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Dr Verdi's research is in the field of computational materials physics. Her work employs first-principles or ab initio methods, complemented by machine learning techniques, to predict and understand physical properties of materials without relying on empirical models.

She received her doctorate in Materials from the University of Oxford in 2017. After working at the University of Oxford and the University of Vienna, Dr Verdi moved to the University of Sydney in 2023 as an ARC DECRA Fellow. In the same year, she then joined UQ as a Lecturer in Condensed Matter Physics.

Her current research focuses on understanding the structural, optical and thermodynamic properties of atomic defects for applications in quantum technologies. She is also interested in studying the influence of atomic vibrations, defects, temperature and disorder on the intrinsic properties of various functional materials that can be exploited for novel technologies. Feel free to reach out to Dr Verdi if you are interested in simulating materials properties from first principles using supercomputers and exploring how this can help develop better materials.

For more information, visit the research group website.

Dr Ross McKenzie's research interests are in the fields of: Condensed Matter Theory, Chemical Physics, and Quantum Many-Body Theory.

He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1989. His chief research projects are in the areas of:

Models for strongly correlated electron materials such as organic and cuprate superconductors

Magnetoresistance of layered metals including topological insulators

Excited states of organic molecules

Hydrogen bonding

Emergent phenomena in complex systems

The relationship between science and theology

Dr Mile Gao is a physicist specialising in condensed matter physics, with a focus on charge carrier dynamics in organic semiconductor devices. His research advances the development of novel measurement techniques to improve the understanding of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and organic photovoltaics (OPVs). He has pioneered several charge carrier mobility measurement methods, including Metal-Insulator-Semiconductor CELIV (MIS-CELIV), photo-MIS-CELIV, injection-CELIV, and photo-injection-CELIV. These techniques enable precise characterisation of charge transport and generation processes in diode-like structures, addressing key challenges in organic optoelectronics.

Dr. Mile's work has led to significant insights into charge injection, extraction, and mobility in organic semiconductors, with implications for improving device efficiency and stability. His research is highly interdisciplinary, combining physics, materials science, and device engineering.

He has published extensively in high-impact journals and holds a patent for his contributions to the field. As an ARC DECRA Fellow at The University of Queensland, he also teaches and supervises students in advanced experimental techniques for semiconductor characterisation.

Expertise:

• Charge transport in organic semiconductors
• Carrier generation efficiency in OPVs
• Advanced electrical characterisation techniques
• Organic optoelectronic device physics

Xiuwen Zhou received her PhD in 2014 from the University of Geneva (Switzerland), where she worked with Prof Tomasz A. Wesolowski, who is recognized as the co-inventor of Frozen-Density Embedding Theory (FDET) alongside Nobel laureate Prof. Arieh Warshel (co-winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry). Then she moved to the University of Queensland (UQ) as a visiting scholar, supported by two awarded fellowships, i.e., a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Early Postdoc Mobility Fellowship (2015) and an Australian-APEC Women in Research Fellowship (2016). She then took up a UQ Development Fellowship in 2017, working as a teaching and research fellow at UQ School of Mathematics and Physics. Later, she was awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (ARC DECRA) commencing in 2019.

Yuan Xu completed a Bachelor of Engineering degree (Chemical and Material) from the University of Queensland in 2015. After that, he started his PhD in the research field of colloidal science, rheology and chemical engineering, supervised by Professor Jason Stokes. He has continued in UQ as postdoctoral research fellow since 2019, at which, he has contributed to multidisciplinary projects including viscoelastic lubrication of soft matter systems, and programming structural anisotropy in nanocellulose hydrogels. His research capability focuses on the area of rheology, colloidal science/ physical chemistry, material/physical science, soft matters/complex fluids, and tribology/lubrication.

Yi-Hsun Chen completed his PhD in Physics at the Monash University in 2024. Prior to this PhD, he obtained his Master degree in Optoelectronics at the National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, in 2014.

His research interests relate to electronic transport and optical properties of the following field of study:

• Superconducting qubits
• Exciton science
• Bose-Einstein condensate
• 2D materials (graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides, etc.)
• Plasmonics

In 2024, He joins UQ as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow under an ARC Linkage Project "Surface and Interface Engineering for Superconducting Quantum Circuits," pursuing high-quality superconducting quantum circuits using surface engineering strategies.

Please find his publication list via google scholar profile https://scholar.google.com.tw/citations?user=EvKa9qIAAAAJ&hl=en

Stephen is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Bernhardt group at the University of Queensland. His current research is focused on the theory of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and molecular dynamics.

Stephen completed a double degree in electrical engineering and physics at James Cook University, followed by a PhD in physics, also at James Cook University, under the supervision of Prof. Ronald White and Dr Bronson Philippa, as well as the University of Queensland's Prof. Paul Burn and Prof. Alan Mark. His PhD focused on using kinetic Monte-Carlo simulations of charge and exciton dynamics, coupled with atomistic molecular dynamics deposition simulations to establish a better understanding of structure-property relationships in organic semiconductors, particularly organic light-emitting diodes.

