Our members

Lisa trained as a registered nurse graduating in 1980, followed by post-graduate certificates in midwifery and neonatal intensive care. She worked for a number of years at the Queen Victoria Hospital for Mothers and Babies and the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. Lisa then worked in the Cooke Islands training midwives and supporting ANC & PNC. She then moved to Namibia, where she initially worked on a malaria and pregnancy project but moved onto support a program with a focus on HIV and pregnancy.  At this time Lisa also completed MPH by distance through the University of Oslo. After 15 years she returned to Australia and since 2010 has been working at Burnet Institute providing technical support to a range of programs in PNG, Myanmar, Indonesia and Tibet. More recently, she has become technical lead for a number of projects with a focus in immunisation in PNG, Laos and Myanmar, including ARIA-RISE, AIHSS – West Sepik and a HPV study in Myanmar.
Lisa has a particular interest in health literacy and health communication. She coordinated the Health and Communication Unit for MPH at Monash for 5 years. She has also taught on the Nossal Global Health course and coordinated a number of AAIs.

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.

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.

Kathryn Tapper is a Clinical Nurse Consultant (CNC) with post-graduate qualifications in immunisation, child and family health, infection control. She holds a Master of Public Health. She has worked within the Public Health Unit (PHU) network as an Immunisation Coordinator for 12 years (Northern Sydney PHU and Illawarra Shoalhaven PHU) and was previously employed by NCIRS, from 2010 to 2015, as the CNC in Adverse Events Following Immunisation (AEFI). She rejoined NCIRS in 2021 and is currently working with the AusVaxSafety team on various adverse event of special interest studies, as well as with the Global Health team on the Philippines AEFI Surveillance System Technical Assistance Twinning Project.

Katie Flanagan is Head of Infectious Diseases at Launceston General Hospital, Director of the Tasmanian Vaccine Trial Centre, a Clinical Professor at the University of Tasmania and an Adjunct Professor at RMIT University. She has been a member of ATAGI since 2019 and was President of the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases between 2022 and 2024. Katie undertook undergraduate and specialist training in Oxford and London (UK). Her PhD, carried out  in Professor Adrian Hill’s group at Oxford, investigated natural immunity to malaria to inform vaccine design. She was Head of Infant Immunology at the Medical Research Council Unit, The Gambia for seven years before relocating to Australia in 2011. Professor Flanagan has led multiple clinical trials of novel and licensed vaccines in Africa, Europe and Australia and has a global network of collaborations in vaccine immunology. Her current research employs systems vaccinology to study vaccine responses at the extremes of age and in pregnancy, non-targeted vaccine effects and the role of biological sex in vaccine responses.

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.