Prof Land’s lab is interested in the intersection of opioids and cannabinoids in the context of pain management and substance use disorder. Specifically, he’s interested in how cannabinoids may or may not be used to treat chronic pain in conjunction with opioids, and the associated addiction risk.

They use whole animal pharmacology, viral methods, modern imaging techniques, and biochemical approaches.

Dr Lemanska first trained as a pharmacist and completed her training graduating with an MSc in Pharmacy in 2005. She then studied for her PhD in Statistics and Machine Learning at the Centre for Chemometrics, University of Bristol (scholarship funded by GlaxoSmithKline).

She is now working as a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Surrey and is involved in teaching and research activities within the University.

Ciara McCabe is Professor of Neuroscience, Psychopharmacology and Mental Health and a University Research Fellow at Reading University. She has been director of the Neuroscience of Reward Group at Reading since 2013. She examines the processing of primary and secondary rewards at the behavioural and neural level and how this relates to the symptom of anhedonia in depression. She also examines how drug treatments interact with the reward response.

Ciara did her BSc in Psychology at Queens University, Belfast. She did her PhD on the effects of anxiolytic drugs on animal models of frustrative non-reward at the University of Ulster, in collaboration with Merck, Sharpe and Dohme. She did her first post doc in primate models of drug addiction at Wake Forest, NC, USA.

Ciara then moved to the Experimental Psychology Department at Oxford University to work on the brain’s response to primary rewards in humans and subsequently to the Psychiatry Department at Oxford University to work on neuropsychopharmacology and reward processing in patient and at-risk groups.

She was awarded the Senior Non-Clinical Psychopharmacology Award and two separate In-Vivo Awards from The British Association of Psychopharmacology (BAP). She was also awarded the Rafaelsen Investigator Award from The International College of Neuropsychopharmacology, a Fellowship Award from the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology and an Eli Lilly Fellowship Award presented at the BAP. She has held funding from the Medical Research Council and has had various Industry collaborations.

Ciara has also been Director of the Reading Scholars Program in Psychology a widening participation program for under-represented students. Ciara was elected as a council member of the British Association of Psychopharmacology and as a trustee of the charity Immigrant Counselling and Psychotherapy (ICAP) for five years each.

Dr Joanne Orlando is a researcher examining our digital lifestyle. Her cutting edge ideas and understandings about our uses of technology and provides practical solutions that ensure technology is an empowering part of the lives of children and adults.

Joanne works closely as an expert with government, key industry, education sector to develop practices that will help us flourish in our digital society. She is a keynote speaker, nationally and internationally, and regularly presents as an expert on TV, radio, and in print.

Joanne is the founder of TechClever, an evidenced-based digital literacy and digital wellbeing education program for parents and students.

Her most recent book ‘Life Mode On: How to be Less Stressed, More Present and Back in Control with Technology’ was released globally in 2021.

Nathan Bartlett is Professor and head of the Viral Immunology and Respiratory Disease group and is based at the Hunter Medical Research Institute. He also retains an honorary academic appointment at Imperial College London, UK. Following the award of PhD, Dr Bartlett undertook a 5 year Postdoctoral research position, first at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, then in the Department of Virology, Imperial College London. Dr Bartlett then undertook a second Postdoctoral position in the Department of Respiratory Medicine within the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI), also at Imperial. After joining the NHLI, Dr Bartlett continued to build on his virology training leading to Bartlett et al, Nature Medicine 2008, the world’s first mouse rhinovirus infection model. He has investigated the interaction of respiratory viral infection with type-2 immunity to uncover pathogenic mechanisms in asthma exacerbations. He was a co-applicant on several successful project and program grants and since his Lecturer appointment at Imperial in 2011 was successful as the Lead Investigator in achieving an MRC project grant to study the role of IL-25 in asthma exacerbations, the research from which was published as the featured cover story in Science Translational Medicine (October 2014). Dr Bartlett has contributed to several scholarly books including the Rhinovirus chapter for the Encyclopaedia of Virology (Elsevier) and ,edited Rhinovirus Infections: Rethinking Impact on Human Health and Disease (Elsevier). Dr Bartlett is considered a world expert on in vivo and human airway epithelial models of rhinovirus infection and consults for a number companies that are bringing novel therapies for respiratory infection and inflammatory airways diseases to the clinic.He is also an Associate Editor for the American Journal of Physiology – Lung, Cellular and Molecular Physiology (AJP-LUNG) and a member of the European Respiratory Society College of Experts. In 2015 Dr Bartlett accepted an academic appointment at the University of Newcastle where he has received funding from HMRI, Asthma Australia, NH&MRC and multiple Industry Partners and associated Government grants. He work has led to the publishing of multiple patents related to treatments currently in development for respiratory virus infections and exacerbations of chronic respiratory diseases. He is now exploring novel therapies and treatments to fight COVID-19, a novel coronavirus which was declared a pandemic in March 2020. His team is exploring a range of anti-viral options for this virus, partnering with other researchers to explore different methods to fight the virus. For example Dr Bartlett is working with Professor Hubert Hondermarck to assess the safety and efficacy of a range of cancer drugs which have the potential to be repurposed. Dr Bartlett continues to work with Ena Respiratory who have developed an innate immune stimulant that protects the lungs against respiratory virus infections. Boosting lung innate immunity bridges the gap between vaccine mediated long term protection and anti-viral drug to treat active infection. He is now using coronavirus infections models to determine the efficacy of this approach. He is also helping local industries that are focusing their business to produce disinfectants, sanitizers and virus inactivating materials that will become part of everyday life as we adapt to coexist with new respiratory viruses such as SARS-CoV-2.

