Our members

Kristine Macartney is Director, National Centre for Immunisation Research and Suveillance (NCIRS). She is a paediatrician and infectious disease specialist. Kristine is a medical graduate of the University of NSW and has almost 20 years of experience in vaccinology. She has experience working in the USA at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where she was a founding member of the US Vaccine Education Center. Her Doctorate of Medicine was on rotavirus infection, in particular the mucosal immune response to novel vaccine candidates. She is interested in all aspects of vaccine preventable disease research, particularly policy development, vaccine safety and prevention of viral diseases. She is the Senior Editor of The Australian Immunisation Handbook. Kristine has a clinical appointment at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead as a Staff Specialist in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology and a conjoint academic appointment as Professor in the Discipline of Child and Adolescent Health, University of Sydney.

Contact ARIA Secretariat to get in touch with Kristine: 

Professor Fiona Russell (BMBS, Grad Dip(Clin Epi), Dip Paeds, MPHTM, FRACP, PhD) is a paediatrician; Director of the Child and Adolescent Health PhD Program, Department of Paediatrics, The University of Melbourne; and Group Leader for the Asia-Pacific Health research group, MCRI. She works for a WHO Collaborating Centre for Child and Neonatal Health Research and Training. She holds a NHMRC Investigator grant and was previously awarded NHMRC TRIP, ECR, and post-grad scholarships. Her research provides evidence for policy to improve child health in low-income countries. Having lived in Fiji for >6 years and Vietnam for 4 years, she partners with local Ministries of Health, WHO and local research institutions, and currently has teams in Fiji and Laos. Her research provides the evidence for new vaccine introduction and develops novel ways to measure vaccine impact. Her research has translated to WHO policy and has been instrumental in setting the global PCV research agenda. She is now evaluating the impact of PCV and rotavirus vaccines, and a single dose of HPV vaccine in the Asia-Pacific countries. She is CIA on the NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence-Pneumococcal Disease Control in the Asia-Pacific Region and is CIA on the NHMRC clinical trial of Azithromycin in labour to prevent maternal and infant infections in Fiji. As PI, she has received >$30 million in grants and has undertaken multiple international consultancies. In 2019, she was awarded the Australasian Society of Infectious Diseases Frank Fenner Award.

Contact ARIA Secretariat to get in touch with Fiona:

Julie Leask is a social scientist in the Susan Wakil School of Nursing and Midwifery and visiting professorial fellow at the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance (NCIRS). Her research focuses vaccination uptake, programs and policy, and health communication. Julie is chair of the WHO Working Group on Measuring Behavioural and Social Drivers of Vaccination. She sits on the WHO Immunization and Vaccines related Implementation Research advisory committee and the South East Asia Regional Immunization Technical Advisory Group. Julie was named overall winner of the Australian Financial Review 100 Woman of Influence; won the Public Health Impact Award 2019 and the Sax Institute Research Action Award in 2015. Her team won the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Research Engagement and Innovation for the www.TalkingAboutImmunisation.com.au package.

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Chris Morgan is a public health researcher, paediatrician and development practitioner with 27 years’ experience of health development in resource-constrained settings. He works on health services improvement, especially for immunization programs, deployment of rapid diagnostics, maternal and infant care, and community health. He is Head of the International Development Discipline at the Burnet Institute, where he has worked since 2001. For Burnet he designs and implements programs in Papua New Guinea, Myanmar, Kenya, and elsewhere in Asia and the Pacific. He serves on advisory groups for the World Health Organization and Gavi (the Global Vaccine Alliance) on innovative vaccine delivery, including chairing the WHO Immunization Practices Advisory Committee for five years until 2018. A focus has been the intersection of birth-dose for hepatitis B vaccine and postnatal care in resource-constrained settings. Earlier in his career he directed bilateral health aid in China, the Mekong sub-region, and PNG, and spent eight years in front-line service delivery in rural hospitals and community health programs in Nepal and Tibet (China). He holds academic appointments at Melbourne and Monash universities.

Contact ARIA Secretariat to get in touch with Chris:

Professor Durrheim is Director of Health Protection, Hunter New England Health; Conjoint Professor of Public Health Medicine at the University of Newcastle; and Adjunct Professor of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at James Cook University, Queensland, Australia. He currently chairs the Western Pacific Regional Measles Rubella Verification Commission and is a member of the World Health Organization’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) working groups on Ebola vaccines, measles and rubella.

