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Dr Melinda Protani is an epidemiologist with over 15 years experience in research and tertiary education. She is the current Program Director for the Master of Epidemiology at UQ. Her research is focussed on cancer aetiology, survivorship and patterns of care, with a particular interest in inequity in access to health services and the receipt of optimal cancer care. Dr Protani has experience in a number of methods including medical record audits, surveys of the general population, patient groups and clinicians, and data linkage using registry and administrative datasets.

Ingrid Rowlands’ research is broadly focused on women’s reproductive health, with a particular interest in adverse events and diseases including miscarriage, infertility, endometriosis and gynaecological cancer. Dr Rowlands' current program of work is generating new knowledge on the causes and consequences of endometriosis using national, longitudinal datasets.

Previously, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute on a national, Australian study of women with uterine cancer, focusing on women’s quality of life following treatment. In this role, she also led a study exploring young women’s fertility concerns following a diagnosis of gynaecological cancer.

Her doctoral work examined women’s adjustment to miscarriage using data from more than 14,000 young women participating in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health.

A/Prof Benn Sartorius is an established spatial and global health epidemiologist, with a particular interest in the burden of infectious disease and attributable determinants at sub-national, national and global scales as a tool to help inform and optimise policy at national and subnational scales. Dr Sartorius a principal research fellow in UQ's ODeSI team at University of Queensland, an affiliate professor in Department of Health Metric Sciences at University of Washington and a honorary visiting research fellow at University of Oxfored. Prior to join UQ, Dr Sartorius was the principal investigator for the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) Project based in the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health at University of Oxford.

Dr Sartorius' research has focused on better understanding the spatial-temporal burden and risk factors of multiple IDs, including mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, sexually transmitted infections, neglected tropical diseases such as soil-transmitted helminths and onchocerciasis, vaccine preventable diseases, emerging infectious diseases and more recently focused on antimicrobial resistance. These and other examples highlight the utility of spatial epidemiology to identify higher risk areas that should be prioritised for more targeted, tailored and resource efficient intervention and control measures. However, often spatial risk estimates for IDs are often not produced in-country in settings such as the Pacific, where disease burden is high and local modelling expertise is limited, resulting in use of incomplete/biased data and resulting in inefficient and suboptimal decision-making. I’ve been a collaborator on the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project since 2014 and the Scientific Council for the GBD Project since 2015. Dr Sartorius is a member of the WHO Reference Group on Health Statistics (RGHS) and chair of the Age-Specific Mortality Estimation and Life Table Computation task force. Benn's vision, through ODeSI-HERA, is to expand his international profile and leadership in spatial-temporal epidemiology of priority infectious diseases in Australia and the Pacific. This will include spatial epidemiological innovation, and capacity building to improve health outcomes in high-risk and vulnerable sub-populations within the region, and will be co-created with stakeholders in the region to ensure that it aligns with their priorities, and support precision-based decision-making systems to help policy makers optimise resource allocation and guide targeted interventions.

Dr. Helena Schuch is a senior research fellow at the School of Dentistry, University of Queensland.

She is a dentist and an oral epidemiologist with special interest in social epidemiology. Helena is also interested in methods to estimate causal inference and on applying machine learning techniques to predict oral health outcomes.

She completed her PhD in Oral Epidemiology at the University of Adelaide (2018) and is currently in the Editorial Board of Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology.

Qualifications: BDS, MScDent, PhD

Research Interests: Oral health inequalities. Life course epidemiology. Causal inference methods. Machine learning applied to oral health.

Dr George Thomas is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow in the Health and Wellbeing Centre for Research Innovation at the University of Queensland and a member of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. George has a PhD in behavioural sciences and his research has focused on better understanding digital technology use among children and how such engagement impacts on their health, wellbeing, and development. He has worked in public health and behavioural sciences for over 10 years, starting with a government taskforce on Weight Management, providing healthy lifestyle programs for school children and families. He has taught research methods and public health to undergraduate paramedic and sport and exercise science students and received excellent student ratings. He has supervised over 25 student research projects. George is a passionate advocate for the promotion of healthy behaviours and is committed to translating evidence into community settings.

Charlotte Young is a research fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research at The University of Queensland. Charlotte is a qualitative researcher with interdisciplinary interests spanning sociology, public health, health promotion, and migration studies. Her research focuses on the systemic drivers of migrant health inequities and how they can be redressed. Charlotte is also interested in the ways migrants adapt and respond to systemic and structural drivers of inequity. Recently, she has been exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted migrant and refugee background tertiary students and how young culturally and linguistically diverse social media influencers have been promoting COVID-safe behaviours online. Charlotte also explores immigrant organisations as critical settings to influence health and wellbeing. She is passionate about producing impactful research to affect positive change and tackling migrant health problems in solidarity with the communities they affect. Charlotte also has experience conducting evaluation research for large-scale health interventions.