Professor Quinn is the Foundation Director of the Eskitis Institute at Griffith University. He is the author of over 200 publications and patents. His research concentrates on the use of natural products as tools to understand interactions in biological systems and to build concepts around molecular recognition. He has developed a front-loading of physicochemical properties of constituents of extracts to transform approaches to the discovery of new bioactive molecules from nature. Most recently he has developed a novel approach to fragment-based drug discovery based on natural products and the use of bioaffinity mass spectrometry. His has developed Nature Bank as a state-of-the-art resource for biodiscovery. Nature Bank contains over 45,000 samples of plant and marine samples collected from mega-diverse areas of tropical Queensland, Tasmania, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia and China in accordance with the Convention on Biological Diversity. He was honoured in the Australia Day Awards 2010 as a recipient of a Member of the Order of Australia (AM). He received the Queensland Museum Medal 2012 for discovery of many new life forms as a consequence of biodiscovery. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) and a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI).