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Dr Akbar is a Pacific Fijian academic and researcher with extensive experience in community development research and teaching and has contributed to the Australian and International higher education sectors. Dr Akbar’s teaching and research are shaping how Indigenous knowledge is used to address the health inequities and social determinants of health of First Nations Peoples, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Māori & Pasifika (Pacific Islander) communities through co-designed solutions with the communities, and integrating community participatory action research and Indigenous perspectives and knowledge systems with social justice principles to promote equitable health and wellbeing. Heena's research addresses the social, cultural and economic burden of chronic conditions through a strength-based approach and impacts policy development that translates to better health outcomes for First Nations peoples, particularly Māori & Pasifika peoples in Australia and Internationally.

Associate Professor Annika Antonsson is a virologist with epidemiological training. Viruses can cause cancer, and Annika’s research has been focused on human papillomavirus (HPV) and its role in different types of cancer. HPV is the virus that causes cervical cancer.

Her current main research areas are oral HPV infections in the general population and HPV in mouth and throat cancer (mucosal squamous cell carcinomas of the head and neck; HNSCC).

Some cancers of the mouth and throat are increasing and some of this increase is caused by HPV infection. HPV is a sexually transmitted infection and changing sexual behaviour is believed to have caused the increase in HPV-positive tumours of the mouth and throat. Annika is investigating how often HPV in found in HNSCCs and if there are any lifestyle factors linked with having HPV or not to have HPV in tumours.

It is not known how common the potentially cancer-causing viruses are in the mouth of the general population, and this is another area of research Annika is looking into. She has also worked on HPV in skin (normal skin and cancer), infections in breast carcinogenesis, HPV in oesophageal cancer and polyomaviruses in normal skin and skin cancer.

Katelyn Barney is an Associate Professor in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit and also affiliated with the School of Music. Her research focuses on improving pathways for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students into and through higher education and advancing understanding about the role of collaborative research and music making between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous people. She has published across these areas and her latest edited book is Musical Collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous People in Australia: Exchanges in the Third Space. She is also Managing Editor of The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education.

She was an Equity Fellow with the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success (formerly NCSEHE) and her fellowship explored effective evaluation of university outreach with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander secondary school students. Katelyn co-hosts a podcast with her colleague Professor Tracey Bunda: "Indigenising Curriculum in Practice" and co-hosted a previous series "Indigenous Success: Doing it, Thinking it, Being it". Katelyn has also collaborated with Professor Bronwyn Fredericks and colleagues across five universities to undertake a ACSES funded project to build the evidence to improve completion rates for Indigenous tertiary students.

Katelyn is an Australian Learning and Teaching Fellow and her National Teaching Fellowship focused on developing pathways for Indigenous students from undergraduate study into Higher Degrees by Research.

Associate Professor Francesca Bartlett lectures in Ethics and the Legal Profession and Contract Law. She is the Director of Teaching and Learning at the School of Law. She is a Fellow of the Centre for Public, Comparative and International Law and researches in the area of lawyers' ethics and practice, access to justice and women and the law. She was a CI on the Australian Feminist Judgments Project funded by the Australian Research Council under a Discovery Project Grant. She is undertaking a number of projects relating to lawyers working across Australia including around family violence, and how technology impacts upon access to justice and ethics in the legal profession. She has led a project concerning technology and access to justice in the legal assistance sector funded under an AIBE Applied Research Fund grant and was a CI on a project funded by the Queensland Law Society concerning disruption to and innovation by small law firms across Queensland. Francesca was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre on the Legal Profession at Stanford University in November 2018.

She is a member of the Queensland Law Society Ethics Committee and is the Vice President of the International Association of Legal Ethics. Francesca is an Academic Member of the School's Pro Bono Centre Advisory Board. Before joining the Law School, she practiced for a number of years as a commercial solicitor at a national law firm in Melbourne and Brisbane. Prior to embarking on her legal career, Francesca completed a PhD in English which concerned the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families.

A/Prof Federica Barzi is a Principal Research Fellow in Biostatistics at the UQ Poche Centre for Indigenous Health and within the Faculty of Health and Behavioral Sciences at The University of Queensland. She was awarded a PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from Sydney University in 2004 and has a BSc degree in Statistics from the University of Padova, Italy.

