All STEAMED up About STEM

Chair, Stuart Cunningham AM is Distinguished Professor of Media and Communications, QUT. He is internationally recognised for his contributions to media, communication and cultural studies and for exemplifying their relevance to industry practice and government policy. He is author, co-author or co-editor of fifteen books, twenty five reports, over 200 chapters and articles, and a wide range of general articles and public communications. He has served in several leadership roles in advocacy, advice and governance in research and higher education, and in the screen and library sectors. His most recent honours include admission into the UK-based Academy of Social Sciences in 2013, the award of a Fulbright Senior Scholarship for 2014-15, and the award of Member of the Order of Australia in 2015.

Dr Alberto Bellocchi has an on-going academic position in the Faculty of Education at QUT. In 2016, he is commencing a three-year research fellowship funded under the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award scheme provided by the Australian Research Council. During this time, his research will focus on uncovering the interplay between social bonds (relationships), emotional experiences, and constructing science knowledge. More broadly, his research program focuses on science education and STEM Education, teaching and learning science and learning to teach science. In his on-going research he has investigated emotional experiences of science students and pre-service science teachers, and the way in which these emotional experiences mediate literacy in STEM education. Alberto teaches in the area of logics of inquiry (research methods and design) and science curriculum studies for secondary preservice teachers. Before working at QUT he taught senior chemistry and junior science in an Education Queensland school for 8 years.

Jonathan is Professor in Robotics at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). His main research interest is in the area of Field Robotics and in particular making machines operate autonomously in unstructured environments. Jonathan is the co-inventor, and current head judge of the UAV Challenge Outback Rescue, an international flying robot competition in which teams search for a lost bushwalker using autonomous robotic aircraft. In 2013 he and his research team won the Australia and New Zealand Internet Award for Innovation for their Museum Robot project.In 2013 Jonathan made international news by being the first person to 3D map the interior of the Leaning Tower of Pisa using his team’s Zebedee 3D laser scanning mobile mapping system. At QUT, Jonathan is now developing technology for medical and healthcare robotics and in particular has an interest in the use of robot vision to help with robotic surgery.

A/Prof. Tomasz Bednarz currently works as a Principal Research Fellow at the QUT Science and Engineering Faculty (between the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers, and Institute of Future Environments). Earlier, he worked as a Research Team Leader (Statistical Analytics and Inference), Computational Research Scientist and Projects Leader at CSIRO’s Digital Productivity and Services Flagship. He joined CSIRO in early 2009, and initially worked as a 3D Visualisation Software Engineer at CSIRO Queensland Centre for Advanced Technologies. In early 2011, he moved to Sydney to carry out works on image analysis using GPGPUs and heterogeneous architectures, and led NeCTAR funded Cloud-based Image Analysis and Processing Toolbox project (http://cloudimaging.net.au). He also led project Platform for Big Data Analytics and Visual Analytics, aiming to connect data analytics, statistical modelling, image analytics, machine learning, visualisation into one stack of reusable solutions running on the CSIRO infrastructure. He has also worked in creative industries as a programmer (game development), and also as a web and graphics designer. His broad range of expertise spanning from image analysis, through numerical simulations and experiments with fluids, visualisation, computer graphics, demoscene, visual analytics, big data analytics to Human-Computer Interactions is evidenced by the quality and number of publications (http://www.researcherid.com/rid/A-7376-2011). He co-organizes Brisbane GPU Meetup group, is active member of the ACM SIGGRAPH International Resources Committee, chairs IEEE Computer Society Queensland Chapter, Brisbane ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter, and leads the Brisbane Khronos Group chapter. He actively promotes use of computational and visualisation techniques for science and research, and art + science methodology.