Our members

Professor Michael Gold is a Paediatric Allergist and Immunologist with conjoint positions in the Discipline of Paediatrics, University of Adelaide and is former Medical Unit Head, of the Department of Allergy and Immunology at the Women’s and Children’s Health Network.  He has a research and clinical interest in the prevention of food allergy and vaccine safety.  He was appointed to the World Health Organisation Global Advisory Committee for Vaccine Safety in 2010 and has been an advisor to the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration via his appointment to a number of expert advisory groups since 2006.  He has been awarded a number of Australian national research grants as a principle investigator for projects that have researched novel methods of safety surveillance including data linkage and m-Health. 

Professor Gold has contributed to a number of key WHO guidelines which include the global Adverse Event Following Immunisation surveillance manual, the WHO guideline on causality assessment, a guideline for programme managers on Immunisation stress related responses and the global manual for COVID vaccine safety surveillance.  He has participated in numerous WHO organised training courses to strengthen adverse event surveillance and causality assessment systems in Low and Middle Income Countries and is currently a consultant to WHO South East Asian Region, facilitating the implementation of COVID vaccine pharmacovigilance. He has contributed to the Vaccines for Africa (VACFA) initiative through research collaborations and presentations at the annual vaccinology course based at the University of Cape Town. 

Kerrie Wiley is a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Emerging Leadership Fellow, and Senior Research Fellow with the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health, in the Faculty of Medicine and Health.  Kerrie’s research focuses on the social and behavioural aspects of immunisation and other preventive health behaviours, and their implications for policy and practice. Kerrie is a member of the World Health Organization ‘Measuring Behavioural and Social Drivers of Vaccination’ (BeSD) Working Group, and a founding member of the Collaboration of Social Science in Immunisation.

Professor Paul Effler is the Medical coordinator in the Communicable Disease Control Directorate for the Western Australian Department of Health.

Professor Julia Brotherton is a public health physician and Medical Director of Population Health at the Australian Centre for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer. She is Professor of Cancer Prevention Policy and Implementation at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, and Professorial Fellow at NCIRS. 

For over fifteen years, Julia has been involved in research and policy development informing the implementation and evaluation of HPV vaccination and cervical screening programs. She was a lead investigator in Australian research which demonstrated the world’s first evidence of dramatic declines in both HPV infections and pre-cancerous cervical lesions in young women post- vaccination. She has 220 publications to date and is a member of the WHO Director General's Expert Advisory Group on Cervical Cancer Elimination.

Kylie Jenkins is a registered nurse and public health expert who is currently employed as Maternal Newborn Health Technical Advisor with the DFAT-funded Australia’s support to the Fiji health sector project. She has >15 years’ experience in international development, predominantly in the Pacific. She has expertise in immunisation programs, maternal and child health, communicable diseases and disaster management. In her role as Advisor to the DFAT-funded Fiji Health Sector Support Program 2012-2016, she worked closely with the Fiji Ministry of Health to procure and introduce three new vaccines (pneumococcal, rotavirus, and HPV vaccines) through an innovative financing system achieving high coverage. She has vast experience advising and working with governments and UN agencies. She previously worked for UNICEF where she was responsible for overseeing the UNICEF support to the Expanded Program on Immunisation (EPI) Programs in the Pacific. In addition, Kylie was the founding member of the PIPS Committee that in 2005 led to a collaborative approach to donor funding and technical support for immunisation programs. The committee coordinated 22 Pacific Island Countries and multiple donors, including Australian Aid, NZAID, JICA and SPC.  This has led to Kylie having strong connections with the EPI Program Managers across the Pacific Region.

Tonia Marquardt is a public health physician who has worked in a range of remote and developing contexts throughout her career. Over the last 25 years she has spent time working with Médecins Sans Frontières on various projects, including relating to HIV in Malawi and to refugees and internally displaced people in Liberia, Darfur and Bangladesh. She has responded to multiple disease outbreaks (cholera, measles, meningitis) in the course of those projects, as well as to measles in Uganda and Ebola in South Sudan. As a women’s health advisor, she has supported activities in multiple locations, including Nigeria, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Philippines. She has also spent time as a regional medical lead on projects dealing with hepatitis C in Cambodia, tuberculosis in Papua New Guinea and leishmaniasis in Pakistan. Tonia has spent many years in far North Queensland, where she worked in retrieval medicine and primary health care with the Royal Flying Doctor Service, mostly in Cape York. During this time, Tonia obtained dual fellowships in General Practice and Rural and Remote Medicine. She was part of the editorial team for the first Chronic Conditions Manual. Recently, Tonia has been working in Queensland Public Health Units as she completed her physician training; her roles included responding to communicable diseases such as COVID-19, melioidosis, meningitis and diphtheria. She also supported the Rheumatic Heart Register team and worked on the addition of acute post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis to the list of nationally notifiable diseases. 

