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Professor Craig A McBride PhD, FRACS, FACS, FFSTEd is a full-time Senior Staff Specialist Paediatric Surgeon at Children's Health Queensland. He is also an educator, a researcher, and a father to two boys. In addition to his public work, he has a private practice at www.betterkids.com.au.

Professor McBride is originally from Aotearoa/New Zealand and worked in three of the four Paediatric Surgical units in that country, before moving to the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne for the final two years of his surgical training. Following Fellowship in 2007, he moved to Brisbane and has been here ever since.

He has specialised interest and expertise in thoracic, hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgery, burns and trauma. He is also a member of both the Children's Health Queensland Human Research Ethics Committee and the Clinical Ethics Response Group at Queensland Children's Hospital, as well as being involved in the Queenslannd Children's Critical Incident Panel and the Clinical Incident Subcommittee of the Queensland Paediatric Quality Council.

Craig has published research in many areas related to children's health.

Neurologist

Dr McCombe graduated in Medicine from UQ and completed a Science degree for medical students. She then trained as a neurologist in Sydney, at Prince Henry and Prince of Wales Hospitals. She obtained a PhD from the University of Sydney. She obtained experience in Neurophysiology in Cleveland and then returned to UQ as a post-doctoral fellow. She worked for some years as a research fellow in Neuroimmunology and was an NHMRc SRF. Later she resumed clinical practice as a neurologist, and contimued her research as an NHMRC Practitioner Fellow. She is currentlyProfessor and Head of the Royal Brisbane Clinical school in the School of Medicine and Co-head of the Brain and Mental Health Theme at the UQ Centre for Clinical Research.

Associate Professor Matthew McGrail is the Head of Regional Training Hubs research at UQ’s Rural Clinical School. Joining UQ in Nov 2017, he is based at the Rockhampton Clinical Unit, and he is chair of the research and evaluation working group of UQ’s Regional Medical Pathway as well as chair of UQ RCS’s medical graduate cohort longitudinal tracking study (UQ MediCoS). He is widely known for co-developing Australia's Modified Monash Model rurality classification, applied to most health research and policies.

Matthew has a particular interest in the ongoing concerns with medical workforce distribution, connecting that through his research and evaluation to health policies, training pathways and healthcare systems. To date he has been a chief investigator on two separate Centres of Research Excellence, one on medical workforce dynamics and the other on rural and remote primary health care access. He has also co-researched with various GP training organisations, specialty colleges, rural workforce agencies, as well as state and commonwealth health departments

Matthew has worked in the university sector for over 25 years, working mostly as a researcher in rural health. He was originally trained as a statistician, expanding his skills across GIS and software development, completing his PhD in 2008. He has been lead biostatistician on 3 large NHMRC-funded RCTs that are published in the world-leading general medical journal, the Lancet. Matthew’s research is mostly centred on improved access to health care for rural populations, mainly focused in the medical sector. He has a unique blend of ‘generalist’ research skills and experience across the disciplines of statistics, geography, rural health, econometrics, public health and clinical research.

John McGrath AM, MBBS, MD, PhD, FRANZCP, FAHMS, FACPsych

John McGrath is a psychiatrist interested in discovering the causes of serious mental disorders. He has affiliations with the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research, the Queensland Brain Institute (University of Queensland), and past appointments with the National Centre for Register-based Research (Aarhus University) Denmark. His research aims to generate and evaluate nongenetic risk factors for schizophrenia. He has forged productive cross-disciplinary collaborations linking risk factor epidemiology with developmental neurobiology (e.g. using animal models to explore candidate exposures). He has supervised major systematic reviews of the incidence, prevalence and mortality of schizophrenia. He was awarded a John Cade Fellowship by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, and a Niels Bohr Professorship by the Danish National Research Foundation. He has been awarded the Erik Stromgren Medal, the Lieber Prize for Outstanding Schizophrenia Research and made an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists.

