Keynote Speaker Profiles

Sub-theme 1: Global health, climate and economics: What is the impact of change?

Dr Deborah Gleeson

Deborah is a lecturer in the School of Public Health and Human Biosciences at La Trobe University. She has a Master of Public Health and a PhD in Health Policy. Her research interests include policy making capacity in health bureaucracies, the impact of trade agreements on health and the capacity for engagement between health and trade sectors. Dr Gleeson has many years of experience teaching public health policy, health promotion and health systems, and has worked in the community health sector in health promotion roles. She has held the honorary position of Convenor of the Political Economy of Health Special Interest Group of PHAA since 2008 and has played a key role in PHAA’s advocacy regarding the public health issues involved in Australia’s current trade negotiations.

Richard Horton

Richard is Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet. He was born in London and is half Norwegian. He qualified in physiology and medicine from the University of Birmingham in 1986. He then joined The Lancet in 1990, moving to New York as North American Editor in 1993. Richard was the first President of the World Association of Medical Editors and he is a Past-Preident of the US Council of Science Editors. He is an honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University College London, and the University of Oslo. He has also received honorary doctorates in medicine from the University of Birmingham, UK, and the University of Umea, Sweden. He is a Council member of both the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences and the University of Birmingham. In 2011, he was appointed co-chair of the independent Expert Review Group overseeing delivery of the UN Secretary-General's Global Strategy of Women's and Children's Health. He is a Senior Associate of the UK health-policy think-tank, the Nuffield Trust. Richard received the Edinburgh medal in 2007 and the Dean’s medal from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in 2009. In 2011, he was elected a Foreign Associate of the US Institute of Medicine. He has written two reports for the Royal College of Physicians of London: Doctors in Society (2005) and Innovating for Health (2009). He wrote Health Wars(2003) about contemporary issues in medicine and health, and he writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and the TLS. He has a strong interest in global health and medicine’s contribution to our wider culture.

David Legge

David Legge started his career as a physician but early on moved into health services research, health policy and planning and public health. He has been based in the La Trobe School of Public Health since 1995 from whence he has developed his research interests and teaching in the political economy of health, comparative health systems, primary health care and international health policy. Since 1996 David has been teaching health policy and management in China and researching the health challenges associated with China’s economic and political transition. David has been active in the global People’s Health Movement since 2000 when it was formed and since 2005 has been academic coordinator of the International People’s Health University which is a short course program in the political economy of health for health activists in low and middle income countries, offered through the People’s Health Movement.

Sub-theme 2: Changing demographics in Australia and New Zealand - the social and health impacts

Professor Tony Blakely

Tony is an epidemiologist at the University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand. He has an extensive portfolio of research. Tony initiated and implemented the New Zealand Census-Mortality Study (NZCMS) in the late 1990s, a pioneering study linking the national censuses with mortality data to allow monitoring and research on ethnic and socio-economic inequalities and the contribution of smoking to mortality (the NZ census periodically includes smoking). He has also led the parallel study, CancerTrends, that links census and cancer registration data to allow cancer incidence and survival studies. Built around these two studies, Tony directs the Health Inequalities Research Programme (www.uow.otago.ac.nz/HIRP-info.html) that includes the health component of a panel study of 20,000 adults followed up for eight years (Survey of Family, Income and Employment, SoFIE-Health), and a series of neighbourhoods and health research projects.

Since 2010, he directs the HRC-funded Burden of Disease Epidemiology, Equity and Cost Effectiveness programme (www.uow.otago.ac.nz/BODE3-info.html). This ambitious programme aims to build infrastructure (e.g. linked routine datasets) and capacity (e.g. economic decision modelling) to rapidly assess the health impact and cost effectiveness of a range of preventative and cancer control interventions – and examine their equity impacts.

Tony also has research interests in nutrition (e.g. a large randomised trial of price discounts and personalised education – the SHOP study) and health services. Cutting across all Tony’s research is a strong focus and interest in epidemiological and quantitative research methodologies. He teaches short courses in social epidemiology and epidemiological methods.  Tony has published over 150 peer reviewed journal articles.

