26th Annual Scientific Meeting

Speaker: Professor Lou Irving

Professor Lou Irving is a Respiratory Physician at  the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. He is Head of the Lung Tumour Stream and the Director of Respiratory and Director of Clinical Training. Professor Irving has clinical, teaching and research interests in lung cancer, advanced bronchoscopy and COPD and has published over 270 scientific papers.​

Speaker: Professor Ian Barr

Professor Ian Barr is currently the Deputy Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza (one of 5 globally) based at the Doherty Institute in Melbourne, Australia which has operated since 1992. The Centre plays an active role in the regional surveillance of human influenza. Ian has over 35 years’ experience in Research and Development both with academic and commercial groups including over 22 years at the Centre and has authored or co-authored nearly 300 publications including over 250 peer reviewed journal articles, reviews and editorials on various aspects of influenza. He holds an Honorary Professorial position in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne.

Speaker: Professor Allen Cheng

Prof Allen Cheng is an infectious diseases physician. He is Professor of Infectious Diseases Epidemiology and is Director of the Infection Prevention and Healthcare Epidemiology unit at Alfred Health. He has a PhD (Flinders University), a Master of Public Health (Monash University) and a Master of Biostatistics (University of Queensland). He has previously worked as an infectious diseases and general physician in Darwin and Geelong, and has worked in remote communities in the Top End of Australia, and in Papua New Guinea, Thailand, the United States and Finland. In 2020, Prof. Cheng became the Victorian Deputy Chief Health Officer during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Speaker: Dr Hazel Clothier

Hazel is Lead Epidemiologist, Child Health Informatics and Surveillance Manager, Vaccine Signal Detection & Investigation at SAEFVIC, Victoria’s Vaccine Safety Service. Her doctoral work on optimizing spontaneous vaccine safety surveillance has had immediate relevance and continued impact since the global Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 crisis brought calls for development and release of vaccines at “pandemic speed”, further highlighting the need for robust and timely vaccine safety surveillance.
She continues to lead in this field of research with expertise in vaccinology, surveillance and signal detection. Hazel is also experienced in public health and infectious diseases more broadly with a strong background in emerging infectious diseases, outbreak management and infectious disease surveillance system design and evaluation.

Speaker: Associate Professor Kirsty Short

A/Professor Kirsty Short is an Australia Research Council DECRA research fellow in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences at the University of Queensland in Brisbane Australia. She completed a PhD in 2013 at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne. In 2013 she was also awarded an NHMRC CJ Martin Early Career Fellowship to go to the Netherlands to work in the Department of Virosciences at Erasmus Medical Centre. She returned to Australia at the end of 2015 and in 2017 she established her independent research group at the University of Queensland. She works on many different aspects of influenza virus pathogenesis, understanding how the flu virus affects different animal species, investigating the role of the immune system in severe flu infections and the interactions between the flu and chronic medical conditions such as diabetes and obesity.

Speaker: Associate Professor Nusrat Homaira

A/Prof Homaira is a medically trained paediatric respiratory epidemiologist with almost two decades of working experience in prevention and control of respiratory infections of childhood in low, middle- and high-income settings . She currently works as A/Prof Paediatric Epidemiology, Discipline of Paediatrics and Child Health at UNSW, Sydney and a Respiratory Scientists at Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick.  A/Prof Homaira leads the program on common lung diseases of childhood and has been involved in multiple seminal studies which were critical for driving immunisation initiatives. She has been heavily engaged in advocacy and policy discussions around equitable access to new and existing immunisations against respiratory infections of childhood . A/Prof Homaira has published >100 scientific papers in high impact journals including Lancet series, BMJ and Thorax and her research has attracted 10 million AUD in grant funding. A/Prof Homaira is an elected council member of International Society for Influenza and other Respiratory Viruses and Research sub-committee member and Lung Health Faculty for Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand.

Speaker: Speaker TBC

Speaker: Chair: Professor Robert Booy

Robert Booy is honorary Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health at the University of Sydney. From 2005 to 2019 he held Senior roles at NCIRS. He is a medical graduate of the University of Queensland (1984), trained in paediatrics at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Brisbane and has held a range of positions in the UK. Professor Booy’s research interests extend from understanding the genetic basis of susceptibility to, and severity of, infectious diseases, especially influenza, RSV and invasive disease caused by encapsulated organisms; the clinical, public health and social burden of these diseases; and means by which to prevent or control serious infections through vaccines, drugs and non-pharmaceutical measures. Over the past 20 years, Professor Booy has been increasingly recognised as an expert in the respiratory virus field, supervising many studies addressing the burden and prevention of influenza disease in children and adults in the UK, Australia and among Muslim pilgrims to Saudi Arabia. In addition he has led intervention studies with new vaccines, new vaccine delivery methods and alternate methods for preventing disease and transmission such as antivirals and personal protective equipment. Professor Robert Booy is a Director at the Immunisation Coalition.

