Meet the Health TG Co-Convenors:

Laetitia Coles is a Research Fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute. As a mixed-methods applied sociologist, she leads the Workforces component of the Thriving Queensland Kids Brain Builders Initiative (https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain-builders), and the project entitled Families in Focus: Amplifying the voices of children with disability and their families (https://child-health-research.centre.uq.edu.au/event/5632/families-focus) in collaboration with Queensland Children’s Hospital. She is committed to undertaking research that helps improve understandings of children’s care, educational, and clinical environments, with a specific focus on supporting those who care for and educate children. Dr Coles’ experience in multi-disciplinary research and in industry engagement underpins her strong track record in knowledge and research translation in both traditional and non-traditional research outputs.

Dr Coles completed her PhD in Sociology in 2020, looking at long work hours and fathers' engagement with children and caregiving – particularly focusing on the factors that facilitate participation in caregiving.

Miriam Dillon is in the final stages of her doctoral research at the School of Social Sciences, University of Queensland. Her research is positioned at the intersection of health sociology, sociology of emotions and physiotherapy, and explores distress in the care for people with chronic low back pain. Miriam is also an experienced physiotherapist, and is passionate about advocating for more integration of sociology perspectives into healthcare practice and research.

Zhaoxi Zheng is a sociologist, thanatologist, and award-winning higher education educator. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at UNSW Sydney and co-director at SocioHealthLab at the University of Queensland. Zhaoxi’s expertise includes the sociologies of childhood, death and dying, and higher education. In his  doctoral research, Zhaoxi uses child-led, art-based, and object-oriented post-qualitative methodologies to explore young children’s everyday realistic-and-imaginary encounters with death and dying. Zhaoxi’s contribution to sociological scholarship centres around his empirical, methodological, and philosophical innovations at the intersection of young children and death and dying. Seeking to queer knowledge production, Zhaoxi’s works are written, published, and performed in poetic, playful, and creative non-traditional academic styles.