2026 Archives - Page 2 of 7

Dr Lei Bao

Many diseases remain difficult to detect early and treat effectively because the biological environments around them are constantly changing, while many current treatments remain largely passive. This can delay healing, reduce treatment effectiveness, and place significant burdens on patients, carers, and healthcare systems.

Dr Lei Bao is developing smart nanotechnologies that can sense changes in the body and respond with treatment when and where it is needed. Her team has created intelligent wound dressings that monitor signs of infection and inflammation while delivering therapy to support healing, with future potential for integration into digital and remote healthcare. Building on this research, she is now developing light-responsive nanotechnologies for precision cancer treatment that target tumours, activate therapy at the disease site and stimulate the body’s immune response.

By bringing together materials engineering, chemistry and biomedical science, Lei aims to move healthcare beyond passive treatment towards smarter, more responsive and personalised care, improving outcomes for people with complex and difficult-to-treat conditions.

Dr Shanmuga Sundar Dhanabalan

As an ARC Industry Fellow and Deputy Director of the Centre for Technology Infusion, Dr Shanmuga Sundar Dhanabalan focuses on developing affordable, easy-to-use wearable devices that make healthcare simpler, enable earlier diagnosis, and improve accessibility, particularly for people living in rural and remote communities.

Dr Dhanabalan leads the Soft Electronics, Materials, and Sensors (SEMS) Research Group in the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences at La Trobe University, where his team develops flexible, stretchable sensors and wearable devices for continuous, real-time health monitoring. Working closely with industry and clinical partners, the team has developed smart mattresses for elderly care, wearable heart-monitoring systems, non-invasive glucose sensors, and fall-prevention technologies. They are also developing smart menstrual pads and point-of-care devices for the early detection of conditions such as anaemia, diabetes, and endometriosis, bringing healthcare closer to everyday life.

Dr Dhanabalan believes that the greatest reward is seeing engineering move beyond the laboratory and into people’s homes, where it can detect health problems early and make healthcare more proactive, affordable, and accessible for everyone.

Dr Rebecca Morris

Rebecca’s research focuses on harnessing nature to help protect coastlines from erosion, storms, and rising sea levels while restoring the ecosystems that support healthy oceans. Rather than relying solely on concrete seawalls or rock structures, she develops and evaluates “living shorelines” that use habitats such as oyster and coral reefs, coastal vegetation, dunes, and beaches as natural coastal defences. These ecosystems can absorb wave energy and reduce erosion, while improving water quality, supporting fisheries, storing carbon, providing habitat for marine life, and delivering important social and cultural benefits to coastal communities.

Her work brings together ecology, engineering, and social science to understand how nature-based solutions function in the real world and how they can be designed to maximise both coastal protection and environmental benefits. Through interdisciplinary research and collaboration with governments, industry, and communities, she and her collaborators develop the evidence, guidelines, and practical tools needed to plan, implement, and evaluate coastal restoration.

Ultimately, her goal is to provide science-based solutions that help communities adapt to climate change by creating coastlines that are more resilient, support biodiversity, and deliver lasting environmental, social, and economic benefits.

A/Prof Milad Haghani

Dr Milad Haghani

Modern cities are becoming increasingly complex, interconnected, and densely populated. As a result, societies continue to face preventable deaths and injuries across transport systems, crowded places, disasters, and other urban environments despite major advances in engineering and technology. Many of these risks cannot be addressed through improvements to physical or digital infrastructure alone. They also require a better understanding of the human element: how people perceive risk, make decisions, and behave in complex environments. Associate Professor Haghani’s research addresses this challenge by generating the science, empirical evidence, engineering tools, and digital solutions needed to integrate the behavioural and engineering dimensions of urban safety.

Associate Professor Milad Haghani is an engineer with a keen interest in social science and a public safety researcher at the University of Melbourne. He studies social infrastructure just as much as he studies physical and digital infrastructure, recognising that safer cities depend as much on people as they do on technology and engineering. His work develops the science, mathematical tools, digital solutions, and empirical evidence needed to reduce preventable death and injury in transport systems, crowded places, disasters, and other risk-prone urban environments.