~~Mike McGuckin is a NHMRC Principal Research Fellow and is Deputy Director (Research) at at the Mater Research Institute – The University of Queensland within the new Translational Research Institute in Brisbane, where he leads the Inflammatory Disease Biology and Therapeutics Research Group. Mike is the author of over 130 scientific publications with his research currently focused on mucosal infection, chronic inflammation and cancer in the gastrointestinal tract, and has held 4 patents. He has particular interests in the role of secreted and cell surface mucin glycoproteins in cancer and in host defense from infection and inflammation. Mike also has a strong interest in the role of protein misfolding and ER stress in secretory cells in chronic inflammatory disease, including diabetes. He is heavily involved in national and international peer review, is on the Editorial Boards of four international journals, and has served as the lead member of the Academy of the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council for Gastroenterology. Mike chairs the Mater Research Committee, and serves on the Research Committees of the Gastroenterology Society of Australia, University of Queensland Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and chairs the Facilitations Committee of the Translational Research Institute. In addition he is an elected Councilor for the International Society for Mucosal Immunology, and serves on the Board of Directors and Chairs the Medical and Scientific Advisory Committee for the Cancer Council Queensland, and is a member of the ANZ Trustees Limited Queensland Medical Research Grant Program Advisory Committee, and the Research and Development Committee for the Autism Collaborative Research Centre.

Associate Professor Treasure McGuire graduated with a Bachelor of Pharmacy and a Bachelor of Science (Pharmacology) from the University of Queensland UQ). She also completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Clinical Pharmacy and Graduate Certificate in Higher Education at UQ. In 2005, she completed her PhD in the School of Population Health, UQ, entitled Consumer medicines call centres: a medication liaison model of pharmaceutical care.

She held a conjoint appointment between the School of Pharmacy, UQ and Mater Pharmacy, Mater Health, South East Queensland between 1996 and December 2022. She was appointed as a Senior Lecturer in 2006, Associate Professor, Clinical in 2021 and since 2023 Honorary Associate Professor. Treasure also holds a conjoint appointment between Mater and the Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine, Bond University as Associate Professor of Pharmacology. In her clinical role at Mater, she is Assistant Director of Pharmacy (Practice and Development). At UQ, she coordinated a graduate clinical pharmacy course within the Master of Clinical Pharmacy program for over a decade. In 2016, this program received a UQ Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences Team Award for Programs that Enhance Learning and in 2017 a citation in the University of Queensland Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.

Treasure’s research is translational, focusing on patient centred-care and quality use of medicines in the domains of medicines information, evidence-based practice, medication safety, reproductive health, complementary medicines, communicable diseases and interprofessional education. She is a Emeritus Fellow of the Australasian College of Pharmacy, Fellow of the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia and Foundation Fellow, Australian and New Zealand College of Advanced Pharmacy. In recognition of her services to medicines information, she received the Lilly International Fellowship in Hospital Pharmacy and the Bowl of Hygeia of the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia. In 2015, she was the recipient of the Sr Eileen Pollard Medal (Mater Research-UQ) for excellence in incorporating research into clinical care provision.

Professor David McIntyre trained in Endocrinology in Australia and Belgium. He works clinically as Director of Obstetric Medicine at Mater Health Services and is an Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Medicine (Mater Research). David has published over 250 papers (>25000 citations), primarily in the field of medical complications of pregnancy, with a particular focus on diabetes and obesity. Recent research has examined the effects of diabetes, obesity and hypertension during pregnancy on the health of Mothers and Babies, during pregnancy and with long term follow up. David is a Past Chair of the Australasian Diabetes in Pregnancy Society and the International Association of Diabetes in Pregnancy Study Groups (IADPSG). In 2016, David became the first Australian trained clinician to receive the Norbert Freinkel Award for contributions to diabetes in pregnancy from the American Diabetes Association. In 2019 he was awarded the Jørgen Pedersen Lecture for diabetes in pregnancy by DPSG Europe and the Stream Lead Award Lecture for “Diabetes and Women” by the International Diabetes Federation.

Elissa is an Intensivist and clinician researcher. She is a full-time Intensive Care Specialist in the Australian Army through which she works at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital. She holds honorary academic titles at the University of Queensland and Monash University. Her PhD was on the role of the endothelial glycocalyx in severe trauma, and she is building a research program that spans the management of severe burns, trauma, blood transfusion, military medicine, and endothelial dysfunction in critical illness. She also has a strong interest in the design of novel clinical trials and is currently completing a Masters in Biostatistics. She is an emerging leader in critical care clinical trials, currently leading the Australian sites of the international, multi-centre, Threshold for Platelets (T4P) clinical trial, and is on the management committee of several other large multi-centre clinical trials. She is an active member of the ANZICS Clinical Trials Group community and supervises several student research projects.

Gita Mishra AO is Professor of Life Course Epidemiology at the University of Queensland (UQ) and is internationally recognised for her research on women’s reproductive health and chronic conditions across life. She is the founding Director of the Australian Women and Girls’ Health Research (AWaGHR) Centre at UQ with a 40-strong multidisciplinary team, including 12 PhD students, that has arisen out of her leadership of the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Women and Non-Communicable Diseases (2019-2025). Professor Mishra is currently an NHMRC Leadership Fellow (Level 3; 2022-2031), having previously been awarded with an ARC Future Fellowship (2013-2017) and an NHMRC Principal Research Fellowship (2017-2021).