Speaker: Professor Lou Irving

Professor Lou Irving is a Respiratory Physician at  the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. He is Head of the Lung Tumour Stream and the Director of Respiratory and Director of Clinical Training. Professor Irving has clinical, teaching and research interests in lung cancer, advanced bronchoscopy and COPD and has published over 270 scientific papers.​

Speaker: TBC

Speaker: Dr Jen Kok

Speaker: Dr Pascal Geldsetzer

Dr Pascal Geldsetzer is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. He has won an NIH New Innovator Award to investigate the feasibility of applying causal effect estimation techniques from the social sciences to clinical research questions. As part of this work, he has led quasi-randomization studies that have consistently and repeatedly shown a protective effect of shingles vaccination for mild cognitive impairment, dementia, as well as dementia progression among those already living with the condition. By taking advantage of specific date-of-birth-based eligibility rules that divided individuals who differed in their age by only a week into being eligible or ineligible for shingles vaccination, his group has been able to provide evidence that is far more robust to confounding than standard observational analyses. Given the potential significance of these findings for population health, his group is entirely focused on furthering their research on the potential link between shingles vaccination and dementia. Dr Geldsetzer has earned a PhD and MPH in epidemiology and statistics from Harvard University and a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh.

Speaker: Associate Professor Carolyn Broderick

Carolyn Broderick is a Sydney-based Sport and Exercise Medicine Physician. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Health Sciences at UNSW Sydney and Staff Specialist in Sport & Exercise Medicine at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead. She was Medical Director of the Australian Olympic Team for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and is Chief Medical Officer at Tennis Australia and the Australian Open.
In Carolyn’s role at Tennis Australia, she is responsible for planning and delivering a comprehensive medical service at The Australian Open (the largest annual sporting event in Australia), which provides medical care to more than 1,000 international tennis players and their teams. The Australian Open in 2021 & 2022 were the largest international events (of any kind) to be held in Australia during the COVID pandemic. She co-authored the framework for rebooting community and high-performance sport in Australia during the COVID pandemic, which was adopted by the National Cabinet.
In addition to her clinical role, she is actively involved in research and policy development for national and international sports organizations to improve athlete safety at all levels of competition. She is currently a Chief Investigator on two NHMRC-funded studies in the area of Extreme Heat & Air Quality in Sport. She co-developed the Sports Medicine Australia (SMA) Extreme Heat Policy, released in 2021, which is used in all community sports in Australia. She was a co-author on the Lancet series on Heat & Health, published in August 2021, with these papers ranked in the top 1% of cited papers in the academic field of Clinical Medicine.

Speaker: Professor Bronwyn King AO

Professor Bronwyn King AO is pleased to be working with Burnet Institute and the University of Melbourne to help advance Australia’s progress on indoor air quality, building on lessons from Australia’s world-leading approach to tobacco control. Prof King has convened multiple ‘indoor air quality’ parliamentary roundtables for Australian politicians and led the development of new collaborations and partnerships amongst a broad range of stakeholders from academia, advocacy, industry, business, and government.

Professor King values multidisciplinary networks and global collaborations in public health and appreciates the wisdom and lessons international colleagues bring to her day-to-day work. As a radiation oncologist by background, Professor King has long been a public health champion. She founded Tobacco Free Portfolios, an NGO that launched a global initiative at United Nations Headquarters in 2018. The Tobacco-Free Finance Pledge has 200+ signatories, including many of the world’s largest financial institutions, representing over AU$25 trillion. Prof King’s TEDx Sydney talk has been viewed over three million times.

Professor King is a former elite swimmer who represented Australia and, for ten years, worked as Team Doctor for the Australian Swimming Team. She is a non-executive director and currently serves on a number of boards, including as Deputy Chair of Medical Indemnity Protection Society (MIPS).

In 2019, Prof King was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia and named Melburnian of the Year. In 2023, she was thrilled to become an Honorary Professor at the University of Melbourne.

Speaker: Professor Peter Richmond

Professor Peter Richmond is a Consultant Paediatric Immunologist and Paediatrician at Perth Children’s Hospital, and is Head of the Immunology Department at the Child and Adolescent Health Service in WA. He also heads the Vaccine Trials Group within the Wesfarmers Centre of Vaccines and Infectious Diseases at the Telethon Kids Institute, and is Head of the Discipline of Paediatrics at the UWA Medical School. His major research interests are in the prevention of meningitis, pneumonia, respiratory infections and otitis media. He has authored over 300 scientific publications in these areas and has worked in vaccine research for over 25 years.

