Dietmar Oelz is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Queensland, having joined in December 2016 as a Lecturer and promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2022. His academic journey began with studies in Technical Mathematics at the Vienna University of Technology. He also holds a Master's degree in Law as well as completing the initial non-clinical portion of Medical Studies at the University of Vienna. In 2007, he earned his PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Vienna, supervised by Christian Schmeiser and Peter Markowich. During his doctoral studies, he visited the University of Buenos Aires and ENS-Paris. Subsequently, Oelz held postdoctoral positions at the Wolfgang Pauli Institute, University of Vienna, and the Research Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics (RICAM) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2013, he was awarded the prestigious Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). He further conducted postdoctoral research under Alex Mogilner at the University of California, Davis, and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. In 2024, he spent four months as a visiting scientist at the Department of Mathematics, University of Heidelberg.

As an applied mathematician and mathematical biologist, Oelz specializes in the mechanobiology of cells and tissues, focusing on cytoskeleton dynamics, cell shape and movement, intracellular transport, collective cell migration, and developmental pattern formation. His methodologies include Brownian dynamics simulations, continuum fluid and solid models, partial differential equations, dynamical systems analysis, and data integration via Bayesian inference and deep learning. Notable publications encompass "Compression-dependent microtubule reinforcement enables cells to navigate confined environments" (Nature Cell Biology, 2024, with R.J. Ju et al.), "Mechanochemical patterning localizes the organizer of a luminal epithelium" (Science Advances, 2025), "F-actin bending facilitates net actomyosin contraction by inhibiting expansion with plus-end-located myosin motors" (Journal of Mathematical Biology, 2022), and "A combination of actin treadmilling and cross-linking drives contraction of random actomyosin arrays" (Biophysical Journal, 2015). Oelz has received funding from the Australian Research Council Discovery Project (2018-2024) on motor proteins and cell division rings, and a UQ Deputy Vice-Chancellor strategic grant (2026-2027) on Hydra pattern formation. He teaches advanced courses in ordinary and partial differential equations, dynamical systems, applied mathematics, mathematical biology, and scientific computing with Julia. Additionally, he earned the 13th Bellman Prize in 2011 for his paper on prion aggregate infectivity.

Professional Email: d.oelz@uq.edu.au