Within the AWaGHR Centre, she is Director of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health (ALSWH), a national flagship study since 1996 with data on over 57,000 women in four age cohorts. She leads a series of NHMRC and MRFF funded studies, including on endometriosis, menstrual disorders, and perimenopause and menopause, that place strong emphasis on the life course and the inclusion of women from First Nations’ communities and from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. The Centre also hosts InterLACE, the International collaboration for a Life course Approach to reproductive health and Chronic disease Events which Professor Mishra has developed and led since 2012. InterLACE now combines data from more than 1.2M women in 35 studies in 19 countries and has become a leading resource for robust evidence on women’s health. As a result, she regularly presents findings from InterLACE and from the AWaGHR Centre at international policy meetings, including as an expert contributor at the UN Commission for the Status of Women in New York and at the WHO in Geneva.

Over her career, Professor Mishra has authored over 500 scientific papers, invited reviews, book chapters, and evidence reports. She is lead editor of “A Life Course Approach to Women’s Health”, a key text that presents the latest research in the field and is part of the ground-breaking Life Course Series from Oxford University Press. She works extensively with governments, especially with Australian Department of Health and Aged Care. She led the 2018 evidence review for the inform the National Women’s Health Strategy 2020-2030, which prioritised a life course approach. In 2023, she was scientific advisor to Queensland Health for the Queensland Women and Girls’ Health Strategy 2023-2032.

In her current role in supporting health policy implementation and research priorities, she is a founding member of the National Women's Health Advisory Council established by the Australian Government and is on the Strategic Advisory Committee for the Queensland Women and Girls’ Health Promotion Program. From 2023-2025 she was co-president of the 16th World Endometriosis Congress in Sydney and is currently Chair of the Queensland branch of the Heart Foundation.

In 2017, Professor Mishra became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and in 2025 she was appointed as President-elect for the World Endometriosis Society (2025-2027). She has received prestigious awards for her contribution to research and education, including the 2022 RANZCOG Award for Excellence in Women’s Health. In 2025, she was honoured with the title of Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) and awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Stockholm University.

Dr Jayson Moloney is a colorectal surgeon and gastrointestinal endoscopist consulting and operating across Brisbane's north.

Jayson's clinical special interests include colorectal cancer, minimally-invasive (laparoscopic and robotic surgery) and complex pelvic surgery. He practices across the full breadth of colorectal surgery, including both benign and malignant disorders such as diverticular disease, inflammatory bowel disease, rectal prolapse and haemorrhoids.

In addition to private practice, Jayson also holds appointments as a colorectal surgeon at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital and is a Senior Lecturer with the University of Queensland.

Enquiries: admin@ausces.com or https://www.drjaysonmoloney.com.au/

Prof Alina Morawska is Director of the Parenting and Family Support Centre, The University of Queensland. She is passionate about creating a world where children develop the skills, competencies and confidence to adapt and thrive in an ever-changing world. Her research focuses on the central role of parents in influencing all aspects of children’s development, and parenting interventions as a way of understanding healthy development, a means for promoting positive family relationships, and a tool for the prevention and early intervention in lifelong health and wellbeing. She has published extensively in the field of parenting and family intervention and has received numerous grants to support her research. She has been recognised as Australia’s top scholar in family studies.

Prof Karen Moritz is internationally renowned for her work in understanding how early life perturbations contribute to an increased risk of developing cardiovascular, renal and metabolic disease in adulthood. Over the last 5-7 years, her research has focused on determining how prenatal alcohol can result in “developmental programming” of disease. Her research has identified critical windows of susceptibility to alcohol, including the period around conception and prior to implantation. In addition, her work has identified the placenta as playing a key role in the sex-specific offspring outcomes following maternal perturbations. Her research spans both preclinical and clinical domains, highlighted by her appointment as the Director of the Child Health Research Centre in 2016.

Current projects are:

• Periconceptional alcohol exposure: Programming long-term health in offspring (with Dr Lisa Akison and Dr James Cuffe)

• Emerging therapies for diabetes and complications: Effects on metabolic, cardiovascular and renal function (with Dr Linda Gallo)

• Effect of prenatal insults on the developing placenta (with Dr Marloes Nitert Dekker, Prof Vicki Clifton [Mater], Dr David Simmons and Dr James Cuffe)

• Effect of prenatal insults on the developing kidney and implications for adult disease (with Dr Peter Trnka [QLD Children's Hospital])

• Impact of maternal cannabis and alcohol around conception on development and long-term health of offspring (with Dr David Simmons and Dr Lisa Akison)

Prof Moritz maintains a strong commitment to teaching of students, including lectures and research student supervision in undergraduate programs, supervision of Honours students and supervision of higher degree research students.

