Panel discussion on career progression for female Level A and B academics

Please join us for this Women in Science event that focuses on the career progression of Level A and B female academics in STEM.

The Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science will introduce her long-term colleague Emeritus Professor Leann Tilley who is a champion of equity, diversity and inclusion in research.

Following Professor Tilley’s presentation will be a panel discussion where you will be provided with plenty of opportunity to ask questions of the panel that includes Prof. Tilley, Prof. Brown, and a range of early- and mid-career researchers from a variety of disciplines, regarding how they have risen to the challenges of pursuing a research career in science.

Meet the panellists

Professor Leann Tilley is Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Pharmacology, at the Bio21 Institute, University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on the basic biology of the malaria parasite and action of and resistance to antimalarial drugs, with a view to designing better drugs.
In 2016, Professor Tilley established the Georgina Sweet awards for Women in Quantitative Biomedical Science as part of her Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship and is committed to increasing parity and seniority in the STEM fields for those from a diversity of backgrounds.

Professor Melissa Brown completed her PhD at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne in 1993. She joined The University of Queensland in 2000 as a Lecturer and is now the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science.

Professor Brown has held a number of academic leadership roles and in these and her current role as Executive Dean, she has introduced multiple processes and schemes to enable early career researchers to reach their potential, and to bring new teams of researchers together with each other or industry to address important research questions in Science and Medicine.

Associate Professor Jacqui Romero's research is focused on using higher-dimensional systems for exploring curious quantum physics phenomena and developing future quantum technologies.

In 2019, she took up a Westpac Research Fellowship and formed her own team, Qudits@UQ at the School of Mathematics and Physics and has received several prestigious awards which include: a L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women In Science Award (2017), the Ruby Payne-Scott Medal of the Australian Institute of Physics for Excellence in Early-Career Research (2018), and the L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women In Science International Rising Talent Award (2019).

Dr Jody Peters is an Advance Queensland Senior Research Fellow who began her career working in AGEN Biomedical as a scientist for almost a decade in numerous departments of the commercialisation pipeline, including manufacturing, product development and research.

She completed her PhD in 2010 with the Australian Biosecurity Co-operative Research Centre for Emerging Infectious Disease and has since worked as a virologist at the School of Chemistry & Molecular Biosciences. Her current research focuses on mosquito-borne virus discovery and the development of innovative vaccine and diagnostic platforms.

Dr Xiuwen Zhou is a theoretician in the interdisciplinary area of physics and chemistry. She received her PhD in 2014 from the University of Geneva (Switzerland).

She moved to the UQ as a visiting scholar, supported by two fellowships, a Swiss National Science Foundation Early Postdoc Mobility fellowship (2015) and an Australia-APEC Woman in Research Fellowship (2016). Later, she accepted an UQ Development Fellowship in 2017, working as a research fellow at the School of Mathematics and Physics. She was awarded an ARC DECRA Research Fellowship in 2019 and is now a UQ Amplify Fellow. 

Dr April Hastwell is a plant molecular biologist within the School of Agriculture and Food Science.

She was awarded an ARC DECRA Research Fellowship in 2020. The focus of her research group is on the roles of short signalling peptides in root development including in molecular networks controlling the beneficial legume-rhizobia symbiosis and nodule development.

She is a passionate proponent of achieving equity in the STEM disciplines.