From AI to social media and the metaverse, the future of media is exciting and evolving.
On Thursday, 2 November, the Future of Media Think Tank will see some of the brightest media minds combine forces at Bond University for a full-day program of events.
Meet the speakers
Jeff Brand
Professor Jeff Brand is an internationally recognised and nationally awarded career academic in the discipline of communication and media with expertise in quantitative research methodology and an intellectual interest in policy for the digital economy. He is the lead author of the Interactive Australia and Interactive New Zealand series of national computer games audience studies supported by the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association, author (with Prof. Mark Pearson) of Sources of News and Current Affairs published by the Australian Broadcasting Authority and co-author with inter-institutional colleagues in SBS research Living Diversity and Connecting Diversity. He currently serves as Associate Dean for Engagement and International in Bond University's Faculty of Society and Design.
Christine Middap
Christine Middap is associate editor and chief writer at The Australian newspaper. She is an award-winning magazine editor, having helmed The Weekend Australian Magazine for 11 years and launching Queensland's Qweekend magazine in 2005. She is a former News Corp London bureau chief, has worked at The Times newspaper in London and across news titles in Queensland and Tasmania.
Darren Paul Fisher
Working across both film and television, Dr Fisher made his feature film debut writing, producing and directing Inbetweeners for Universal Pictures. His last film, Frequencies, received rave reviews with a television adaptation now in development with a major US network. In 2018 he was awarded the prestigious Greg Coote Scholarship by Australians in Film and Screen Queensland. Dr Fisher was awarded his PhD in 2020 for his thesis Film as Argument: Mainstream feature filmmaking as the social practice of incognizant argument design and delivery. 
Keitha Dunstan
Professor Keitha Dunstan is Bond University’s Provost, overseeing implementation of the research, learning and teaching strategies of the University. She has been Chair of the Bond University Women's Network since 2014 and was the Chair of Academic Senate 2012 - 2016. She is a Fellow of CPA Australia. Member of Chartered Accountants Australia & New Zealand and Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Professor Dunstan is a proud descendant of the Mandandanji people of south-west Queensland. 
Mick Carroll
Mick Carroll is Chair of the News Corp Editorial Board which oversees strategic decisions for the broader group of News Corp titles in Australia. Mick began his career in 1985 as a cadet journalist at The Northern Daily Leader in Tamworth where he worked for eight years before joining The Gold Coast Bulletin. He rose to the position of deputy editor at the Gold Coast Bulletin before being appointed editor of the Townsville Bulletin in 2005. In 2008, he moved to Sydney as deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph and was appointed editor of The Sunday Telegraph in 2012. The Sunday Telegraph was named Newspaper of the Year at the 2015 News Corp Australia News Awards. In 2020 Mick was appointed National Weekend Editor and Editor of the Saturday Telegraph. Mick has also been the Olympics Editor for the Rio and Tokyo, as well as the Commonwealth Games Editor for Birmingham.
James Birt
Dr James Birt is the Associate Dean of External Engagement for the Faculty of Society Design, and an Associate Professor of Creative Media studies at Bond. His research spans computer science, applied design, the development of virtual, augmented, and extended reality (VR/AR/XR) technology and he’s recognised as an international leader in educational technology, extended reality (XR) and games. 
Cher McGillivray
Dr Cher McGillivray is an Assistant Professor at Bond University and a registered Clinical Psychologist. After starting her career in Marketing, Dr McGillivray decided to pursue her passion for helping others through psychology, and she now specialises in family and child therapy and trauma recovery. Her research has been published in leading international psychology journals and presented at child and adolescent mental health and international trauma conferences. Cher is also a published author with research interests in complex trauma, childhood sexual abuse, posttraumatic growth, mindfulness, and resilience.
Nick James
Professor Nick James is the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Law at Bond University. He is a former commercial lawyer and has been practising as an academic since 1996. He is passionate about legal education and the role of law schools in modern society. He has written numerous journal articles, book chapters and conference papers in the areas of legal education, critical legal theory, disruption of the legal services sector and the impacts of climate change.
Danielle Cronin
Danielle Cronin is the National Commissioning Editor for abc.net.au – one of Australia's top news sites and one of the top 50 news sites in the world. She joined the national public broadcaster after more than two decades with Fairfax Media, serving as the first female editor of metropolitan masthead the Brisbane Times. The award-winning journalist has worked in Brisbane, Bundaberg, Africa, and Canberra where she covered 10 federal budgets and three federal elections. As a reporter for The Canberra Times, she spent seven years in the federal press gallery reporting on stories ranging from the coup that ended Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership to the Canberra firestorm, which was recognised with a Walkley Award. She has also worked in South Africa as the inaugural winner of the Independent Newspapers Fellowship for Australia and travelled to Germany as the winner of the German Prize for Journalism. After a long career in newspapers, Cronin joined the digital revolution and is interested in pushing the boundaries of storytelling and innovative ways to build online communities. In 2019, she was named one of the inaugural Columbia Journalism School-Google News Initiative fellows for the Asia Pacific. She has been a Women in Media Queensland committee member since its inception in 2014 and serves on the board of Women in Media Australia.