Dr Philip Mosley studied at the University of Oxford and obtained a master’s degree in physiological sciences and a degree in medicine. He was also captain of the university boxing team and was awarded two full 'Blues'. He worked as a junior doctor in Manchester before moving to Australia to complete his specialist training in psychiatry, which he undertook at the Royal brisbane and Women's Hospital.

Dr Mosley is a Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry (RANZCP) and halso holds an advanced certificate in Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry. As part of his training, Dr Mosley undertook a 2-year neuropsychiatry fellowship at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital (RBWH) and the Asia-Pacific Centre for Neuromodulation (APCN), an active research entity of the Queensland Brain Institute.

Currently, Dr Mosley works as a specialist neuropsychiatrist in a deep brain stimulation team, runs a private neuropsychiatry practice and also provides a consultation-liaison psychiatry service to the neurology, medical and surgical wards of the general hospital. Dr Mosley's private practice is focussed on neurodegenerative disease, movement disorders and head injury.

Dr Mosley remains an active clinician-scientist with appointments at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and the Queensland Brain Institute. He completed his PhD in neuroscience in 2019 under the supervision of Professor Michael Breakspear. He published eleven peer-reviewed manuscripts from his thesis alone, and received the UQ Dean's Award for outstanding thesis.

Dr Mosley has been the chief investigator in a study of the neuropsychiatric effects of DBS for Parkinson’s disease, in a study of medicinal cannabis for Tourette’s syndrome, a lead investigator in a clinical trial of DBS for obsessive-compulsive disorder and anorexia nervosa, as well as a clinical fellow in a neuroimaging study of Alzheimer’s disease. He has won prizes from the RANZCP in Old Age Psychiatry and Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry, and he has received research funding from the RBWH Foundation, the RANZCP Young Investigator Grant, Parkinson’s Queensland and Wesley Medical Research. Dr Mosley was awarded an ‘Advance Queensland’ Early Career Fellowship for his Parkinson's disease research and won the postgraduate medal from the Australian Society for Medical Research for findings arising from this project. In 2020, he won the Early Career Psychiatrist award from the RANZCP, which is presented to the fellow producing the most significant piece of research in the five years since fellowship. Currently Dr Mosley's research is funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF).

Bryan is a graduate in medicine from the University of Queensland and holds a BA (Hons) degree in philosophy from the University of Western Australia. A medical specialist in psychiatry, he is a clinician researcher, who is Conjoint Professor at the Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland, and Director of Genetics at the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research. His primary research interest is the molecular genetics of schizophrenia, and holds a MD degree (University of Queensland) in this field. Since 1990, he has conducted studies, with national and international collaborators, to identify susceptibility genes for this disorder. He is the recipient of grants from the Australian NHMRC and the US NIMH.

The primary research goal is to identify and functionally characterise susceptibility genes for schizophrenia and related disorders. A special focus is on the study of large collaborative samples and ethnically homogeneous populations. Key methodologies used in the lab include genome-wide association studies, next-generation sequencing, transcriptome profiling of post-mortem brain samples, neurocognitive and neuroimaging phenotyping and induced pluripotent stem cells.

Current areas of interest include pharmacogenomics of clozapine treatment response, whole exome sequencing focused on de novo mutations, and the neuroimmunology of schizophrenia

My current appointment is Director of Kidney Services at Redland Hospitals in Metro South, Brisbane, where I practice as a senior consultant nephrologist.

My research interests are varied and include post-transplant anaemia and iron metabolism, and novel measures of iron status such as hepcidin; improving dialysis outcomes though the implementation of evidence-based guidelines; kidney disease due to thrombotic microangiopathy (particularly aHUS) and the role of inhibitors of the complement system in kidney disease; and the use of honey to prevent infections in dialysis patients.

I am committed to teaching medical students and young nephrologists, and am actively involved in medical education at all levels.

Dr Mansoureh Nickbakht is a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland Centre for Hearing Research (CHEAR). She is a qualitative researcher and her research mainly focuses on improving hearing services. Currently, she is working on a NHMRC-funded project to improve access to the hearing services program for people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in Australia.