A/Prof Barzi is an applied Biostatistician with extensive experience on study design and data analysis of randomized clinical trials, very large observational studies and data linkage. She has worked across a variety of specialties including cardiology, nephrology, nutrition, oncology and emergency care. She has been involved in Indigenous Health since 2005 and from April 2014, with her appointment at the Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin, A/Prof Barzi’s contribution to research focuses solely on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health. She has co-authored over a hundred and thirty peer reviewed journal articles with colleagues from various institutions and has secured, as a CI, over 24M in research funding since 2006.

Susan is a research academic within the Human Centred Computing group in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE). She has a B.InfoTech, Data Comms and Info Systems (Honours) awarded 1st Class. She has just submitted her thesis, and when conferred will complete her PhD degree in Information Systems Theory at QUT. Her thesis explores the dyadic phenomenon of nodes in culturally different social media networks, with implications in the design of information systems. Her research centres on Aboriginal peoples' design methods in human computer interaction; specifically within cultural learning contexts, including languages.

Susan's thesis, which explores the dyadic phenomenon of culturally different network nodes, extends social media network theories. The impact of Susan's Indigenist research extends Eurocentric designed virtual, interactive and immersive spaces and process incl. AI, XR and emerging technologies. As Ngemba Wiradjuri and grown up on Country her lived experience of social, institutional and political dimensions that impact Aboriginal peoples lives in Australia enables Susan to critically analyse and reflect on all aspects, reflexively throughout her research.

Along with esteemed national and international Indigenous academics, Susan is a Chief Investigator on the $35,000,000 ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous Futures and won a highly competitve Science & Technology Australia's #SuperstarsOfStem program. Susan is also a guest Academic Editor for Information Systems Journal (ISJ) and Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues (JAIIS).

Current research collaborations with Aboriginal peoples:

• explores technology as a networking tool for Ballardong/Whadjuk (urban WA) and Ngemba (very remote NSW) community members on Country and in the diaspora, including the design, build and embedding of community cultural hubs. These are Knowledge (Data) Centres that have a holistic view of ancestral and contemporary Knowledges. Cultural hubs contribute to continuing, developing, consolidating and teaching the protection rehabilitation and restoration of cultural Knowledges and artefacts. This relates to languages, environmental and ecological communities across our waters, lands and skies. Elders and Knowledge rangers connected through Drone, AI, XR technologies, identify and connect Cultural Knowledges with local, national and global initiatives, innovation and solutions. Critical to the design and development is the specific Kinship lore of each community to ensure Kinship Intellectual Property remains with the individual, family and/or community. Outcomes facilitate individual and community digital entrepreneurship centred on Aboriginal Knowledge sovereignty and economic independence for Aboriginal communities in Australia.

A/Prof Steve Bell is a senior social scientist at the Burnet Institute and has 22 years’ experience across South-East Asia (India, Nepal), Africa (Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe) and Western Pacific (Australia, Indonesia, PNG, Fiji) Regions. He works respectfully with not-for-profits, public institutions, businesses and community organisations, using innovative, inclusive, people-centred approaches to identify sustainable solutions to critical health challenges and accelerate health equity.

Steve’s work brings together lived experience, socio-ecological systems thinking and social theory to understand what works (or not) in global health and social development. He has researched and published widely on HIV, sexual and reproductive health, maternal health, neglected tropical diseases, TB and Indigenous health. He is particularly interested in understanding the socio-structural determinants of health and social inequities, and injustices associated with marginalisation due to gender, sexuality, age and geography. He has also published two books on interpretive and community-led approaches in research, design, monitoring and evaluation: ‘Peer research in health and social development: international perspectives on participatory research’ (2021), and ‘Monitoring and evaluation in health and social development: interpretive and ethnographic perspectives’ (2016). He is currently taking on new PhD students in these areas, so please do reach out to him at the Burnet Institute for a chat!

He holds associate professorial appointments at UNSW Sydney and The University of Queensland, is a Member of the International Editorial Board at Culture, Health & Sexuality, has been a Senior Advisor to the Boston Consulting Group, and has worked in research and consultancy roles with international governments, NGOs, UNAIDS, UNFPA and WHO.