April Murphy has a background in nursing, with a focus on primary health care and preventive health, and has experience in the public and private sectors, Aboriginal medical services, digital health and humanitarian responses. She has worked in international health projects in South Africa, Uganda, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Liberia and Papua New Guinea in areas including primary health care, childhood immunisation and nutrition, chronic disease, infectious diseases, mobile health services and mass vaccination campaigns. April completed her Master of International Public Health at the University of Sydney and remains committed to health systems strengthening and sustainable health care.

Ketaki is a paediatrician with a special interest in vaccinology, and works as a Staff Specialist at the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance (NCIRS). She is a medical graduate of the University of New South Wales and undertook her paediatric training at the Sydney Children’s Hospital Network. At NCIRS, Ketaki’s main role is evidence synthesis and supporting development of Australian national immunisation policies by the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation.

Ketaki also provides technical advice to NCIRS Global Health team, and is a member of the New South Wales Immunisation Specialist Service, providing clinical support to immunisation providers and public health units. She is carrying out research on the impact of biologic immunosuppressants taken during pregnancy on maternal and infant immune responses to vaccines. 

Katie Attwell is a political science and public policy scholar at the University of Western Australia. She is a global expert in vaccine hesitancy and vaccination policies for childhood and COVID-19 vaccines. Katie has engaged in community, policy and behavioural research in vaccination uptake since 2014, the year of her groundbreaking, internationally recognised ‘I Immunise’ campaign, which drew on behavioural insights to address alternative lifestyle-based vaccine hesitancy in Fremantle, Western Australia. She led the interdisciplinary West Australian project ’Coronavax: Preparing community and government’, which engaged in community and government research for a vaccine roll-out for COVID-19. Associate Professor Attwell frequently shares her research and insights globally with the academic field, governments, technical specialists and the media. She has published in Nature, Pediatrics, Milbank Quarterly and Social Science and Medicine. With her team, she is currently researching vaccination policymaking in the US, the UK, Italy, France, Bangladesh and Malaysia. Her specific area of expertise is vaccine mandates.

Belle Overmars is a project coordinator and researcher. She coordinates and evaluates a vaccine education and communication training program in the Asia-Pacific region, including Fiji, Tonga, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. Her qualitative research background has involved vaccine uptake research with migrants, children living with disability and people living in the Asia-Pacific region who participate in the education program. She has expertise in public health, vaccination social science, COVID-19 disease and qualitative research methods. She is also experienced in the area of infectious diseases more broadly, with a background in vaccinology, immunology and microbiology.

Clare Glover-Wright works as a Research Fellow in the Economics of Global Health and Infectious Diseases group within the Health Economics Unit at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health (University of Melbourne), and in the Vaccine Uptake group at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute.

Drawing on a background in both clinical research and public health, Clare’s predominant research focus is health economics analyses alongside implementation science of maternal and childhood anaemia, rheumatic heart disease and meningococcal disease, as well as childhood vaccine uptake programs in low- and middle-income settings in the Asia-Pacific region and Africa. This research involves conceptualising and designing economic evaluation studies to determine the cost-effectiveness of interventions in resource-poor settings alongside randomised controlled trials and observational research. 

Clare also has significant experience in using evidence synthesis to understand how services can be better orientated to support marginalised populations through the design and conduct of systematic and scoping reviews.

Bianca Middleton is a paediatrician and vaccine researcher working in the Northern Territory, Australia. She has a long-standing clinical and research commitment to improving child health in rural and remote northern Australia. Her research expertise includes real-world evaluation of rotavirus vaccine performance among First Nations children, and the delivery of pragmatic clinical trials in rural and remote settings.