Rate My Professor Andrea Bugarcic

Associate Professor Andrea Bugarcic serves as Deputy Director of Education at the National Centre for Naturopathic Medicine within the Faculty of Health at Southern Cross University, alongside her role as Associate Professor. She holds a BSc, Graduate Certificate in Higher Education from the University of Queensland, MSc in Biotechnology from the University of Auckland, and PhD in Molecular Virology from the University of Queensland, where her doctoral research focused on rotavirus. Following her PhD, Bugarcic held postdoctoral positions at Griffith University and the University of Queensland, researching protein trafficking in viral infections and Parkinson’s disease. As a lecturer at the University of Queensland, she developed and evaluated biomedical science curricula while building expertise in educational research. From 2015, she assumed educational leadership roles in complementary medicine at Endeavour College, overseeing curriculum development and accreditation. She joined Southern Cross University in 2020 as a Senior Lecturer and progressed to her current positions.

Bugarcic's academic interests span educational research, clinical reasoning, critical thinking, evidence-based practice, integrative medicine, traditional and complementary medicine, herbal medicine, translational research, pre-clinical research, and biomedicine. Her work explores the integration of contemporary and traditional evidence, molecular pathways in diseases from viral infections to Parkinson’s disease, and herbal research aligned with naturopathic practice. Key publications include "The Vps35 D620N mutation linked to Parkinson's disease disrupts the cargo sorting function of retromer" (2014), "Classification of the human phox homology (PX) domains based on their phosphoinositide binding specificities" (2019), "Structural basis for endosomal trafficking of diverse transmembrane cargos by PX-FERM proteins" (2013), "Australian Tea Tree (Melaleuca alternifolia) oil: an updated overview of ethnopharmacology, phytochemistry, pharmacology and clinical applications" (2025), and "The Effects of Kefir on the Human Oral and Gut Microbiome" (2025). She earned a Commendation for Programs that Enhance Student Learning from the University of Queensland in 2012. Bugarcic supervises PhD students on herbal medicine in bacterial and mammalian systems, guest-edited a special issue of Cells on cellular Parkinson’s disease from gut to brain, and contributes to the Harvest to Health research cluster.