Dr. Bialasiewicz worked at the Royal Children's Hospital and the Children's Health Queensland HHS for over 18 years conducting translational research and clinical support centering on infectious disease (primarily viral and bacterial) molecular diagnostics, general microbiology and molecular epidemiology. In 2019, he became a group leader at The University of Queensland's Australian Centre for Ecogenomics, expanding on a growing interest in the microbial ecology of the human body, it's role in health and disease, and ways to manipulated to achieve desirable outcomes. One Health microbial ecology, where human health is interconnected with the health of animals (both livestock and wildlife), and the broader environment is also an area of active interest. His background in virology has influenced the work he does, meaning a key focus of his microbial ecology works centres around the interactions between all types of microorgansims (bacteria, archaea, viruses, fungi, and micro-eukaryotes).

Ongoing work includes:

- Leveraging of emerging technologies to explore the hidden microbial diversity and their interactions in the human body.

- Using the technology to develop microbial (e.g. phage)-based treatments or preventatives to complex diseases (e.g. Otitis Media, Chronic Rhinosinusitis, GvHD).

- Understanding the genetics of antibiotic resistance spread.

Dr Peter Billings is a Professor at the School of Law, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. His research interests are in particular areas of public law: administrative law, immigration and refugee law, social welfare law and human rights law. In 2016 he received an Australian Award for University Teaching - Award for Programs that Enhance Learning (Pro Bono Centre). Since 2010 he has received five teaching excellence awards within the School of Law for outstanding course/teacher evaluations, and in 2011 was awarded the Vice Chancellor's Equity and Diversity Award (UQ) for the Asylum and Refugee Law Project.

Recently, he has published several papers on 'crImmigration' law, policy and practice in Australia, including a chapter, "International crimes, refugee 'prisoner' swaps and duplicity in Australia's refugee admissions", in J Simeon (ed) Serious International Crimes, Human Rights and Forced Migration (Routledge, 2022). And he authored chapter one in his own edited collection, Regulating Refugee Protection through Social Welfare: Law, Policy and Praxis (Routledge, 2023). Most recently, he has authored a chapter on the corrosive effect of immigration detention laws on officialdom, in M Peterie, Immigration Detention and Social Harm: The Collateral Impacts of Migrant Incarceration (Routledge) forthcoming.

Tamara is a trained respiratory scientist and has 7 years' experience in measuring the lung function of children aged 3-18 years. She has recently completed her PhD whereby she validated the use of normal healthy reference values for two lung function tests (spirometry and fractional exhaled nitric oxide) for children who identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander. She has a particular interest in childhood respiratory illnesses such as cystic fibrosis and asthma, emerging clinical measurement techniques, as well as Australian First Nations respiratory health. Her current research aims to better understand the mechanisms of early CF lung disease and to improve current clinical outcome measures to aid in appropriate CF management.

As a music-maker and language revivalist from the south coast Noongar region of Western Australia, I am interested in the connections between song, language, and landscapes. My work intersects with applied linguistics, ecomusicology, Australian studies, and Indigenous studies.

I am lead Chief Investigator for ARC DI project 'Restoring on-Country Performance' and a Chief Investigator for ARC LIEF project 'Nyingarn: A platform for primary sources in Australian Indigenous languages', ARC DI project 'The role of First Nations’ music as a determinant of health', and ARC Linkage project 'Life After Digitisation: Future-Proofing WA's Vulnerable Cultural Heritage'.

After working as an ESL and music teacher, I helped establish the major in Indigenous Knowledge at the University of Western Australia, where I completed a PhD in Noongar song. At the University of Sydney I co-developed the major in contemporary music for Sydney Conservatorium of Music, before returning to Western Australia at Edith Cowan University to bolster humanities research in my home state. Recent arts-language projects I have collaborated on include a mainstage production of Shakespeare's Macbeth in Noongar (Hecate 2020), a Bruce Lee film dubbed in Noongar (Fist of Fury Noongar Daa 2021), and the multi-sensory ‘Noongar Wonderland’ performance installation in Perth Festival 2022.