Our laboratory is interested in understanding how neural systems encode time and generate rhythmic physiological and behavioral outputs to adapt to the temporal structure of the environment. We use a comparative approach that capitalizes on animal models that range from the laboratory mouse to humans.

Virtually all living species have biological clocks that generate and control the daily cyclic variations in physiology and behavior, such us the sleep-wake cycle, rhythms in locomotor activity, core body temperature and hormonal secretion. In mammals, the master control of these so-called circadian rhythms is exerted by a biological clock located within the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the brain. We use behavioral, physiological and molecular techniques in order to understand how the SCN, in concert with other circadian oscillators in the brain, generates and orchestrates this array of circadian rhythms. We also study human circadian rhthms through non-invasive methods to assess the effect of electric light and the urban environment on the timing and quality of sleep.

Ann Kirkness is a Clinical Nurse Consultant in Cardiac Rehabilitation at the Royal North Shore Hospital. She has extensive clinical experience in working with people with cardiac disease, which includes development of many educational resources.

Ann has a specific interest in the role of lifestyle choices and the importance of exercise in the ongoing management and prevention of heart disease. She has also been involved in a number of research and quality improvement programs specifically related to risk factor modification and improving outcomes in patients with pre-existing cardiovascular disease.

Ann has publications in a number of international peer reviewed journals and presented a number of conference papers at state and national level.

Professor Vanessa McDonald is co-director of the NHMRC CRE in Severe Asthma, Co-director and research leader in the Priority Research Centre for Healthy Lungs and an academic clinician in the Department of Respiratory and Sleep Medicine. She also leads the Chronic Disease and Older Person Research group within the School of Nursing and Midwifery.

Professor McDonald joined the University of Newcastle in 2011, following the completion of her PhD. Prior to this, she worked clinically within the Hunter New England Local Health District as a Respiratory Clinical Nurse Consultant. She has been a nurse for over 20 years and it is her clinical background and experience that drives her innovation in research.

Vanessa’s research program is centred around the development of innovative approaches to the management of chronic diseases. Her translational research program links biomedicine, clinical effectiveness and health policy development.

At 8 years post-doctoral, Prof Vanessa McDonald established a productive track record publishing over 110 peer reviewed journal articles. Her work is published in high impact journals including the Lancet, the AJRCCM, Thorax and the Eur Resp J. Complimenting her publication catalogue is a suite of other outputs. She has authored 10 book chapters, six separate national clinical practice guidelines for Asthma and COPD, national reports, multimedia resources, and national patient education publications.

John Blakey is a Consultant in Respiratory and Sleep Medicine at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Perth. He has clinical expertise in asthma and airways diseases.

His main research interest is in health service delivery, particularly the move toward assessment of future risk as a key aspect of asthma care, and the use of newer connected techologies.

His research has been published in leading journals such as The Lancet, JACI, Thorax, and AJRCCM. He continues to be research active through adjunct positions with Curtin University and UWA. He undertakes advisory and committee work for Asthma Australia and Asthma WA, and is WA branch President of TSANZ.