Speaker: Associate Professor Michael Woodward

Associate Professor Michael Woodward is Head of Aged Care Research at Austin Health in Melbourne, Victoria. He is a specialist in geriatric medicine with a major interest in adult vaccination and also Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, wound management and the quality use of medications in older people. He is head of the Medical and Cognitive Research Unit that conducts trials into new vaccines and other new therapies for conditions such as dementia and influenza.
Associate Professor Woodward’s publication record includes over 130 peer-reviewed research and review articles. As chair of the Geriatric Therapeutics section of the editorial board of the Journal of Pharmacy Practice and Research he oversaw nearly 20 years of publications on quality use of medications and health promotion activities in older people, including articles on vaccination. He was also joint editor of Wound Practice and Research, the journal of the Australian Wound Management Association, of which he is a past President. He is a member of the editorial committee of the Department of Veteran’s Affairs MATES program, which improves prescribing and pharmaceutical care of DVA beneficiaries, including vaccination.
He is heavily involved in a number of professional organizations including previously Chairing the Committee for Physician Training, Royal Australasian College of Physicians, which oversaw and approved the training of all future consultants in internal medicine. He is currently Chair of that College’s Site Accreditation Committee and was previously a member of their Board of Censors. He was until recently a member of the Geriatric Medicine Education and Training Subcommittee of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Geriatric Medicine, having previously chaired that subcommittee. He has recently overseen a 3rd revision of that Society’s position document on Vaccinations for Older People.
His work in geriatric medicine, dementia and other research and his extensive authorship has been honoured with Membership of the Order of Australia, awarded on Australia Day 2016.

Speaker: Professor Stanley Perlman

Professor Perlman received his Ph.D. in Biophysics from M.I.T., Cambridge, Massachusetts and his M.D. from the University of Miami, Miami, Florida. He is a member of the VRBPAC of the FDA and the COVID-19 Advisory Committee of the ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices).

His current research efforts are focused on coronavirus pathogenesis, including virus-induced demyelination and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and COVID-19. His laboratory has developed several novel animal models useful for studying pathogenesis and evaluating vaccines and antiviral therapies. His studies are directed at understanding why aged patients and mice developed more severe disease than younger individuals after infection with SARS-CoV or SARS-CoV-2 and also on why there is a male predominance in patients with more severe disease after infection with SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV or SARS-CoV-2. He and his colleagues demonstrated that transduction of mice with an adenovirus expressing the human receptor for MERS-CoV, DPP4, rendered them sensitive to infection, providing the first rodent model useful for studying MERS. Similar approaches have been used to develop several mouse models for COVID-19. Among other topics, his research is now focusing on the loss of sense of smell (anosmia) and taste (ageusia) observed in patients with COVID-19.

Speaker: Professor Colleen Lau

Prof Colleen Lau – MBBS (UWA), MPHTM (JCU), PhD (UQ), FRACGP, FACTM, FISTM.
Prof Colleen Lau is an NHMRC Fellow and Professorial Research Fellow at the UQ Centre for Clinical Research. Her areas of expertise include emerging infectious diseases, neglected tropical diseases, and clinical travel medicine. Her wide range of research interests include infectious disease epidemiology, spatial epidemiology and disease mapping, infectious disease surveillance and elimination, vaccinations, travel health, environmental health, and digital decision support tools. Professor Lau’s research projects focus on answering practical questions in clinical management of infectious diseases and operational questions on improving strategies to solve public health problems. She leads UQ’s HERA program on Operational Research and Decision Support for Infectious Diseases (ODeSI).

Speaker: Associate Professor Anthony Byrne

Associate Professor Anthony Byrne is an experienced Respiratory Physician at St Vincent’s and St George hospitals in Sydney, an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of New South Wales, and a respiratory and global health researcher as principal investigator on many national and international investigations. Professor Byrne co-leads the multi-disciplinary Long COVID service at St Vincent’s Hospital with Professor Steven Faux and also leads the Tuberculosis service at the hospital.

Current research includes interventional and observational studies related to acute and post-COVID-19 disease (Long COVID), therapeutic drug monitoring, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (including post-TB sequelae), and respiratory health in resource-limited settings. Professor Byrne completed his PhD studies through the University of Sydney with seminal research into the effect of tuberculosis on the development of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Lima, Peru, under the supervision of Prof Ben Marais, Prof Guy Marks (current president of the International Union), and Harvard University’s Prof Carole Mitnick.

This important work has led to ongoing research collaboration with institutions around the world, including Partners In Health (Peru), GHESKIO (Haiti), Harvard University (USA), University of Florida (USA), McGill University (Canada), Karuna Trust (India), and Stellenbosch University (South Africa). Exciting new research into Long COVID, in collaboration with Professor Bruce Brew, Steven Faux, and Lucette Cysique, as well as collaborating institutions in Australia and beyond, includes the University of NSW, Curran Foundation, the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, the Kirby Institute, and Macquarie University.

Speaker: Professor Lou Irving

Professor Lou Irving is a Respiratory Physician at  the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. He is Head of the Lung Tumour Stream and the Director of Respiratory and Director of Clinical Training. Professor Irving has clinical, teaching and research interests in lung cancer, advanced bronchoscopy and COPD and has published over 270 scientific papers.​