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A/Prof Stephen Bell is a senior social scientist, advisor and international development research consultant with 23 years’ experience tackling global health challenges in settings across South-East Asia, Africa, Western Pacific and Europe. He works respectfully with not-for-profits, public institutions, businesses and community organisations, using innovative, inclusive, people-centred approaches to identify sustainable solutions to critical health challenges and accelerate health equity.

As Principal Research Fellow and ‘Theme Lead - Social Science and Global Health’ at the Burnet Institute, Steve’s role includes:

• Research on young people's sexual, reproductive and maternal health, including adolescent-responsive health services and systems, contraceptive innovation, safe abortion, enabling socio-structural environments, and the intersections of health and climate change;
• Providing methodological expertise, technical support and mentoring in social science, co-design and community-based, community-led research practice across the Institute’s global health programs and business development across working groups and programs;
• Supporting a growing regional network of youth research, advocacy and thought leadership hubs across Asia and the Pacific;
• Managing and delivering consultancy, advisory and research work for institutional partners.

Steve’s work brings together lived experience, socio-ecological systems thinking and social theory to understand what works (or not) in global health and social development. He has researched and published widely on HIV, sexual and reproductive health, maternal health, neglected tropical diseases, TB and Indigenous health. He is particularly interested in understanding the socio-structural determinants of health and social inequities, and injustices associated with marginalisation due to gender, sexuality, age and geography. He has published two edited collections on interpretive and community-led approaches in research, design, monitoring and evaluation: ‘Peer research in health and social development: international perspectives on participatory research’ (2021), and ‘Monitoring and evaluation in health and social development: interpretive and ethnographic perspectives’ (2016). With international colleagues, he is working on a third edited collection called, ‘Lived Experience: Critical Perspectives in a Changing World’. Steve is currently taking on new PhD students who are interested in undertaking research in any of these areas, so please do reach out to him for a chat!

Steve is Commissioner on The Lancet Global Health Commission on People-Centered Care for Universal Health Coverage, Technical Consultant (Strategy and Insights) with PSI, and Member of the International Editorial Board at Culture, Health & Sexuality. Steve has served as a Senior Advisor to the Boston Consulting Group, and has worked in senior research and consultancy roles with international governments, NGOs, UNAIDS, UNFPA and WHO.

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Digital Health and Accredited Practising Dietitian (APD) interested in the prevention and management of noncommunicable diseases, especially obesity, across the lifecourse.

Through research, I aim to add health to life and equity to health by changing policies and practices to reduce the impact of obesity.

My research program aims to forge a new nexus across dietetics, digital health and public health to improve healthy weight. In my Postdoctoral Fellowship, I have established a new evidence base that supports precision public health approaches to the prevention and management of obesity, including innovate methods of public health surveillance that can use data from sources such as electronic medical records. I trained as a Paediatric Dietitian and have experience as a clinician-researcher working in Queensland's healthcare system, specifically in preventing and managing childhood obesity via clinical, community, and public health programs.

I have used epidemiology, public health informatics, action research, co-design, and ethnographic methods to generate new knowledge in obesity and digital health. I was awarded my PhD (UQ) in November 2020, which developed and validated i-PATHWAY, a clinical model to predict childhood obesity from the first 1,000 days to help guide its prevention. This research was the first of its kind in Australia and uncovered new evidence for risk factors for childhood obesity that are evident from the early years.

At The University of Queensland (UQ), I am a member of the Queensland Digital Health Centre, located within the Centre for Health Services Research (Faculty of Medicine). I established and currently Co-Chair the UQ Digital Health HDR Cohort, which provides research mentorship and support to ~20 PhD, MPhil and Honours research students.

Our team partners closely with multiple healthcare and research organisations across Australia to innovate and translate obesity research into practice, including Health and Wellbeing Queensland (public health and prevention of chronic diseases), Queensland Health (healthcare system) and the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (digital health research). I hold an Honorary Appointment with Health and Wellbeing Queensland, and an Affiliate Research Fellow position with the Faculty of Medicine (UQ) to help bridge the gap between obesity research and practice.

