Speakers
Dr Scarlett Raine
Session
Two world-class Australian scientists on what happens when disciplines collide — and what it means for family capital.
Purpose: To bring laureate-level Australian science into direct conversation with family principals — and showing, by lived example, what becomes possible when two disciplines are held in one room rather than in parallel.
Discussion: What each scientist is researching, where their fields intersect in unexpected ways, and what families investing in or supporting Australian deeptech and applied science should be looking for at the cross-domain edge.
Outcomes: A more confident lens on Australian deeptech investment, a feel for what world-class science sounds like in practice, and a sharper set of questions to bring to your own investment or philanthropy conversations.
Dr Scarlett Raine is a Research Fellow, QUT Centre for Robotics, pioneering the use of Artificial Intelligence to analyse underwater images and help monitor marine ecosystems more efficiently. With the increasing use of robotic underwater and surface vehicles to study coral reefs and seagrass meadows, vast amounts of imagery are generated.
Traditionally, analysing this data has been challenging, time-consuming, and expensive, as it heavily relied on marine experts. Dr Raine's innovative artificial intelligence methods automatically identify marine species in these images, streamlining the process. This technology can monitor coral reef health, estimate blue carbon in seagrass meadows, and identify the best seafloor areas for coral restoration.
Dr Ashbolt joined the Queensland University of Technology in September 2025 – where he is the ARC Industry Laureate Fellow in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and leads the Living Labs initiative and associated risk assessment and management aspects within the Cooperative Research Centre for Solving Antimicrobial Resistance in Agribusiness, Foods and Environments (SAAFE^CRC).
He has held previous positions as the Peter Teasdale Chair in Environmental Health Risk Assessment at UniSA, Executive Dean, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Southern Cross University, the Alberta Innovates Chair in Waterborne Disease Prevention in the School of Public Health & adjunct in the School of Medical Immunology and Microbiology, University of Alberta, Title 42 Senior Research Microbiologist within the National Exposure Research Laboratory, U.S. EPA Cincinnati, and Professor and Head of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney. Over the previous 20 years he has worked in joint Australian-Sweden, European and North American programs developing methods to interpret pathogen data with the aid of quantitative microbial risk assessment within an urban water sustainability framework.
This work has contributed to the risk-based approach adopted in the most recent WHO and U.S. EPA water documents that address recreation, drinking and reuse guidelines. He has been an adjunct professor at UNSW-Sydney, Swedish Institute for Infectious Diseases, Stockholm and in the School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Nankai University Tianjin, China.