Professor Pankaj Sah is Director of the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) at The University of Queensland (UQ). He is renowned for his work in understanding the neural circuitry of the amygdala, an area of the brain that plays a central role in learning and memory formation. Dysfunction of the amygdala leads to a host of anxiety-related disorders. His laboratory uses a combination of molecular tools, electrophysiology, anatomical reconstruction, calcium imaging and behavioural studies to examine the electrophysiological signatures of different brain regions and their impact on disease. Recently, his laboratory has been working with patients undergoing electrode implantation for deep brain stimulation, which is used to treat a variety of disorders such as Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome and essential tremor. Professor Sah trained in medicine at The University of New South Wales and, after completing his internship, gained a PhD from the Australian National University. Following postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco, and UQ, he established his own laboratory at the University of Newcastle in 1994. He then joined the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University as a group leader in 1997. He was recruited to QBI as a founding member in 2003, and has been Director since July 2015. Professor Sah has published over 110 papers in international peer-reviewed journals. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Nature Partner Journal npj Science of Learning, the first journal to bring together the findings of neuroscientists, psychologists, and education researchers to understand how the brain learns.

Karen Thorpe is Australian Research Council, Laureate Professor and Group Leader in Child Development, Education and Care at the Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland. Her research is grounded in the understanding that early learning experiences shape brain development and are critical in establishing trajectories of health, social inclusion and learning across the lifespan. A particular focus of her work is early care and education environments including parenting, parent work, quality of care and education, and the early years workforce.

Karen leads a multi-disciplinary team of developmental scientists undertaking large scale longitudinal studies with embedded studies to explicate mechanisms that enable or limit children's life chances. She was Foundation Psychologist on the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children at the University of Bristol, UK; led the evaluation of the Preparing School Trial for Queensland Government; led the Queensland team of the E4Kids study of quality in Australian Early Education and Care and a recent data linkage project with Queensland Government to track participants through their school journey. In partnership with Queensland Government, Goodstart Early Learning and the Creche and Kindergarten Association she led a large population study of the Australian ECEC workforce (ARC Linkage). Her current research, as a chief investigator on the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families across the life course, and through an ARC Laureate fellowship, is to examine barriers to providing high quality early learning services in developmentally vulnerable communities.

In 2013 and again in 2019 Karen was named by the Australian Financial Review as among Australia's 100 Women of Influence for the impacts of her research on educational and family policy. In 2020 she was recognised by Australian Government, Advance Global Awards for her international contribution to education. Karen chairs the Australian Early Years Reference Council for Evidence for Learning, Australia whose remit is to build a strong evidence-base in early childhood education and care with focus on translation into policy and practice. She is also director on the board of the Australian Research Council for Children and Youth and advisor to the national board of Beyond Blue – Be You.

Dr. Susannah Tye joined the Queensland Brain Institute in 2017 and has established a research program within the Asia Pacific Centre for Neuromodulation (QLD, Australia). Before returning to Australia, Dr. Tye directed the Translational Neuroscience Laboratory at the Mayo Clinic (2012-2017). While there she led efforts to develop brain stimulation devices (for rodents and humans) that can quantify neural activity and neurotransmitter dynamics in the living brain. This body of work now forms the basis of the neuropsychiatric arm of the Mayo Clinic’s Deep Brain Stimulation Consortium. Her specific research expertise are in utilising voltammetric (electrochemical) recording techniques to monitor rapid, synaptic neurotransmission in the living brain.

Dr. Tye has over ten years of experience studying neuromodulation in preclinical rodent models and human patients. Her long-term goal is to bridge preclinical and clinical studies to maximise translational impact, specifically in terms of improving patient outcomes for those with severe refractory psychiatric illness. Towards this end, she maintains many international collaborations with both clinical and basic science researchers. Dr. Tye also has a longstanding interest in mentoring young scientists to help them expand their skills in preclinical and basic science research and achieve a successful research career.

Professor Bruno van Swinderen received his PhD in Evolutionary and Population Biology in 1998 from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. His graduate work was on general anesthesia in a Caenorhabditis elegans model, applying both quantitative genetics and molecular genetic approaches. For his postdoc at The Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in San Diego, California (1999-2003), he switched to Drosophila melanogaster to develop methods of studying perception in the fruit-fly model. He ran a lab at NSI from 2003 to late 2007.

Professor van Swinderen established a new laboratory at the Queensland Brain Institute in February 2008.

Bruno van Swinderen's group use Drosophila as a genetic model system to study mechanisms of perception in the brain and are interested in three phenomena: selective attention, sleep, and general anesthesia. Their focus is on visual perception and how it is affected by these different arousal states. Their current effort is in understanding how sleep regulates selective attention and predictive processing. Toward this goal, they use various novel visual paradigms in a Drosophila molecular genetics context. The lab is also focussed on understanding presynaptic mechamisms of general anaesthesia, with a view to uncovering new strategies to improve recovery from this common medical procedure.

