Victor Anggono received his PhD in 2007 from the University of Sydney and undertook his postdoctoral training at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. In 2012, Dr Anggono returned to Australia as an NHMRC CJ Martin Research Fellow and joined the Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland, where he is currently a Senior Research Fellow and Group Leader at the Clem Jones Centre for Ageing Dementia Research. His research aims to understand the molecular mechanisms of synaptic vesicle and glutamate receptor trafficking in neurons, processes that are essential for synaptic transmission, plasticity, learning and memory, and how their dysregulations impact on the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative diseases and neuropsychiatric disorders. Dr Anggono has published in journals such as Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Journal of Neuroscience and Cell Reports, and has attracted more than 1500 citations. For his works, Dr Anggono was awarded the Boomerang Award (Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 2011), the Young Scientist Award (Federation of Asian and Oceanian Biochemists and Molecular Biologists, 2015), the Science to Art Award (NHMRC, 2015) and more recently the Young Investigator Award (Asian-Pacific Society for Neurochemistry, 2016).

Professor Elizabeth (Lizzie) Coulson did her undergraduate Honours degree at the University of Melbourne, majoring in Genetics and Biochemistry. Her PhD (1997) in the Department of Pathology, University of Melbourne, with Professor Colin Masters, was on the normal function of the amyloid precursor protein of Alzheimer's disease. Following a year at the ZMBH, University of Heidelberg, Germany, she pursued postdoctoral work studying neuronal cell death in neurodegeneration and development at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute with Professor Perry Bartlett before being recruited in 2003 to the University of Queensland as a founding member of the Queensland Brain Institute. She was appointed Professor in 2015, joining the School of Biomedical Sciences and becoming Deputy Head of School in 2016/7 and 2019 and Head of School in 2020. She maintains a 20% Queensland Brain Institutes appointment and is a member of the Clem Jones Centre for Ageing Dementia Research.

Her Lab webpage is: Coulson Lab - Neurotrophin - School of Biomedical Sciences ...

Queensland Brain Institute

Dr Massimo A. Hilliard received his PhD in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Biology in 2001 from the University of Naples, Italy. His experimental work, performed at the Institute of Genetics and Biophysics of the CNR (Italian National Council of Research), was aimed at understanding the neuronal and genetic basis of aversive taste behavior (bitter taste) in C. elegans.

During his first postdoc at the University of California, San Diego, using the Ca2+ indicator Cameleon he published the first direct visualisation of chemosensory activity in C. elegans neurons. In his second postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco and at The Rockefeller University, he switched from neuronal function to neuronal development, focusing in particular on how neurons establish and orient their polarity with respect to extracellular cues.

From September 2007, he is at the Queensland Brain Institute where he established an independent laboratory.

Professor Frederic Meunier obtained his Masters degree in Neurophysiology at the Paris XI University, France in 1992 and completed his Ph.D in Neurobiology at the CNRS in Gif-sur-Yvette, France in 1996. He was the recipient of a European Biotechnology Fellowship and went on to postgraduate work at the Department of Biochemistry at Imperial College (1997-1999) and at Cancer Research UK (2000-2002) in London, UK. After a short sabbatical at the LMB-MRC in Cambridge (UK), he became a group leader at the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Queensland (Australia) in 2003. He joined the Queensland Brain Institute of the University of Queensland in 2007 and obtained an NHMRC senior research fellowship in 2009 renewed in 2014 with promotion. He became Professor in 2014 at the Queensland Brain Institute and is currently part of the Centre for Ageing Dementia Research.

Prof Nestor joined the Queensland Brain Institute in October/2017 and has a conjoint appointment as a cognitive neurologist at Mater Misericordiae Ltd (Mater Hospital).

His particular interests include understanding the earliest stages of Alzheimer's disease (i.e. before dementia is established); atypical forms of dementia with a particular focus on primary progressive aphasia and dementias related to Parkinson's and Lewy body diseases; and improving differential diagnosis between the major categories of neurodegenerative diseases.

He works on development of neuropsychological tests of cognition, both to accurately track change over time and improve diagnostic accuracy between the major diseases causing dementia. He also uses multi-modal imaging (magnetic resonance imaging [MRI] and positron emission tomography [PET]) to understand the sequence of events occurring in degenerative brain diseases (particularly Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson's disease, motor neuron disease [ALS], progressive supranuclear palsy [PSP] and corticobasal degeneration [CBD]) and identify novel biomarkers. A major focus of his is on developing novel approaches to MR imaging for single subject pathological diagnoses that can be exported into the everyday clinical setting; recent examples include diffusion tensor imaging to identify PSP and CBD (Sajjadi et al, 2013) and quantitative susceptibility mapping in Parkinson's disease (Acosta-Cabornero et al, 2013).

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.

Follow the Zuryn lab on Twitter: @zurynlab

Visit the Zuryn lab website.

Professor Gail Robinson holds a joint Queensland Brain Institute and the School of Psychology appointment. She has been a clinical neuropsychologist and researcher for ~25 years in Australia and in London (UK), where she spent 14 years at the dynamic and historic National Hospital of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London. In 2010, she transitioned from a clinical role to an academic position at The University of Queensland where was Director of the Clinical Neuropsychology Doctoral programme (2010-2018), taking up this lead role again in 2023. Her clinical research is focused on both theoretical questions about brain-behaviour relationships like the crucial mechanisms for the executive control of language, and clinical questions regarding cognitive assessment and management of various pathologies including neurodegenerative disorders, neurodevelopmental disorders, brain tumours and stroke. Professor Robinson has attracted internal and national funding; she Leads the Neuropsychology Core of a large-scale longitudinal and multidisciplinary NHMRC Dementia Team Research grant (Prospective Imaging Study of Ageing: Genes, Brain and Behaviour - PISA). She was the recipient of an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) in 2012 and a NHMRC Boosting Dementia Research Leadership Fellowship in 2018 in which she has been focused on early neurocognitive diagnostic indicators for dementia.