Professor Jonathan Carapetis

Jonathan is a leading paediatrician and infectious diseases specialist. Professor Jonathan Carapetis will take up the position of Director of the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in July 2012. He is recognised as a leading mind in the Australian health field, with particular expertise in Indigenous child health. Since 2006, Professor Carapetis has been Director of the Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin where he forged new directions in research and training to tackle the big problems in Indigenous health. Professor Carapetis has made an international contribution and commitment to the reduction of rheumatic heart disease. Amongst his many accolades, Professor Carapetis was named as Northern Territory Australian of the Year for 2008. He has been named as one of Australia's top 100 brains in Cosmos magazine, selected in the top ten in Medicine and Health in the Bulletin Magazine's "Smart 100" list, and attended the Prime Minister's 2020 summit in Canberra in 2008.

Sub-theme 3: Complex systems thinking - changing contexts for action and advocacy on population health

Professor Louisa Jorm

Louisa is the Foundation Professor of Population Health in the School of Medicine at the University of Western Sydney. She also holds the part-time position of Principal Scientist at the Sax Institute.

She is an epidemiologist who prior to taking up her current post, spent more than 15 years in senior positions in public health policy and service roles. Her areas of expertise include data linkage, use of routinely collected health data and facilitating the policy and practice uptake of research. She is Chief Investigator of the Outcomes, Services, Policy for the Reproductive and Early Years (OSPREY) capacity building program, which has been funded by the NHMRC to build methods and capacity for the analysis of linked health datasets to answer policy-relevant questions about the health of mothers, babies and children. She also leads the NHMRC-funded Indigenous Health Outcomes Patient Evaluation (IHOPE) project, which is using linked data and multilevel modeling to investigate the influences of individual-, geographic and hospital-level factors on hospital outcomes for Aboriginal people. In her role at the Sax Institute, Professor Jorm leads the development of the Secure Unified Research Environment (SURE) remote access data laboratory, and is a Chief Investigator on an NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence, the Centre for Informing Policy in Health through Evidence from Research (CIPHER).

Alan Shiell

Alan is the Executive Director of the Centre of Excellence in Intervention and Prevention Science. Previously he was Professor of Health Economics at the University of Calgary, holding a Health Scientist award from the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research, and a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Chair in Applied Public Health. His research interests include the economic evaluation of social interventions designed to promote health and reduce inequalities.

Sub-theme 4: How are translational research and knowledge transfer shaping the future of population health?

Professor Adrian Bauman

Adrian Bauman is Professor of Public Health at the University of Sydney and the Director of the Prevention Research Collaboration. His research interests are in broad areas around health promotion and disease prevention with a major focus on physical activity and public health. He also has other interests in broader quantitative health promotion research and in the design and evaluation of community-wide and social marketing interventions. His current interests include research translation, and developing designs for replication and dissemination research. He has published more than 300 scientific peer reviewed journal papers, and has written more than 70 monographs, reports and book chapters, and three books. He serves internationally for the World Health Organisation and for other agencies in the area of chronic disease prevention.

Professor Nick Graves

Nick is Professor of Health Economics with a joint appointment in the Institute of biomedical and Health Innovation, School of Public Health, Queensland University of Technology and the Centre for Healthcare Related Infection Control and Surveillance, Queensland Health, Australia. His applied research brings economics to the study of health-care.

He has a programme of research that uses Bayesian methods for the synthesis of diverse sources of data that are subsequently used to inform parameters in decision models that address questions about the value of competing investments in health care sector alternatives.

He has made research contributions of international significance publishing in Nature, BMJ, AIDS, Health Economics, Lancet Infectious Diseases, The Journal of Infectious Diseases and Emerging Infectious Diseases. His research interests include applied economics work on a range of areas, including screening for chronic and infectious disease, mental health and workplace productivity and changing health behaviour among high risk groups. He has a particular interest in using existing evidence to inform decision making.

Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver

Lisa is a Principal Research Fellow for Neuroscience Research Australia. She describes herself as ‘a Koori woman committed to a career that translates my work into research capacity building for Aboriginal workers and improved health status for Aboriginal people. I work within a group dedicated to Aboriginal population health and ageing across the lifespan, where the innovative nature of my work includes partnership with co-investigators in both Indigenous adult health studies and child health studies and in relating current adult health status to childhood and life-cycle risk factors, in particular to major socio-economic factors affecting cognition and behaviour.’

Sub-theme 5: Inequalities and social determinants - how are these being addressed and with what effect?

Professor Richard Wilkinson

Richard has played a formative role in international research on the social determinants of health and on the societal effects of income inequality. He studied economic history at LSE before training in epidemiology. He is Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School, Honorary Professor at UCL and a Visiting Professor at the University of York. Richard co-wrote The Spirit Level with Kate Pickett which won the 2011 Political Studies Association Publication of the YearAward and the 2010 Bristol Festival of Ideas Prize. Richard is also a co-founder of The Equality Trust.

The spirit level: Why equality is better for everyone

Comparing life expectancy, mental health, levels of violence, teenage birth rates, drug abuse, child wellbeing, obesity rates, levels of trust, the educational performance of school children, or the strength of community life among rich countries, it is clear that societies which tend to do well on one of these measures tend to do well on all of them, and the ones which do badly, do badly on all of them. What accounts for the difference?  The key is the amount of inequality in each society. The picture is consistent whether we compare rich countries or the 50 states of the USA. The more unequal a society is, the more ill health and social problems it has.  Inequality has always been regarded as divisive and socially corrosive. The data show that even small differences in the amount of inequality matter. Material inequality serves as a determinant of the scale and importance of social stratification. It increases status insecurity and competition and the prevalence of all the problems associated with relative deprivation. Particularly important are effects mediated by social status, friendship and early childhood experience. However, although the amount of inequality has its greatest effect on rates of problems among the poor, its influence extends to almost all income groups: too much inequality reduces levels of well-being among the vast majority of the population.

Professor Papaarangi Reid

Papaarangi is Head of Department of Maori Health at the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland. A leading Māori health researcher and advocate, she was named the Public Health Champion of 2007 by the Public Health Association of New Zealand.

Papaarangi is Tumuaki and, New Zealand.  She holds science and medical degrees from the University of Auckland and is a specialist in public health medicine. She has tribal affiliations to TeRarawa in the Far North of Aotearoa and her research interests include analysing disparities between indigenous and non-indigenous citizens as a means of monitoring government commitment to indigenous rights.

Other speakers

Christine Bennett

Christine is the Chair of the new Australian National Preventive Health Agency, and earlier was the Chair of the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission. She has held many senior positions in health care and is now the Dean of the School of Medicine at Notre Dame University. Previously she had been Chief Medical Officer of BUPA and MBF, the CEO of Research Australia Ltd, and the CEO of Westmead Hospital and Community Health Services, among many.  Christine is a pediatrician and the newly appointed Chair of the Children's Hospital Network in Sydney.

Mark Cormack

Mark was appointed as the first Chief Executive Officer of Health Workforce Australia (HWA) in January 2010.

HWA is Commonwealth statutory authority, enacted in 2009 following the COAG decision to establish a new national authority to plan, fund, research and deliver programs for the enhancement and development of Australia’s health workforce.

Prior to this Mark was Chief Executive of ACT Health from July 2006 to January 2010 where he  was responsible for the provision of public health, hospital and healthcare services to the ACT and region.

Mark has previously filled a number of national roles in the public health care system as a member of the Australian Health Ministers Advisory Council (AHMAC), Chairman of the Health Policy Priorities Principal Committee (HPPPC) of AHMAC, and Board member of the National E Health Transition Authority (NEHTA).