Dr Julie Nichols

From Heritage to Futures: Reimagining Vernacular Architecture Through Collaborative Design with Dr Julie Nichols

What if the key to designing regenerative futures lies in the wisdom of human environments shaped by non-architects? Dr Julie Nichols is redefining architectural research by fusing cultural heritage, vernacular knowledge, and community-led design. As leader of the Vernacular Knowledge Research Group (VKRG), she collaborates with First Nations communities in Australia and in Indonesia to reimagine architecture as a responsive, ethical, and creative practice emergent from culture, place, people, and Country.

Her work is innovative, hands-on, and people-centred: blending architectural fieldwork, ethnography, and both digital and manual documentation to uncover the stories and knowledge embedded in buildings, landscapes, and traditions. From Designing on Country and Yarning methodologies to immersive “slow-drawing” cultural design studios, Dr Nichols transforms heritage into a living design tool for resilience and creativity.

Through this approach, she has reshaped disaster recovery and adaptive reuse projects, pioneering new ways of embedding cultural heritage into contemporary practice. Her groundbreaking frameworks — including pyro-vernacular studies and the Aceh Method — are gaining international recognition for showing how architecture can regenerate, heal, sustain, and inspire.

Dr Nichols demonstrates that architecture is more than buildings — it is relational. It is about people, memory, Country, and futures. Her research reveals how curiosity, cultural respect, and innovative methodologies can unlock deep knowledge, amplify community voices, and model new pathways for designing human environments in a changing world.

Dr Susannah Emery

Game Design, Social Change & Women in Research at IVE

Susie’s research explores how games and digital media can communicate across cultural and social divides — making them tools for empathy, education and equity. Driving social change through story and play, her work engages with issues like neurodivergence, gender equality, socio-economic barriers, and more.  Intersecting tech, empathy and social justice, Susie is involved in a co-design project aimed at improving post-release outcomes for formerly incarcerated women.

Susie teaches the next generation of game creators and has been recognised for her work: winning the Women in Games Global Awards: Games or Esports Educator Award (2022), an International Women in Games Ambassador, and recipient of UniSA’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Award.

Susie’s journey highlights that you don’t have to follow the conventional path. You can be a researcher, designer, storyteller, advocate – all at once.  Your voice, your ideas, your curiosity can disrupt, heal, teach and inspire.

Dr Emery’s journey highlights the power of mentorship, representation, and visibility in STEM. She reminds us that inspiring even one person can create ripples of change — especially in spaces where women have been historically underrepresented.

Professor Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky

Unravelling Language, Brain & Diversity at the University of South Australia

Professor Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky is using research in cognitive neuroscience to explore how our brains process language, in all its diversity. Ina studies how language is processed across different languages, and across different individuals. Using tools like electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and behavioural techniques (eg eye-tracking), she explores the way in which language is implemented by the brain.

Originally from Germany, but raised in Tasmania, Ina brings broad experience from institutions like the University of Marburg and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Ina has been leading UniSA's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab since 2014.

Ina inspires her students in Cognitive Neuroscience. She mentors the next generation of researchers, collaborates across disciplines, and builds research that connects theory with real human experience having real-world impact into education, communication and inclusion.

Her research has been honoured with several prizes, including the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize (awarded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - German Research Foundation and German Federal Ministry of Education and Research), the most prestigious scientific prize for young researchers in Germany, and an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship.

She is currently a guest professor at the University of Cologne as part of their Global Faculty program.

Here’s to more leaders like Professor Bornkessel-Schlesewsky — pushing science forward, celebrating diversity, and lighting the way.

Dr Deirdre Feeney

Where Art, Optics & Technology Converge at the University of South Australia

Dr Deirdre Feeney’s research investigates materialities of image-making to transform how we see and experience the technological image. Working with light’s interaction with glass, mirrors and mechanical components, Dr Feeney develops optical devices which reveal how mediated images shape our experience of seeing and perceiving. Dr Feeney’s research sits at the intersection of art, optical history and media archaeology - looking back to old image devices such as the magic lantern and phenakistoscope (the first widespread animation device that created a fluid illusion of motion) - and revealing those histories into contemporary optical image system artworks.

Dr Feeney's practice involves collaborating with scientists and electronic and fabrication engineers. Whether using micro-machining for bespoke optical components, exploring moving image projection, or integrating digital fabrication with traditional glass making, Dr Feeney navigates cross-disciplinary territories to produce work that is aesthetically and technologically rich that physically and emotionally engages the viewer.

Projects like: A Partnership for Uncertain Times emphasise experimental development and foreground the uncertainty and vulnerability of the artist-researcher process. Her work invites viewers to both wonder and critically engage with what it means to see with mediated tools.

Dr Feeney’s works have been exhibited in Australia and internationally and are held in public Australian and international collections such as the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the National Museum of Ireland. Dr Feeney leads by example: integrating art, history, science, making and engineering, while being curious and brave in process.

Dr Feeney demonstrates that Creative Arts and STEM can inform and enhance each other. Engaging across these diverse fields facilitates the research and development of rich and layered work.