Professor Nissen is Director, and Taylor Family Chair, of the Centre for the Business and Economics of Health (CBEH), Faculty of Business Economics and Law at The University of Queensland. She has been a prominent health practitioner leader, educator, researcher, and implementation scientist nationally and internationally for more than 25 years. A pharmacist by training, her research has driven major health system change, notably leading to the introduction of immunization services by pharmacists throughout Australia (Queensland Pharmacists Immunization Pilot (QPIP), (2014-15) and more recently the Urinary Tract Infection Pharmacy Pilot – Queensland (UTIPP-Q, 2020-21), both Australian firsts. Before joining UQ, Lisa was previously Head of the School of Clinical Sciences at QUT (2012-22) overseeing the training for 2,500 students per year across seven clinical disciplines. In late 2022 she returned to UQ, taking on a new and innovative role as Director of the EvolveHealth Health Workforce Optimisation Program at CBEH. This program is part of the seven strategic Health Research Accelerator (HERA) initiatives announced by UQ in 2022, which will address some of the most pressing health and medical challenges of today.

Lisa has had career-long leadership and executive roles with national boards and state committees including the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, the Society of Hospital Pharmacists of Australia, Family Planning Queensland, and Hepatitis Queensland. Professor Nissen was a ministerial appointment to the Queensland Health Interim Pharmacy Round Table overseeing the implementation of a council to govern pharmacy ownership in Queensland. She is also a ministerial appointment to the Queensland Health Voluntary Assisted Dying Review Board. She is on governance boards various other health organization groups including the Optometry Council of Australia and New Zealand Board, and the AHPRA scheduled medicines expert committee.

Professor Nissen focuses on strategic collaborations across the healthcare continuum with key partnerships in government, professional boards, associations, university, and other industry and consumer groups. These have led to the implementation of multiple complex practice change interventions. She has a proven record of bringing together these groups to focus on establishing multidisciplinary care teams to provide consumer-centric health care. This often means challenging currently held views of the scope of practice of health professionals, drawing on her high-level collaboration and negotiation skills.

Professor Nissen has supervised more than 80 higher degree research students and published over 180 peer-reviewed journal articles, and 200 professional publications. She has given more than 250 invited keynotes, plenary, and workshop presentations. In the past 5 years she has generated more than $9M in competitive research funding.

Michael has over 30 years’ experience in clinical medicine (infectious diseases & paediatrics) and clinical laboratory microbiology with a particular interest in the epidemiology of vaccine preventable diseases and the diagnosis of infectious diseases in hospital, public health and industry settings. He recently took up the inaugural Director of Research at The Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane.

He is a past Principal Medical Officer and Director of CoVID-19 Pharmacovigilance at the Therapeutic Goods Administration, Department of Health & Ageing, Australian Government (2021-2022), Director of Scientific Affairs & Public Health for GSK Vaccines in the Greater China Intercontinental region based in Singapore (2014-2020) and Director of Infectious Diseases at the Royal Children’s Hospital-Brisbane and a practising Clinical Microbiologist at the Royal Brisbane & Women’s Hospitals (2000-2014). Michael is a past full member of the Australian Technical Advisory Group for Immunisation from 2007 to 2013.

Prof. Nissen has 223 peer-reviewed medical publications and book chapters, a h- index of 64 with 13,321 citations of his work to date. His research interests include the epidemiology and prevention of vaccine preventable diseases and the rapid molecular diagnostic techniques of infectious diseases.

Professor Clare Nourse AM is a paediatric infection specialist at the Queensland Children’s Hospital in Brisbane and clinical professor of paediatrics at the University of Queensland. She qualified in medicine in from Trinity College Dublin and trained at Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Dublin, Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and Mater Children’s Hospital in Brisbane. Her particular interests are in tropical medicine, HIV, TB and syphilis infection in children, health in resource limited countries and staph aureus infection. She travels regularly to Timor Leste and is a board director of Maluk Timor, a not for profit organisation in Dili, of which she chairs the Medical Advisory Committee.Clare established the Paediatric Infection Management Service at Mater Children’s Hospital in 2001 and currently leads the Children’s Health Queeensland (CHQ) Paediatric services for HIV, Tuberculosis and Syphilis. Clare regularly contributes to/leads national multicentre trials in Australia and New Zealand. She is the author of 70+ peer reviewed publications. Clare is the recipient of many external grants for service provision (Indo-Pacific Centre for Health Security, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australian Government for the Pacific Infectious Diseases Prevention (PIDP) Program) and research (Queensland Sexual Health Research Fund and others).