Paul specialises in Assessment and Management of Risk and Impact of Socio-Environmental determinants on the Wellbeing of our younger generations across their life span.

His overall vision is about how we use Environmental Health Intelligence to improve decision-making towards delivering more efficient Environmental Health Practices, Services and Solutions for local and regional communities in remote and disadvantaged socio-economic settings.

Within the complex interdisciplinary domains that hold the socio-environmental determinants of wellbeing, Paul’s operational research focuses on how / what interventions would best support communities to prevent, mitigate and adapt to EH risk and impact in rapidly changing environments and climate.

Prof Colleen Lau - MBBS (UWA), MPHTM (JCU), PhD (UQ), FRACGP, FACTM, FISTM.

Prof Colleen Lau is an NHMRC Fellow and Professorial Research Fellow at the UQ Centre for Clinical Research. Her areas of expertise include emerging infectious diseases, neglected tropical diseases, and clinical travel medicine. Her wide range of research interests include infectious disease epidemiology, spatial epidemiology and disease mapping, infectious disease surveillance and elimination, vaccinations, travel health, environmental health, and digital decision support tools. Professor Lau’s research projects focus on answering practical questions in clinical management of infectious diseases and operational questions on improving strategies to solve public health problems. She leads UQ's HERA program on Operational Research and Decision Support for Infectious Diseases (ODeSI).

I am a cultural anthropologist with expertise in medical anthropology and critical global health. I have conducted extensive ethnographic research in Indonesia on health care, gendered violence, education, and racial stigma. My work in Papua/West Papua has tried to document and understand evolving forms of racism and violence, including how people resist and create change. Over the past 15 years I have worked with local Papuan and international research teams on studies of violence, older women's life stories, HIV/AIDS, hospital birth, and health vulnerabilities. My research aims to develop knowledge of the nuances and complexities of conditions and experiences in West Papua, while also working with Papuan scholars and community members to address pressing health and social problems.

I recently completed a study with Els Tieneke Rieke and Meki Wetipo on how urban Papuans understand and experience hospital childbirth, as part of an effort to understand dire maternal health in this location (2023, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology), published in a special issue on 'Reproducing Life in Conditions of Abandonment in Oceania', edited with Alexandra Widmer (York University, Canada). Another recent study funded by the Australian Research Council looked at vulnerabilities in Indonesia with Professor Lyn Parker (University of Western Australia) and others from the UK and Indonesia. The study used ethnography and surveys to develop a deeper, contextual understanding of who is vulnerable, how and why, and thus shed light on the concept of vulnerability and what it means. Recent publications look at education in gender inequality in Indonesia's frontier economy, older women’s narratives of economic agency and survivance (co-authored with Yohana Baransano), and the challenges faced by newlyweds.My article in Asian Studies Review, "West Papuan ‘Housewives’ with HIV: Gender, Marriage, and Inequality in Indonesia," was awarded the 2025 Wang Gungwu Prize by the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA).

Funded by the Australian Research Council, I am currently expanding my research on obstetrics and c-sections to understand the cultures and inequalities of maternity care in Indonesia, both in terms of local cultural needs and preferences, and in relation to the cultures of medicine and obstetrics that exist in hospitals and birth centres. This project is conducted with Dr Els Rieke (Universitas Papua), Associate Professor Najmah (Universitas Sriwijaya), and Dr Elan Lazuardi (Universitas Gadjah Mada). I also maintain ongoing collaborations with researchers at the National University of Singapore and Fiji National University, focused on maternity care.

I am an experienced PhD supervisor in medical anthropology and gender studies. I am interested in working with research students who wish to conduct anthropological research in Indonesia or the Pacific Islands. I teach undergraduate and postgraduate courses in medical anthropology (ANTH2250/7250), Pacific anthropology (ANTH2020) and gender (SOCY2050).