Uncle John Graham
Uncle John is a Traditional Custodian of the Gold Coast region, a Kombumerri man, a saltwater man of the Gold Coast part of the wider Yugambeh Language Group. The Yugambeh lands are situated between the Logan River in the north to the Tweed River in the south and bordered by the mountains to the west and the ocean to the east. Uncle John is the Bond University Elder and has been a long-term member of the Bond Indigenous Consultative Committee. He is a Business graduate of Griffith University where he previously worked at their GUMURRII Unit. He is the Chair of the Yugambeh Region Aboriginal Corporation Alliance (YRACA). 
Solua Middleton
Solua is a proud Torres Strait Islander with more than 20 years in experience in the media industry, championing Indigenous stories in her roles at the Koori Mail, NITV and even in her self-published Indigenous newspaper, Be Counted.
For the last 13 years Solua has worked with the ABC out of the Gold Coast in various roles from open producer to senior features reporter, to leading impactful storytelling projects within the organisation. Solua is currently with ABC News Story Lab to co-lead a project about Australia’s Indigenous history that takes a deep dive into our 65,000+ year-old history of First Nations Australians. She’s also the deputy chair of the Bonner Committee, the ABC’s Indigenous advisory group.
During her career, Solua has won several media awards, including the also a Clarion Award winner for the Aftermath project, and the UNAA Media Awards for the ABC project Right Wrongs.
Solua was also finalist for the 2012 Human Rights Media Award for her Dreambox project which captured the dreams of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across the country, and a 2022 Clarion Award finalist for the Photo Essay category for her story on Erub in the Torres Strait.
Solua is a graduate of Griffith University and Bond University, completing a Bachelor of Communications majoring in journalism and film and television, and a Masters of Journalism respectively.
Rob Layton
Rob Layton teaches mobile journalism and iPhone photography at Bond University. His expertise has led him to work with and be published by Apple, Google, News Corp, and Al Jazeera, among others, and he trains journalists and content creators around the world in how to use their phones professionally. He was a career journalist, specialising in online and digital production, before becoming a full-time journalism educator.
Libby Sander
Dr Libby Sander is an internationally renowned academic expert on work and the workplace. She is a leading expert on understanding the future of work, and how we can reimagine work to live more meaningful and creative lives. She is an Agenda Contributor at the World Economic Forum and has spoken at TEDx. Libby is regularly featured on radio and in national & international media including for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, BBC, The Guardian, ABC, SBS, Channel 7 and 3AW Melbourne commenting on issues on work, the workplace, society & future trends in organisations. She has a PhD in Organisational Behaviour from Griffith University, and also holds a Masters Degree in Human Resource Management, Bachelor of Arts in Japanese and Bachelor of Business. 
Oliver Baumann
Dr Oliver Baumann is originally from Germany, joining Bond University in 2018. He is an experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist using a combination of human behavioural testing, electrophysiology, and neuroimaging. Dr Baumann has made seminal discoveries in the area of human spatial perception, memory and emotion. To address fundamental and applied psychological questions, he uses a combination of human behavioural, psychophysiological and neuroimaging methods.
Liz Marshall
Liz Marshall is a business consultant, executive coach, champion for business founders & the social impact community. She will bring her skills and experience in innovation, leadership, business acumen & personal development to a multi-Australian-first project for entrepreneurs, launching on the Gold Coast in 2024. Liz has been the Business Strategy Coach in the Bond’s Transformer entrepreneurship program for all students & all disciplines, and is a proud Alumni, with an Executive Masters of Business Administration (EMBA) & completing Masters of Legal Administration.
Niamh Sullivan
Niamh Sullivan is a Bond alumna and co-founder and CEO of INFIX Creative Studio. INFIX specialises in helping tech start-ups create their brand stories, launch, scale and raise funds, as well as produce the collateral needed to get their brand up and running. 
Angela Obree
Angela Obree has spent more than two decades negotiating in corporate boardrooms, mediations, and more recently, attempting to negotiate getting her toddler to wear shoes. She has extensive experience in management and consulting in the UK, South Africa, Ireland, Germany and Australia. 
Maria Lewis
Bond University alumna Maria Lewis is a best-selling author, award-winning screenwriter, film curator and pop culture etymologist currently based in Australia. Getting her start as a journalist, over the past 17 years of her career she has worked on projects for Marvel, DC Comics, Ubisoft, Netflix, ABC, Disney, SBS and many more.
William van Caenegem
Professor William van Caenegem, Bond University -– Professor William van Caenegem studied law in Belgium and the United Kingdom. He has published extensively on intellectual property law, in particular in a comparative context and with a law and economics approach. William has also conducted research, including funded empirical projects, in the sphere of food law and policy. He has done extensive work on Geographical Indications of Origin and on comparative regulation (in particular in relation to dairy manufacturing in Australia and Europe). He has published a number of textbooks for LexisNexis in Australia as well as books for Kluwer and Edward Elgar. He is an Honorary Visiting Professor of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and has taught in France and Belgium as well. He has a broad interest in food law and comparative law, and more recently has researched the relationship between AI and intellectual property law.