I serve as Deputy Chair of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and received the 2020 Barrett Award for Australian Studies.

Dr Clare Bradley is a Senior Research Fellow with the UQ Poche Centre and the Program Manager for the ATLAS Indigenous Primary Care Surveillance Network. She has a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Adelaide and has been working in the health surveillance and health services research sectors for nearly two decades.

Before joining Professor Ward’s team in 2017 as the Study Coordinator for the NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence in Aboriginal Sexual Health and Blood-Borne Viruses (which established the ATLAS network), Clare spent 14 years at Flinders University; first with the Research Centre for Injury Studies (2003–2014) where she led the AIHW National Injury Surveillance Unit’s falls and older people’s injury research program, and then with the NHMRC Cognitive Decline Partnership Centre as the Senior Research Fellow for the Understanding long-term care services for older people with cognitive decline in Australia project. Clare has extensive project coordination, health surveillance and data linkage skills and wide-ranging research interests, now focused on Indigenous health.

Clare is the Chief Investigator for the recently awarded Improving surveillance infrastructure for Indigenous primary health care project, receiving $1.99m through the Medical Research Future Fund (PHRDI000054). She is also a CI on two current NHMRC Ideas grants: Leaving no-one behind: Informing Indigenous aged care policy with big data (GNT2004089, CI-C), and Implementing a precision public health approach to eliminate STIs and control HIV in regional Australia (GNT1185073, CI-D). Through these and her ongoing involvement in the maintenance and development of the ATLAS network and research infrastructure, Clare is committed to excellence and innovation in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health services research and passionate about strengthening research capacity and supporting Indigenous Data Sovereignty in all aspects her research activity.

Clare has successfully co-supervised one PhD and two honours students to completion and is available for collaboration or supervision across a range of topics, including Indigenous primary care and infectious disease surveillance; health services research; dementia and aged care services research; falls injury; suicide and self-harm; use of linked administrative datasets; development of disease classification structures; and descriptive epidemiology for public health purposes.

Dr Bena Brown is a clinician/researcher who brings her passion for caring for people with cancer and their families to her current role in the FNCWR team, where her focus is on delivering projects that optimise survivorship and cancer health services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. These projects include implementing novel models of care such as navigation and health behaviour intervention, optimising communication and access to services through the development and evaluation of culturally responsive resources.

Bena has more than 60 peer-reviewed publications, has presented at multiple national and international conferences, and has been awarded over $3.6 million in research grants.

She is also an Advanced Speech Pathologist (Cancer Care) at Brisbane's Princess Alexandra Hospital and provides RHD supervision for higher-degree students in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences in UQ's Health and Behavioural Sciences Faculty. Bena is a member of the Human Research and Ethics Committees at Metro South Health and serves on State-wide committees for the Queensland Collaborative for Cancer Survivorship and the Clinical Oncological Society of Australia (COSA) Patient-Reported Outcome Working Group.

Outside her research and clinical career, Bena is mum to two boisterous boys, a keen yogi, and passionate student and board member at Vulcana Circus.

Dr Tamara Butler is an Aboriginal woman of the Undumbi people from the Sunshine Coast region of Queensland, Australia and a NHMRC Emerging Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. She works withing the First Nations Cancer and Wellbeing Research Program. Her work is focused on women’s cancers with the goal of improving cancer outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, families, and communities. Broadly Dr Butler’s research interests also include First Nations research methods and process, co-design, wellbeing, and psychosocial aspects of cancer care.

Sally Butler is a Reader in Art History.

Sally Butler took up the position as lecturer in Art History at the University of Queensland in 2004 after a period as Art History lecturer at the Australian National Univeristy in Canberra. Visual arts industry experience includes working for the Queensland Art Gallery and a number of freelance curating projects, and several years as Associate Editor of Australian Art Collector magazine and one of the edtiors for the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art. Sally regularly writes for Australian visual arts magazines, maintaining a particular interest in contemporary Australian art, Australian indigenous art and new media art.

Research

Her research interests include cross-cultural critical theory, Australian Indigenous art, Australian contemporary art, photography and new media art. Current research includes: Indigenous art from Far North Queensland, Virtual Reality theory and photography, contemporary Queensland photography, and art and cultural tourism.