Milad is passionate about translating safety science into knowledge that people can understand and apply in everyday life. Through media, public engagement, professional training, and the international Crowd Safety Summit that he founded, he works to make complex science accessible to communities, practitioners, and policymakers. His research has informed policy, professional practice, and public debate in Australia and internationally. He has published more than 120 peer-reviewed papers, including in Science and Nature, but hopes his greatest contribution will be ensuring that his work translates into better policies and practices that make communities safer.

Dr Helena Wang

As the world transitions to clean energy, millions of batteries and solar panels will reach the end of their life over the coming decades. These waste streams contain valuable critical minerals but are difficult to recycle using current technologies, leading to resource loss and environmental challenges. Dr Helena Wang’s research addresses how these valuable materials can be recovered sustainably to support a circular economy and secure future supplies of critical resources.

Dr Wang develops innovative electrochemical and materials engineering technologies to recover critical metals from end-of-life batteries and solar panels while reducing energy use and chemical waste. Her research has advanced sustainable recycling processes and resource recovery technologies that help transform waste into valuable materials. She is working closely with industry and international collaborators to translate these technologies towards real-world applications that support Australia’s clean energy transition.

Dr Ashleigh Hood

How did life evolve on Earth and how has life survived for billions of years on our planet? These are some of the most fundamental questions in science, yet we still only have a very limited understanding of how we got here. Beyond ourselves, understanding how our planet has remained habitable to life over Earth’s long history is a crucial part in the search for life elsewhere.

It’s clear that the evolution of life on Earth is intimately tied to conditions in Earth’s surface environments; our continents, oceans, atmosphere and climate. Over long time scales, the evolution, radiation and extinction of life appears to be linked to broad changes in our climate, and the composition of our oceans and atmosphere. However, deciphering environmental conditions from billions of years ago is difficult, as the only record of this is locked up in ancient rocks.

Ashleigh Hood is a field-based geologist who incorporates multidisciplinary methods to broadly understand the long-term evolution of the Earth’s environments, climates and ecosystems using sedimentary rocks. Dr. Hood is interested in the impact of large changes in the Earth system–including climate change and the oxygenation of the atmosphere-ocean system–in driving environmental evolution and the radiation and extinction of life.

This research uses ancient reef systems and sediments preserved in the geological record as windows into ancient ecosystems. Dr. Hood’s group’s research on Precambrian reefs reveals ancient oceans full of metals; an anoxic world transitioning from microbial to animal ecosystems. This collaborative research shows how the oceans gradually gained oxygen and supported more complex life over billions of years, and how trees became the true engineers of our modern environment.

At the moment, Dr. Hood is mapping strata in the Flinders Ranges which were formed at the dawn of animal life. These rocks represent Earth’s most extreme ice age, a frozen planet known as “Snowball Earth”. Her work aims to uncover these ancient frozen ocean habitats, investigate how complex life might have survived, and understand how Earth’s rock cycle regulates recovery from severe climate change.

Dr Elizabeth Hill

Dr Lizz Hill addresses an often-overlooked barrier to fair and effective mental health care: language skills. Many children and young people experiencing mental health difficulties also have trouble understanding or using spoken language. This can include developmental language disorder (DLD), a lifelong condition that affects how people understand and communicate with others. Research suggests that language challenges may affect up to 80% of young people with mental health difficulties, yet they are not routinely recognised in mental health services.

Communication is central to almost every part of mental health care. Young people must be able to describe their experiences, understand questions and explanations, and use therapeutic strategies in their everyday lives. These tasks can be especially difficult for someone with language challenges.

When services do not recognise or accommodate these needs, young people may be misunderstood or viewed as disengaged. They may struggle to access care, participate fully in therapy, or benefit from treatments that rely heavily on conversation. In some cases, they may be excluded from support altogether. Lizz’s research seeks to make this hidden inequity visible and ensure that young people can access mental health care, regardless of how they understand or use language.

