Professor Raina MacIntyre

Raina MacIntyre is Professor of Infectious Diseases Epidemiology, with a cross-appointment as Head of School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of New South Wales. She graduated in medicine from the University of Sydney, and did her adult physician training at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney. She obtained her Masters in Applied Epidemiology and PhD from ANU, and also has her FRACP and FAFPHM. Her interests include infectious diseases, epidemiology, tuberculosis (the subject of her PhD thesis), health economics, evidence-based medicine, public health and preventive medicine, adult immunisation and health services research. She is a current editor of Epidemiology and Infection (Cambridge University Press). Her current research program includes clinical trials, epidemiology and modelling research.

Professor Niels Becker

Niels Becker is Professor of Biostatistics at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health. His undergraduate studies were conducted at the University of Melbourne, followed by a PhD at the University of Sheffield in the UK. He has had a longstanding interest in mathematical and statistical models of infectious diseases and has made a number of key contributions to the field. Currently he is involved in several projects related to the study of infectious diseases including the control of infectious diseases in realistically structured communities, analyses of disease transmission and models of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Associate Professor Matthew Law

Matthew Law is head of the Biostatistics and Databases Program at the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, UNSW. His broad research interests include clinical trials and observational cohort studies in HIV and hepatitis C. Dr Law's interests in mathematical modelling include estimates and projections of the hepatitis C epidemic in Australia, trends in HIV transmission among gay men in Australia, and risk assessments of vCJD transmission through blood transfusions or blood products.

Professor Aileen Plant

Professor Aileen Plant was Professor of International Health at Curtin University of Technology and Deputy CEO of the Australian Biosecurity Cooperative Research Centre for Emerging Infectious Disease. She was a medical epidemiologist with extensive experience in outbreak investigation. She has published over 100 papers, books, chapters and major reports.

In 2003 she was the Coordinator for the World Health Organization SARS Team in Vietnam. She was the longest-staying WHO SARS coordinator in the world and worked with the Ministry of Health and WHO in Viet Nam; the combined effort led to Viet Nam being the first country in the world to be declared SARS-free. Her interests were preparing for an influenza pandemic and finding ways of using routinely collected data to identify outbreaks.

Sadly Aileen Plant has passed away in 2007[see "Vale...].

Professor Terry Nolan

Professor Terry Nolan is the Head of the School of Population Health and Department of Public Health at the University of Melbourne, and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences.
He was Professor of Paediatrics and Deputy Chair of that department at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne prior to taking up this appointment.

He went to medical school at the University of Western Australia and did his paediatric training at Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne and Montreal Children's Hospital, Canada, where he also obtained a PhD in epidemiology and biostatistics from McGill University. He is Chair of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) and Deputy Chair of the Research Committee of NHMRC. His research includes clinical trials of new child and adolescent vaccines, epidemiologic studies of vaccine-preventable disease, and evaluation of new models of immunisation program delivery.

Professor Graham Brown

Professor Graham Brown is James Stewart Professor of Medicine and Director of the University Department of Medicine at the University of Melbourne. He is also Head of the Division of Infection and Immunity at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research; and Head of the Victorian Infectious Diseases Service, where he holds an NHMRC Centre for Clinical Research Excellence in Infectious Diseases.

Graham has spent many years working in malaria prone regions, including extended stints in both Papua New Guinea and Tanzania. For more than ten years, Graham served on Steering Committees of the United Nations Development Program/World Bank/World Health Organization Special Program for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, on Committees for Applied Field Research in Malaria, Immunology of Malaria, and finally as Chairman of Vaccine Discovery Research programme. He has many other appointments and is currently a member of the Strategic Advisory Council for the Bill and Melinda Gates Children's Vaccine Programme.

Dr Jim Black

Jim Black has followed a somewhat elliptical career path. He graduated in medicine from Monash in 1982, took a Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in Liverpool in 1986, then spent ten years in Africa (he was mostly based in Mozambique, but spent some time in Tanzania and picked up a Liverpool Master of Community Health degree on the way).

His interest in modelling began through his work on the Mozambican infectious disease surveillance system, and led to him doing a PhD on the uses of Artificial Neural Networks on his return to Melbourne. Since 2002 he has been the epidemiologist in the Victorian Infectious Diseases Service at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. Among his current projects there are a real-time syndromic surveillance system using hospital Emergency Department data, and a computerised decision support system for hospital clinicians (known as "Guidance DS").

Dr James Wood

James Wood is a mathematician pursuing research into mathematical models of infectious diseases. He joined the NCIRS in June 2005 after completing a PhD and subsequent postdoctoral work in quantum theory. His current research interests include dynamical models of infectious diseases, vaccination strategies and economic modelling as applied to Meningococcal C, HPV and Influenza.

Dr Belinda Barnes

Belinda Barnes is situated at NCEPH in Canberra. Previously she has worked as a lecturer in Mathematics and as a Research Fellow in Environmental Modelling - mostly in Research Schools at the Australian National University.

Dr Peter Caley

Peter Caley is a team investigator in the NHMRC-funded Capacity Building Grant for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases. He has previously undertaken research into the epidemiology and management of wildlife disease in Australia, New Zealand and North America. He is interested in quantifying parameters underlying both endemic and epidemic diseases, and assessing the effects of policy interventions.

Dr David Regan

Dr David Regan completed his PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Sydney in 2002. He has expertise in the study of molecular transport and diffusion in heterogeneous systems using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). He also has extensive experience in the mathematical modelling and simulation of these systems. After completing his PhD, he was appointed as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales where his work involved characterisation of high molecular weight solute transport in hydrogels and polymer networks. Dr Regan is interested in developing mathematical models of sexually transmitted diseases (e.g., HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C, Human Papillomavirus, and Chlamydia) as a means of evaluating prevention strategies such as vaccination.

Dr Rochelle Watkins

Rochelle graduated as a physiotherapist from Curtin University in 1993, and completed her doctoral research in the field of social gerontology. She has since worked on a number of qualitative and quantitative research projects, and is currently working with Professor Aileen Plant on a project funded by the Australian Biosecurity CRC investigating the use of automated algorithms and GIS to identify and monitor outbreaks of human disease

Dr Jodie McVernon

Jodie McVernon trained initially as a paediatrician in Melbourne. She became involved in surveillance of invasive Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) infections while working in Oxford. This interest subsequently gave rise to her PhD thesis, which investigated an observed rise in infections due to this potentially vaccine preventable disease among fully immunised children in Britain at the turn of the 21st century. She returned to Melbourne in 2004, and commenced an NHMRC post-doctoral training fellowship in the Vaccine and Immunisation Group of the School of Population Health, University of Melbourne, in early 2005. Her primary interest is in the evaluation of the medium to long term effects of immunisation programs that influence disease transmission.

Dr James McCaw

James McCaw is a theoretical physicist who has recently moved into the field of mathematical modelling of infectious diseases. He obtained his PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2004, on the classification of solutions to periodically perturbed quantum mechanical systems. He has experience in the mathematical fields of spectral analysis and number theory. His current interests are in influenza research, specifically in attempting to model the possible outbreak of an avian flu pandemic.

Dr Emma Mcbryde

Emma McBryde is an Infectious Diseases physician, with a PhD in mathematical modelling of human infectious diseases. The focus of her research is hospital epidemiology, including the transmission of antibiotic resistant bacteria and SARS. Current interests include Bayesian statistics and Hidden Markov Models.