At the November Lunch Club, Prof Mia Woodruff and Dr Pawel Mieszczanek shared their career journeys with the CBT Community.
Prof Woodruff is an internationally recognised leader in tissue engineering and biofabrication and heads QUT’s Biofabrication and Tissue Morphology Group, advancing 3D printing technologies for patient-specific tissues and organs. Dr Mieszczanek is Chief Technology Officer at Gelomics and leads innovations in advanced laboratory systems and AI for biomedical research. Pawel bridges academia and industry, turning complex scientific challenges into impactful technologies.
Prof Mia Woodruff: Academia – From ECR to Prof, learning when to Pivot
Mia attained her undergraduate degree and PhD at the University of Nottingham, UK) and undertook postdoctoral research at the National university of Singapore, She joined QUT in 2009 and became Professor in 2019. CI Woodruff is an expert in bone tissue engineering with extensive experience in all aspects of biomaterial scaffold fabrication techniques and pre-clinical models. She founded QUT’s Biofabrication and Tissue morphology group (BTM) in 2011. She is the recipient of a QUT Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellowship (2009-2012), an ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2011-2014), the Women in Technology QLD Life Sciences Research Leader Award in 2018, the QUT Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence, and the Rose-Anne Kelso Commemorative Award in 2017 for her “endeavours, passion and dedication to the health and life sciences industry”. She was also the winner of the Queensland Young Tall Poppy Science Award in 2013 and in 2014 was recognised in Qweekend’s 50 Best and Brightest. She has published over 200 papers with 14,000 citations and has been a CI on over $10 million in research grants, $1M in equipment funding and $5M in advance Queensland industry funding. She is an external advisory board member for the UK’s EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Adv. Biomedical Materials (Uni Manchester, Sheffield) overseeing scientific content, research impact/training and ED activities for 70 PhD projects (2019-2025). Supported by 2 lead-CI grants (MRFF 2024-2026 and AEA 2025), Woodruff recently co-founded Aptium.ai – a spin out company from QUT which will take her teams patented 4D scanning technology to market, which can instantaneously capture both still and moving 3D anatomical images and launched 2 devices at the Australian Podiatry conference in June 2025.
Dr Pawel Mieszczanek Navigating the unknown: lessons from my journey from student to startup CTO
Dr. Pawel Mieszczanek is the Chief Technology Officer at Gelomics, where he leads the development of advanced laboratory systems and AI-powered data platforms for biomedical research. With a PhD in engineering and a background spanning mechatronics and artificial intelligence, Pawel is passionate about bridging hardware innovation with intelligent software solutions. His work focuses on translating cutting-edge research into scalable technologies that accelerate discovery in life sciences
Penny De Roany was also awarded the HDR of the Month
Nominated by Dr Angus Weekes with the motivation:
Penny has completed her Honours BEng research project with the CRL/MPQC research groups and contributed to at least 2 journal papers to be submitted which is an outstanding achievement. She has demonstrated great lab, writing and project management skills, and has taken initiative throughout her project.