of 7. She is currently the primary advisor of 2 PhD students, 2 MEpi students and a MBiostats student.

Projects currently being investigated by her and her students include:

• Effectiveness of influenza, pertussis & COVID vaccinations in pregnancy against adverse maternal-infant outcomes
• RSV hospitalisations among First Nations children aged <2yrs (Lisa is leading this collaboration with UQCCR)
• Adverse birth outcomes among NT mother-infant pairs after maternal vaccinations
• Pertussis vaccine effectiveness among preterm infants
• Vaccine failures after influenza + pertussis vaccination in pregnancy

Lisa is the Academic Integrity Officer for SPH, and mentors 2 academics in the SPH Mentoring Program. Her research expertise and interests include clinical midwifery, First Nations health, infectious diseases, pregnancy and birth outcomes, and maternal vaccination. She has been a member of the Public Health Association of Australia since 2014, and Immunisation Special Interest Group working group member, contributing to the latest Immunisation Policy Review (2026).

Lisa is also member of the Australasian Epidemiological Association and Editor for the Aust and New Zealand Journal of Public Health.

She reviews for NHMRC grant applications.

When not working Lisa can be found (or not found) trail running, hiking in the middle of nowhere and swimming.

Dr Anelise Silveira is a physiotherapist and early career researcher specializing in musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions, particularly upper extremity disorders. She has a strong interest in non-pharmacological randomized controlled trials (RCTs), systematic reviews (including meta-analysis and network meta-analysis), and co-designing research protocols with people with lived experience to ensure relevance and impact.

Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Clinical Trials at the STARS Education and Research Alliance and the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, The University of Queensland. Anelise is also affiliated with the Centre for Innovation in Pain and Health Research (CIPHeR), the ANZMUSC Clinical Trials Network, the Queensland Orthopaedic Physiotherapy Network (QOPN), and the Canadian Physiotherapy Association (CPA).

She has contributed to 12 successful grant applications securing over AUD$688,000 and published 19 peer-reviewed papers. She has mentored 10 orthopaedic surgery residents in completing research projects, 4 physical therapists in conducting systematic reviews, 2 physiotherapists in clinical skill development, and numerous research personnel in data collection, RCT procedures, and project management. She previously served as Research Director for the College of Health Sciences at the University of Alberta in Canada, where she also completed her PhD in Epidemiology in 2024. Her doctoral work focused on improving care and return-to-work outcomes for workers with shoulder injuries. Anelise relocated to Australia in March 2025 to begin her fellowship and is welcoming PhD and Master’s students interested in upper-extremity MSK research.

Dr Mike Trott is a Research Fellow with the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research (QCMHR), The University of Queensland, where he serves as Section Head of Epidemiology and Biostatistics within the Physical and Mental Health Research Group. He specialises in lifestyle psychiatry, clinical trials, and psychiatric epidemiology, with a particular focus on addressing the physical health inequities faced by people with schizophrenia and other severe mental illnesses.

His current research program addresses three major themes:

• Physical activity and sedentary behaviour – understanding their impact on mental and physical health and developing interventions, including the effectiveness of movement breaks to reduce sedentary time and cardiometabolic risk in people with schizophrenia, and the risk profiles of different types of sedentary behaviours.
• Clinical trials – leading the methodological and statistical aspects of a national platform of several schizophrenia clinical trials to find strategies to improve mental and physical health in this population
• Pharmacoepidemiology - using statewide and national linked data to determine the comparative effectiveness of clozapine augmentation strategies for treatment-resistant schizophrenia, as well as examining the mortality gap in several mental illness vs the general population.

Nicola Warren is the Head of Psychiatry and the Director of Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research (QCMHR). In 2018, she established the Neuropsychiatric Service at Metro South Health focusing on the psychiatric care of those with severe movement disorders, epilepsy and autoimmune encephalitis and continues working clinically. She has undertaken a PhD in psychiatric clinical decision making in anti-NMDAR encephalitis and has been an international and national invited speaker in the area of autoimmune encephalitis. Nicola was awarded the Australian fellowship to the World Psychiatric Association 2020 and the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists Early Career Psychiatrist in 2019.

Qualifications

• Doctor of Philosophy, The University of Queensland
• Fellow of the Aus & NZ College of Psychiatrists (Certificate Consultation Liaison Psychiatry)
• Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, James Cook University