Contact ARIA Secretariat to get in touch with David: 

Professor Andrews is an epidemiologist with major research interests in vaccine-preventable diseases and skin infections. He is a senior member of the Australian Partnership for Preparedness Research on InfectiouS disease Emergencies (APPRISE) and has a joint appointment as Director of the Masters of Applied Epidemiology (MAE) program at the Australian National University. The MAE is Australia’s field epidemiology training program. Ross has contributed to national immunisation policy for 10 years as a member the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI), including four years as Chair. His term on ATAGI ended on 30 June 2018.

Contact ARIA Secretariat to get in touch with Ross: SCHN-NCIRSGlobal@health.nsw.gov.au

Josh Francis is a paediatrician and paediatric infectious diseases specialist at the Royal Darwin Hospital, and senior research fellow at Menzies School of Health Research. He leads capacity building and research projects in the Northern Territory and Timor-Leste, focused on strengthening health systems responses to infectious diseases.

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John Kaldor is a NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow and UNSW Scientia Professor. He holds a doctorate in Biostatistics from the University of California. Berkeley, and began his research career at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France. For over 30 years he has built and led internationally recognised research programs at the University of New South Wales on the epidemiology and prevention of infectious diseases. His research has covered a wide range of projects, including the development and implementation of public health surveillance systems, investigations of infection-related cancer, cohort and cross-sectional investigations of risk factors for infectious disease transmission, and interventional trials of disease prevention strategies. Professor Kaldor has been a highly influential contributor to public health knowledge. His work has guided policy in disease control, particularly in relation to the prevention of HIV infection and other sexually transmitted infections, viral hepatitis and neglected tropical diseases. Professor Kaldor has also served on numerous policy and advisory committees in Australia and internationally. He has had close working relationships with public health programs in a number of countries of the Asia-Pacific region, particularly Cambodia, Indonesia,  Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Solomon Islands.

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Chris Blyth is a clinical academic, NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow and co-director of Wesfarmers Centre for Vaccines and Infectious Diseases (WCVID), Telethon Kids Institute. He is Associate Professor of Paediatrics at University of Western Australia, Infectious Diseases Physician at Perth Children's Hospital and a Clinical Microbiologist with PathWest Laboratory. Dr Blyth has extensive experience in paediatric and infectious diseases research particularly in the fields of influenza, vaccine-preventable respiratory infection, pneumonia and vaccine safety. His PhD (Preventing influenza morbidity in Australian children through vaccination; 2016) was instrumental in influencing national and state policy. He has held a NHMRC Career Development Fellowship (2016-2019) and recently awarded a NHMRC Emerging Leader Fellowship (2020-2024). He co-leads the WCVID Infectious Disease Epidemiology team, a multidisciplinary group using administrative data, case-control, cohort studies and clinical trials to investigating better ways to diagnose, treatment and prevent respiratory infections in children. Dr Blyth collaborates broadly with other research groups within WCVID, TKI, Perth Children’s Hospital, Australian paediatric tertiary hospitals and the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research.

Kim Mulholland is a paediatrician with extensive experience in research leading to or evaluating the introduction of new vaccines in the developing world. Between 1989 and 1995 he led the Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) vaccine research program in the Gambia and between 1995 and 2000 he worked at the World Health Organization (WHO) assisting with the design and oversight of Gambian and South African pneumococcal trials. He also established a pneumonia trialists group that established standardized methods and definitions for pneumococcal carriage and radiological pneumonia in vaccine trials. Since 2000 he has worked in at the London School of Hygiene and tropical Medicine, the Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin and Murdoch Childrens Research Institute. Kim currently leads the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded PneuCarriage Research Project, based at Murdoch Children's Reserach Instittue, as well as field studies in Fiji (PCV10 impact study), Mongolia (PCV13 impact/effectiveness study), Laos (PCV13 impact study), Indonesia (PATH funded pneumococcal Whole Cell Vaccine evaluation) and Vietnam (PCV10/PCV13 schedules study).

Contact ARIA Secretariat to get in touch with Kim:

Meru Sheel is an infectious diseases epidemiologist and a global health researcher. Meru has advanced training in microbiology, immunology and epidemiology with nearly 15 years of experiences in infectious diseases in Australia and internationally. Meru has varied experience in vaccinology and immunisation including vaccine discovery and clinical development, immunisation and diseases surveillance and, outbreak response to vaccine-preventable diseases especially in resource limited settings. Meru is passionate about improving health outcomes for marginalised populations and health systems; and has worked in dynamic and complex settings including having worked in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health in Australia and in India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Fiji, America Samoa, Samoa, Tonga and Dominica.

Contact ARIA Secretariat to get in touch with Meru: