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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 conducted in partnership with community and focuses on:

• Multidisciplinary care needs of people with endometriosis - QENDOCare
• Supportive care interventions in cancer - PROMISE trial
• Co-designed, integrated, person-centred models of care for people with innate variations of sex characteristics - Interconnect Health Research

Dr Rowlands is a mixed methods researcher and combines her training in health psychology with her epidemiological skills to understand people's health and wellbeing. Her previous research has focused on:

• The causes and consequences of endometriosis in Australia - GELLES
• Women’s quality of life following a diagnosis of endometrial (uterine) cancer ANECS. In this role, she also led a qualitative study exploring young women’s fertility concerns following a diagnosis of gynaecological cancer.

Women’s adjustment to miscarriage using data from more than 14,000 young women participating in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health - Coping with miscarriage study.

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.

Janet Stajic is a Yidinji–Jirrbal woman of Far North Queensland who grew up in Brisbane. With 17 years’ experience in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health, Janet has worked as an Aboriginal Health Worker, in program management, policy, and research across the Aboriginal community-controlled, public, non-profit, and university sectors. With over a decade of research experience, Janet has contributed to projects spanning chronic disease, blood borne viruses, health services research, program evaluation, and workforce. Her doctoral research explored the racialisation of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Worker and Practitioner workforce, its positioning within the health system, their conceptualisations of care, and the limitations of the health system in supporting this workforce. Janet currently works for the University of Queensland Poche Centre for Indigenous Health as a Research Fellow and is a Professional Ambassador for the National Association of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Health Workers and Practitioners.

Dr George Thomas is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Queensland’s Health and Wellbeing Centre for Research Innovation and a member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. His work focuses on understanding children’s engagement with digital technologies and how this shapes their health, wellbeing, and development.

George has over 15 years of experience in public health and behavioural sciences, with expertise spanning:

• Digital health and healthy screen use in childhood

• Health behaviour change and family-based interventions

• Translation of research into community programs

He began his career with a UK government taskforce on weight management, delivering healthy lifestyle programs for school children and families. Since then, his research has focused on bridging science and practice, ensuring evidence informs policy and community action.

George is also committed to education and mentorship. He has taught research methods and public health to undergraduate students in paramedicine and sport and exercise sciences, consistently receiving excellent feedback, and has supervised more than 30 student research projects.

A passionate advocate for promoting healthy behaviours, George works to create practical solutions that support families, schools, and communities.

Dr Mike Trott is a Research Fellow in Psychiatric Epidemiology and Evidence Synthesis with the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research, specialising in lifestyle psychiatry, clinical trials, and advanced statistical methodology.

His current research program addresses three major themes:

• Physical activity and sedentary behaviour – understanding their impact on mental and physical health and developing interventions to reduce cardiometabolic risk.
• Clinical trials methodology – applying Bayesian and frequentist designs, adaptive platforms, and individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis to improve the efficiency and robustness of mental health research.
• Evidence translation – contributing to international guideline development, including forthcoming lifestyle guidelines for schizophrenia, and linking research findings to health service delivery.

He has published extensively in psychiatry, public health, and medical journals, and my work has informed global organisations such as WHO, OECD, and UNESCO.

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.