The Vukovic laboratory investigates how brain function is sculpted and influenced by the immune system. Specifically, we examine the role of brain's main resident immune cell population (i.e. microglia), as well as various peripheral immune cells, on learning and memory in mice. We are interested in defining the contribution of immune cells to such higher cognitive tasks, including for neuroinflammatory conditions where learning and memory deficits can occur, e.g. following traumatic brain injury, cancer treatment, and ageing. We have established an array of genetic and pharmacological tools alongside robust behavioural assays to directly probe the function of these immune cells in both the healthy and diseased brain. The ultimate goal of our work is to link cellular and molecular events to altered behaviour, and to harness the brain's intrinsic regenerative potential for stimulating optimal cognitive function.

A neuroimmunologist, Dr Vukovic received her PhD in 2008 from The University of Western Australia after working on the repair of injured nerve cell connections. She joined QBI in 2009 to work in Professor Perry Bartlett's laboratory as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, before being awarded a Queensland Government Smart Futures Fellowship to continue her research into the importance of adult neurogenesis for behaviour and how microglia influence this process in ageing. Dr Vukovic demonstrated that microglia can exert a dual and opposing influence over adult neurogenesis (the birth of new neurons) in the hippocampus under different physiological conditions, namely exercise and ageing, and that signalling through the chemokine receptor, CX3CR1, critically contributes towards this (Vukovic et al., 2012, J Neurosci). Dr Vukovic also generated novel evidence that ongoing neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus is critical for new learning but does not play a role in memory recall (Vukovic et al., 2013, J Neurosci).

Dr Vukovic was awarded an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2015-2018) and was jointly appointed as a group leader by the UQ School of Biomedical Sciences (SBMS) and QBI in 2015. She heads the Neuroimmunology and Cognition team investigating the interactions between the brain and the immune system in health and disease.

Currently, the group is working on three main projects:

1. Identification of microglia-derived molecules that support neuronal survival and stimulate neural stem/progenitor cell expansion
2. Characterisation of immune cell contribution to changes in neuronal connectivity
3. Immune cell responses to cancer treatment, and their effect on learning and memory

Dr Adam Walker received his BSc(Hons) in Biochemistry from the University of Tasmania, and PhD in Neuroscience from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms of motor neuron disease (MND). He undertook a postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Virginia Lee at the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, University of Pennsylvania (2011-2015), developing new transgenic TDP-43 mouse models of disease. Dr Walker was previously an NHMRC CJ Martin Overseas Biomedical Research Fellow and was awarded an NHMRC RD Wright Career Development Fellowship (2018-2022), to continue his research on neurodegenerative diseases. His research has been supported by fellowships and project grants from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian National Foundation for Medical Research and Innovation, Dementia Australia, Motor Neuron Disease Research Institute of Australia, MonSTaR Foundation and the Cure for MND Foundation.

Dr Tara Walker is a Senior Research Associate at the Queensland Brain Institute. Dr Walker's group is investigating the mechanisms governing the lifelong production of neurons in the adult brain (adult neurogenesis). Tara studied Biotechnology as an undergraduate at the Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane, Australia), before carrying out her PhD in the field of Plant Biotechnology. In 2003 she made the transition to neuroscience, joining the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) and the group of Professor Perry Bartlett. Here she became interested in the field of adult hippocampal neurogenesis, particularly in its activity-dependent regulation. In 2010, she joined the group of Professor Gerd Kempermann at the Center for Regenerative Therapies in Dresden, Germany, where she was awarded a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship in 2011. In July 2018 she returned to QBI to take up a position in the newly developed Centre for Restorative Neurosciences as a Senior Research Associate, where she will apply her knowledge of neural stem cell biology to stroke research.

Dr. Whitmire is a group leader at the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) and a senior lecturer in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at The University of Queensland (UQ). She is a leading expert in understanding how sensory information is represented along the neuraxis from the neurons in the skin that sense external stimuli to the central representation in the thalamocortical circuit. She operates at the interface of neuroscience and engineering to generate novel insights into information representation in the brain. Her laboratory uses a combination of tools to record from populations of neurons, manipulate the activity of those neurons, and model the underlying neural circuitry. Dr. Whitmire trained as a Biomedical Engineer at North Carolina State University (B. S.) and Georgia Institute of Technology/Emory Universty (Ph.D.). Following postdoctoral work at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, she established her own laboratory at The University of Queensland in 2023.

Dr Steven Zuryn is a molecular geneticist within the Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland. After training as a PhD in genetics, he undertook postdoctoral reseach at the Institut Génétique Biologie Moléculaire Cellulaire (IGBMC) in Strasbourg, France. He now leads an international and diverse team of postdoctoral, PhD, Honours, and undergraduate investigators studying epigenetics and mitochondrial biology. His laboratory's work focuses on the role and impact of mitochondrial dysfunction in neurodegenerative diseases and is particularly fascinated with mutations that accumulate within the mitochondria's own genome during ageing. His research has been published in the high profile journals Science, Nature Cell Biology, and Nature Communications and has appeared in multiple mainstream media outlets. For his research, he has received multiple international prizes and fellowships, been awarded grants from the NHMRC and ARC as primary chief investigator and is generously supported as a fellow of the Stafford Fox Research Foundation. Steven is passionate about communicating the critical importance of fundamental scientific research as a long-term human endeavour.

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