"Gender in Science" Round Table Speakers

  • "Gender in Science" Round Table Speakers

Laura Bray – Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of the ARC Training Centre for Cell and Tissue Engineering Technologies, IHBI, Queensland University of Technology, Australia.

Dr Laura Bray is a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of the ARC Training Centre for Cell and Tissue Engineering Technologies. She graduated with first class honours in Biomedical Science followed by a PhD at QUT. At the end of 2012, Dr Bray was awarded the inaugural Prime Minister’s Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Postdoctoral Award (awarded to only one woman in Australia), which she accepted and joined the group of Professor Carsten Werner at the Leibniz Institute for Polymer Research in Dresden, Germany. After 3 years working in Dresden, from 2013-2016, Dr Bray received a National Breast Cancer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Cure Cancer Australia project grant and moved her research to the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia in March 2016. Through the use of state of the art matrix engineering techniques, her work has led to a number of significant advances in knowledge in the area of 3D tissue engineering and culture techniques. Her work has helped to clarify the potential role of the matrix environment in 3D cell cultivation and has provided new insights into mimicking the natural tissue environment in vitro.

To learn more about Laura, click HERE. 

 

Melissa Bull – Professor of Justice & Law and Director of the QUT Centre for Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Australia.

Professor Melissa Bull joined QUT School of Justice as Director of QUT Centre for Justice in September 2019.  Prior to this Melissa worked in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University.  While at Griffith University Melissa held a number of research leadership roles, including Deputy Director and then Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security (2012-15). From 2016 she was the leader of the Justice, Law and Society research program in the Griffith Criminology Institute.

Melissa’s two main areas of research include drug regulation and policing diversity.  Her current research projects include work that focuses on harm reduction and drug law reform in China and Australia, as well as a project with colleagues from the University of Queensland that explores new ways of thinking about policing in Pacific Island states.

Melissa has published widely on drug regulation and drug control, sentencing and punishment, long term immigration detention, community policing and diversity, counter terrorism narratives and prevention programs, and gender violence in Pacific island states.

To learn more about Melissa, click HERE. 

 

Megan Godwin – PhD Candidate, BEST, QUT Business School, Queensland University of Technology, Australia.

PhD candidate Megan Godwin is investigating Australian women’s preventative health behaviours in relation to mental health. The study is called ‘coping and cracking’. The aim of the study is to have a deeper understanding of how health behaviours and mental health (as a variable for life satisfaction) changes over time. The study seeks to identify behavioural biases that impact women’s decision making in relation to health behaviours – hence the name coping or cracking – why do some women appear to ‘cope’ and others ‘crack’ with demands of life. Having two PhD supervisors from different fields (marketing and economics) has meant learning a new language both in conceptualisation and methods for studies. Megan feels that the most rewarding aspect of aligning with BEST is working with researchers from varying disciplines to achieve social good.

To learn more about Megan, click HERE. 

 

Annette Quayle – Senior Lecturer in the School of Accountancy, QUT Business School, Queensland University of Technology, Australia.

Dr Annette Quayle’s research focuses on public governance problems at the intersection of politics and society. She’s looking for ways to improve how the public sector, often in collaboration with the private and non-profit sectors, govern and manage complex problems such as climate change, refugees, fraud and corruption.

Annette’s area of management accounting focuses on the structures and controls we build around people that try to govern and control their behaviour. Working with BEST, we can develop these further through the tools and techniques of behavioural economics. Currently she is working with BEST to understand if the $ amount of government spending announcements influences voter choice in elections.

To learn more about Annette, click HERE. 

 

Stephen Whyte – Research Fellow and Deputy Program Lead (Behavioural Economics and Public Policy), BEST, QUT Business School, Queensland University of Technology, Australia.

Dr Stephen Whyte is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Behavioural Economics in the School of Economics & Finance, QUT. His research focus explores large scale decision making in mate choice settings. His work takes a multi-disciplinary approach in studying key sex differences in human behaviour, with work that bridges the fields of applied micro-economics, personality & social psychology, and evolutionary biology. His most recent research has explored such diverse topics as sex differences in nonbinary gender identification, male & female decision making in assisted reproductive & donor insemination medical environments, and preferences vs choice in cyber dating markets. His primary research interest lies in the area of applied micro-economics, but he has also published in journals with a social psychology, evolutionary psychology, health, scientometric, cyber-psychology, reproductive medicine and biology focus.

To learn more about Stephen, click HERE. 

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