Dr Tebyetekerwa is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Sub-Group Leader at UQ Dow Centre for Sustainable Engineering Innovation and ARC Centre of Excellence for Green Electrochemical Transformation of Carbon Dioxide(GETCO2), working with Professor Xiwang Zhang. His current main research interests at UQ School of Chemical Engineering rotate around water and electrochemical systems such as electrochemical CO2 capture and conversion to valuable chemicals and electrochemical production of hydrogen peroxide and/or hydrogen. He is deeply interested in designing scalable and industry-relevant chemical cells and generators. He completed his PhD from The Australian National University (ANU), where his research focused on optical spectroscopy and advanced characterization of semiconducting materials and their devices (Supervised by Prof Dan Macdonald, A/Prof. Dr. Hieu T. Nguyen and Prof. Yuerui (Larry) Lu). Dr Tebyetekerwa also holds a Master's in Materials Processing Engineering from Donghua University, Shanghai, where his research focused on fibrous materials for flexible energy storage (Supervised by Academician Meifang Zhu and A/Prof Shengyuan Yang). Mike supervises projects for undergraduate, master's, and PhD students on topics related to the following research interests;

1. Scalable electrochemical production of hydrogen peroxide and/or hydrogen from water*
2. Scalable electrochemical CO2 capture and reduction to valuable chemicals*
3. Reconstructed graphite for sodium-ion batteries
4. High surface area electrospun fibre materials for various applications
5. Aggregation-induced emission (AIE) molecules and their engineered applications
6. Light-matter understanding of 2D materials and other semiconductor materials for optoelectronics*

*Currently funded and active ongoing projects

Featured works

• 2022: His work on 2D materials (https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/S2666-3864(21)00213-7) was selected in the Cell Reports Physical Science “Influential papers-2021” and "Editor's Choice-2021" collection.
• 2021: His works (https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2017/sc/c8ee02607f) and other co-authored works (https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abb8687), ( https://doi.org/10.1016/j.carbon.2017.11.012 ) are listed as "Highly Cited Papers" and "Hot Papers" in Web of Science.
• 2020:His work on nanofibers has continuously been listed as one of the highly cited articles for Advanced Fiber Materials (https://doi.org/10.1007/s42765-020-00049-5), since it was published to date.
• 2019:His work on nanofibers ( https://doi.org/10.1021/acsaem.7b00057 ) was listed as the most-read article for ACS Applied Energy Materials in 2018.

In addition to his research, Mike lectures Sustainable Energy Technologies and Supply Systems (ENGY7000) course as part of the Master of Sustainable Energy (MSE) program.

A/Prof Yao-Zhong Zhang's research interests are in: Algebraic structures, quantum (super)integrable systems, (quasi-)exactly solvable models, supersymmetry, and conformal field theory.

Yao-Zhong Zhang received his PhD from Northwest University, China, in 1988 under the supervision of Prof Bo-Yu Hou. He spent 12 years in Europe, Japan and Australia as Postdoctoral/Research Fellow, before becoming in 2001 a permament staff member as a Senior Lecturer in Mathematics of the University of Queensland. Since 2006, he has been Reader/Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Queensland.

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.

Julian A. Steele received his Ph.D. in physics from The Institute for Superconducting and Electronic Materials (ISEM), University of Wollongong, before undertaking postdoctoral work at KU Leuven (Belgium) and UC Berkeley (USA). From 2023, he began a DECRA Fellowship at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), The University of Queensland, working on a range of condensed matter topics, within which phase transition phenomena in metal halide perovskite semiconductors feature heavily.

Professor Stace completed his PhD at the Cavendish Lab, University of Cambridge in the UK on quantum computing, followed by postdoctoral research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, also at Cambridge, and Queens' College, Cambridge. Since 2006, he has held various ARC research fellowships, most recently a Future Fellowship (2015-2019).

His research topics include device physics for quantum computing solid-state and atomic systems, quantum error correction, and quantum measurement and precision sensing.

Professor Stace is the Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Engineered Quantum Systems (equs.org).

Professor Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop’s research interests are in the fields of atom optics, laser micromanipulation, nano optics, quantum computing and biophotonics.

She has long standing experience with lasers, linear and nonlinear high-resolution spectroscopy, laser micromanipulation, and atom cooling and trapping. She was one of the originators of the widely used laser enhanced ionisation spectroscopy technique and is well known for her recent work in laser micromanipulation. She has been also working (Nanotechnology Laboratory, Göteborg, Sweden) in the field of nano- and microfabrication in order to produce the microstructures needed for optically driven micromachines and tips for the scanning force microscopy with optically trapped stylus. Recently she led the team that observed dynamical tunnelling in quantum chaotic system. Additionally Prof. Rubinsztein-Dunlop has led the new effort into development of new nano-structured quantum dots for quantum computing and other advanced device related applications.