Our members

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.

Katarzyna Bolsewicz has been involved in co-designing and implementing WHO Tailoring Immunisation Programmes (TIP) across three local health districts (LHDs) in NSW: Central Coast, Hunter New England and Mid-North Coast for the last 2 years. TIP is a strategy developed by WHO (and implemented in many European countries as well as successfully piloted in Maitland, NSW) that uses social sciences and qualitative approaches to understand the demand and supply barriers and enablers to childhood immunisation in areas of low coverage. Findings are then used by local immunisation stakeholders to design localised, appropriate strategies to get more children up to date on their immunisations. Katarzyna has been working closely with immunisation stakeholders in each LHD, including caregivers, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, public health units, public health networks, GP practices, child and family health nurses. She is also a research fellow in social science with NCIRS, where she has been working on exploring and addressing communication barriers and enablers related to influenza vaccination experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and health providers working with these communities.

Dr Geoff Clark is a global public health and international development specialist with more than 25 years experience working for both multilateral, bilateral and national organisations in senior clinical. Management, policy and advisory roles in several countries in the Asia Pacific region.  He has also held leadership roles in setting the health service agenda regionally, including developing policy processes to progress the implementation of health security, health system strengthening and health service delivery goals.  He holds post-graduate qualifications in Infectious Disease’s Intelligence, Public Health, Health Management and Law and supported the Vanuatu Ministry of Health in its response to COVID 19 as the Senior Health Security Adviser.  

His current role is the State Manager, Primary Health Care for the Queensland Section of the Royal Flying Doctor Service.
 

Professor Gulam Khandaker is a Public Health Physician and currently working as the Director of Public Health for Central Queensland Hospital and Health Service, Queensland, Australia. His research focuses on childhood development, disability, infectious diseases, vaccine preventable diseases and healthcare in high, low- and middle-income countries. Gulam's research is supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council Investigators Grant (2022-2026), Queensland Health (Queensland Advancing Clinical Research Fellowship 2019-2023) and Australian Cerebral Palsy Alliance Research Foundation.

He leads a global research program on cerebral palsy and vaccine preventable childhood disabilities in LMICs using a network of cerebral palsy registers in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Indonesia, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Argentina, and Suriname.

Dorothy is a senior research fellow at the Kirby Institute, UNSW, and an honorary research fellow with the Centre for Women’s Infectious Disease at The Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne. She holds a Doctorate in epidemiology and a Master of Public Health. Dorothy's research focuses on development and implementation of novel public health surveillance systems, and the evaluation of vaccination and screening strategies for the prevention of HPV and related diseases. 

Since 2014, she has led the development and implementation of a Commonwealth Department of Health funded National HPV Monitoring Program that is evaluating the long-term impact of HPV vaccination on HPV infections. This program has provided the basis for well-cited publications on the impact of Australia’s vaccination program. The program methodology underpinned the design of a world-first project to evaluate the impact of one- and two-dose HPV vaccine schedules in South Africa funded by NHMRC and the Gates Foundation. Currently, she also coordinates the implementation of serological surveys to track the spread of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Australia.

Andrew is a clinical epidemiologist with over 20 years’ experience in international public health, sexually transmitted and infectious disease research. Andrew has held a joint appointment with the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research (PNGIMR) and the Kirby Institute for Infection and Immunity in Society, Faculty of Medicine, UNSW Sydney, since 2010. In the last 20 years he has designed and led multi-disciplinary research teams in Australia, Kenya, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tanzania, United Kingdom and Vanuatu. In 2007, he established an international collaborative research group at the PNGIMR, where he was head of the Sexual and Reproductive Health Unit and Deputy Director from 2010 to 2015. His research in the last decade has focused on evaluating innovative solutions to improve women’s reproductive health in high-burden, low-resource settings. 

Andrew is lead investigator of an NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence in Cervical Cancer Control grant (C4 CRE; 2017-22) and an NHMRC Project Grant to evaluate the impact of 2-dose and 1-dose HPV vaccination schedules on community level HPV prevalence among adolescent girls in South Africa (2019-24); and leads an NHMRC-funded field trial of point-of-care HPV testing and treatment for cervical screening in PNG (2015-20). He is a member of the PNG National Technical Advisory Committee on HPV Vaccination (2016-present) and the PNG National Technical Working Group on Comprehensive Cervical Cancer Control (2017-present). He has been a board member of the PNG National Cancer Foundation since its inception in 2013. He jointly organised a regional meeting on cervical cancer in the Pacific, held in Fiji and attended by representatives from seven countries, WHO, UNFPA, and UNICEF that led to a joint Call to Action on Cervical Cancer Elimination (December 2019). He was subsequently asked to take a lead role in progressing the elimination agenda in PNG and Vanuatu from 2020.

Dr André Wattiaux is a dual trained paediatrician and public health physician who is currently the Medical Director of the Gold Coast Public Health Unit. He has gained knowledge and experience of public health practice, research and policy with a focus on immunisation and vaccine-preventable diseases at local, state and national levels through more than 15 years practicing in the US, the UK, the Gambia and Indigenous Australia with special attention to vulnerable populations. André’s experience has spanned
from contributing to the setting up of a nationwide surveillance system in the Gambia monitoring invasive pneumococcal disease to leading the roll-out of pandemic influenza vaccines across the Northern Territory of Australia including remote Indigenous communities.

He has previously served as a member of a technical support team based at NCIRS supporting the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) and as a member of the Australian National Immunisation Committee (NIC) to provide advice on the National Immunisation Program (NIP).

Jennifer is a clinician researcher, working as a general paediatrician and paediatric infectious diseases specialist at the Royal Darwin Hospital, and co-leading the Menzies Timor-Leste projects with Dr Josh Francis. Her work with Menzies is focused around Indigenous and global child health, particularly in areas of antimicrobial resistance, infectious diseases, rheumatic heart disease and health system strengthening. Immunisation and vaccine preventable diseases are therefore a core part of her work, both in the Northern Territory in Australia and in Timor-Leste. Menzies, through the STRONG-TL project, supports VPD epidemiology, surveillance and outbreak management. Menzies is a collaborating partner in the ARIA work to be conducted in Timor-Leste. 

Jennifer is also a senior lecturer with Flinders University and teaches medical students about immunisation and vaccine preventable disease. Previous overseas experience includes capacity building and improving quality of care in resource-limited settings with work in Laos, Malawi and India.