Lizz’s research brings together young people and families with speech pathologists, mental health professionals, educators, researchers, and community organisations to make mental health care more accessible. Rather than developing solutions in isolation, she works in partnership with the people who will use them. This ensures that new approaches reflect lived experience and can be applied in real-world settings.

She co-designs and evaluates practical interventions, resources, and workforce training that help professionals recognise language challenges and adapt the way they communicate. This may include using clearer language, improving how information is presented, checking understanding, and making therapeutic activities easier to use in everyday life.

Lizz’s research spans schools, universities, community services, and clinical settings. She also strengthens the ability of organisations and communities to identify communication barriers and advocate for more equitable support. By connecting research with teaching, professional training, and community partnerships, Lizz helps translate evidence into lasting changes in practice.

Ultimately, her work aims to ensure that communication differences do not prevent young people from receiving effective mental health care. She is building the evidence, practical tools, and workforce capability needed to create services that are more inclusive, responsive, and equitable.

Dr Mehwish Nasim

Dr Mehwish Nasim studies a growing challenge at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and society: how AI can influence what people think, believe and share. As AI systems become more embedded in everyday life, they can amplify misinformation, reinforce bias and shape human behaviour in ways that are difficult to predict or control. Her work asks how language, culture and personality affect the way people interact with AI, and how these differences can create risks for online safety, trust and responsible AI use.

Dr Nasim combines artificial intelligence, network science, psychology and mathematical modelling to understand how AI influences human behaviour, communication and decision-making. Her research has developed models of how misinformation and social influence spread through networks, and has examined how personality and cultural context shape the behaviour of large language models. She now leads research on human–AI alignment, including how AI systems infer and respond to human traits, values and communication styles. Her goal is to help build AI that is safer, more transparent and better aligned with the diverse communities it serves.

Dr Chloe Maxwell-Smith

Cancer touches almost every Australian family, yet critical opportunities to improve outcomes are being missed at both ends of the cancer journey. Many people, particularly in regional and rural communities, delay screening or seeking help for concerning symptoms, meaning cancers are often diagnosed later than they could be, especially where access to information and health services is limited. At the other end of the journey, people frequently struggle to rebuild healthy routines after cancer treatment. Fatigue, pain, time pressures, and reduced confidence can be obstacles to healthy living with and after cancer, leaving many Australians at greater risk of comorbidities and poor long-term clinical and health outcomes.

Dr Chloe Maxwell-Smith works directly with communities and health services to design and test practical solutions grounded in clinical health psychology and behavioural medicine. In partnership with Cancer Council WA, she has evaluated and refined state-wide cancer awareness campaign messaging, working with rural consumers and lived experience experts to make early diagnosis messaging culturally appropriate for regional Australians. Her research investigates strategies to overcome psychological barriers and encourage people to act, such as by visiting a GP when symptoms persist.

For those who have completed cancer treatment, Dr Chloe Maxwell-Smith’s research identifies psychosocial and environmental barriers that prevent individuals from being physically active and adopting healthier routines. She has designed interventions using health professional guidance and wearable activity trackers, with structured goal setting and action planning, to rebuild confidence, motivation, and physical activity levels after cancer. These findings are cited in international health policy and have been translated into training resources for health professionals, including with pharmacists and physiotherapists, extending their impact into clinical and community care.

Dr Marcus Korb

Many of the medicines, materials and chemical products we use every day rely on rare and expensive metals such as palladium and platinum. These metals are limited resources, expensive to obtain and vulnerable to global supply disruptions. At the same time, society faces growing challenges such as antimicrobial resistance, which requires entirely new approaches to drug discovery. Marcus Korb’s research asks whether one of the most abundant metals on Earth – iron – can provide solutions to both problems.

Marcus Korb is developing new ways to use iron in chemistry, turning this abundant and inexpensive metal into a tool for making important molecules and potentially new medicines. His team has developed iron-based systems that can perform chemical reactions traditionally carried out using precious metals. They are also exploring iron in the fight against antimicrobial resistance. Because bacteria need iron to survive, the team designs synthetic iron-containing molecules that can exploit this dependence and turn it against them. Early results show activity against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, opening a potential new direction for antimicrobial development.