Liam is an Associate Professor in Telehealth and Director of Telehealth Technology for the University of Queensland’s Centre for Online Health.

Liam has a PhD in Medicine. His research is centred on pragmatic trials of telehealth services. Liam has a special interest in the use of telehealth for Indigenous health and rural health care delivery. He is involved in telehealth service development, delivery and evaluation across a broad range of telehealth services. Liam uses implementation research principles to understand why telehealth services work well in some scenarios and not others. He evaluates the effectiveness of telehealth from multi-disciplinary perspectives including clinical effectiveness, patient perspectives, economic aspects, organisational aspects, and socio-cultural, ethical and legal aspects.

Liam also has an active research agenda in health informatics, in particular, in imaging informatics. Liam’s work focusses on skin imaging for melanoma detection. Liam chairs dermatology working group for the DICOM standards development organisation as well as the technology standards working group for the International Skin Imaging Collaboration: Melanoma Project. This project is an academia and industry partnership designed to facilitate the application of digital skin imaging to help reduce melanoma mortality. Liam is technology lead for the Australian Centre of Excellence in Melanoma Imaging and Diagnosis. Liam has previously been a member of the Standards Australia IT-014 Health Informatics technical committees for telehealth and messaging and communication.

Liam is Vice-President of the Australian Telehealth Society and an executive member of the International Teledermatology Society.

Liam has 25 years industry experience as a health informatician. His immediate past role was the Manager of Medical Imaging Informatics at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital. Previously, Liam had over a decade’s clinical experience as a diagnostic radiographer.

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Digital Health and Accredited Practising Dietitian (APD) interested in the prevention and management of noncommunicable diseases, especially obesity, across the lifecourse.

Through research, I aim to add health to life and equity to health by changing policies and practices to reduce the impact of obesity.

My research program aims to forge a new nexus across dietetics, digital health and public health to improve healthy weight. In my Postdoctoral Fellowship, I have established a new evidence base that supports precision public health approaches to the prevention and management of obesity, including innovate methods of public health surveillance that can use data from sources such as electronic medical records. I trained as a Paediatric Dietitian and have experience as a clinician-researcher working in Queensland's healthcare system, specifically in preventing and managing childhood obesity via clinical, community, and public health programs.

I have used epidemiology, public health informatics, action research, co-design, and ethnographic methods to generate new knowledge in obesity and digital health. I was awarded my PhD (UQ) in November 2020, which developed and validated i-PATHWAY, a clinical model to predict childhood obesity from the first 1,000 days to help guide its prevention. This research was the first of its kind in Australia and uncovered new evidence for risk factors for childhood obesity that are evident from the early years.

At The University of Queensland (UQ), I am a member of the Queensland Digital Health Centre, located within the Centre for Health Services Research (Faculty of Medicine). I established and currently Co-Chair the UQ Digital Health HDR Cohort, which provides research mentorship and support to ~20 PhD, MPhil and Honours research students.

Our team partners closely with multiple healthcare and research organisations across Australia to innovate and translate obesity research into practice, including Health and Wellbeing Queensland (public health and prevention of chronic diseases), Queensland Health (healthcare system) and the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (digital health research). I hold an Honorary Appointment with Health and Wellbeing Queensland, and an Affiliate Research Fellow position with the Faculty of Medicine (UQ) to help bridge the gap between obesity research and practice.

Anton is a mixed methods researcher with primary expertise in qualitative research methods. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow in the UQ Poche Centre for Indigenous Health at the University of Queensland.

Anton's primary interest is in working in partnership with Aboriginal community-controlled health services to co-design, implement and evaluate intervention strategies, and develop more practical and effective models of embedding evaluation into their delivery of services and programs. His work in this area focuses on participatory qualitative research with staff and patients of Aboriginal community-controlled health services to improve the acceptability of interventions and optimise their potential effectiveness.

Anton has previously worked in a research role with the Institute for Urban Indigenous Health and as a senior lecturer in the School of Public Health at the University of Queensland. Following completion of his PhD in 2008, he was awarded a National Health & Medical Research Council postdoctoral research fellowship which he undertook at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of NSW.