Our members

Professor Michael Gold is a Paediatric Allergist and Immunologist with conjoint positions in the Discipline of Paediatrics, University of Adelaide and is former Medical Unit Head, of the Department of Allergy and Immunology at the Women’s and Children’s Health Network.  He has a research and clinical interest in the prevention of food allergy and vaccine safety.  He was appointed to the World Health Organisation Global Advisory Committee for Vaccine Safety in 2010 and has been an advisor to the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration via his appointment to a number of expert advisory groups since 2006.  He has been awarded a number of Australian national research grants as a principle investigator for projects that have researched novel methods of safety surveillance including data linkage and m-Health. 

Professor Gold has contributed to a number of key WHO guidelines which include the global Adverse Event Following Immunisation surveillance manual, the WHO guideline on causality assessment, a guideline for programme managers on Immunisation stress related responses and the global manual for COVID vaccine safety surveillance.  He has participated in numerous WHO organised training courses to strengthen adverse event surveillance and causality assessment systems in Low and Middle Income Countries and is currently a consultant to WHO South East Asian Region, facilitating the implementation of COVID vaccine pharmacovigilance. He has contributed to the Vaccines for Africa (VACFA) initiative through research collaborations and presentations at the annual vaccinology course based at the University of Cape Town. 

Kerrie Wiley is a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Emerging Leadership Fellow, and Senior Research Fellow with the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health, in the Faculty of Medicine and Health.  Kerrie’s research focuses on the social and behavioural aspects of immunisation and other preventive health behaviours, and their implications for policy and practice. Kerrie is a member of the World Health Organization ‘Measuring Behavioural and Social Drivers of Vaccination’ (BeSD) Working Group, and a founding member of the Collaboration of Social Science in Immunisation.

Professor Paul Effler is the Medical coordinator in the Communicable Disease Control Directorate for the Western Australian Department of Health.

Professor Julia Brotherton is a public health physician and Medical Director of Population Health at the Australian Centre for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer. She is Professor of Cancer Prevention Policy and Implementation at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, and Professorial Fellow at NCIRS. 

For over fifteen years, Julia has been involved in research and policy development informing the implementation and evaluation of HPV vaccination and cervical screening programs. She was a lead investigator in Australian research which demonstrated the world’s first evidence of dramatic declines in both HPV infections and pre-cancerous cervical lesions in young women post- vaccination. She has 220 publications to date and is a member of the WHO Director General's Expert Advisory Group on Cervical Cancer Elimination.

Kylie Jenkins is a registered nurse and public health expert who is currently employed as Maternal Newborn Health Technical Advisor with the DFAT-funded Australia’s support to the Fiji health sector project. She has >15 years’ experience in international development, predominantly in the Pacific. She has expertise in immunisation programs, maternal and child health, communicable diseases and disaster management. In her role as Advisor to the DFAT-funded Fiji Health Sector Support Program 2012-2016, she worked closely with the Fiji Ministry of Health to procure and introduce three new vaccines (pneumococcal, rotavirus, and HPV vaccines) through an innovative financing system achieving high coverage. She has vast experience advising and working with governments and UN agencies. She previously worked for UNICEF where she was responsible for overseeing the UNICEF support to the Expanded Program on Immunisation (EPI) Programs in the Pacific. In addition, Kylie was the founding member of the PIPS Committee that in 2005 led to a collaborative approach to donor funding and technical support for immunisation programs. The committee coordinated 22 Pacific Island Countries and multiple donors, including Australian Aid, NZAID, JICA and SPC.  This has led to Kylie having strong connections with the EPI Program Managers across the Pacific Region.

Katie Attwell is a political science and public policy scholar at the University of Western Australia. She is a global expert in vaccine hesitancy and vaccination policies for childhood and COVID-19 vaccines. Katie has engaged in community, policy and behavioural research in vaccination uptake since 2014, the year of her groundbreaking, internationally recognised ‘I Immunise’ campaign, which drew on behavioural insights to address alternative lifestyle-based vaccine hesitancy in Fremantle, Western Australia. She led the interdisciplinary West Australian project ’Coronavax: Preparing community and government’, which engaged in community and government research for a vaccine roll-out for COVID-19. Associate Professor Attwell frequently shares her research and insights globally with the academic field, governments, technical specialists and the media. She has published in Nature, Pediatrics, Milbank Quarterly and Social Science and Medicine. With her team, she is currently researching vaccination policymaking in the US, the UK, Italy, France, Bangladesh and Malaysia. Her specific area of expertise is vaccine mandates.

Belle Overmars is a project coordinator and researcher. She coordinates and evaluates a vaccine education and communication training program in the Asia-Pacific region, including Fiji, Tonga, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. Her qualitative research background has involved vaccine uptake research with migrants, children living with disability and people living in the Asia-Pacific region who participate in the education program. She has expertise in public health, vaccination social science, COVID-19 disease and qualitative research methods. She is also experienced in the area of infectious diseases more broadly, with a background in vaccinology, immunology and microbiology.

Clare Glover-Wright works as a Research Fellow in the Economics of Global Health and Infectious Diseases group within the Health Economics Unit at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health (University of Melbourne), and in the Vaccine Uptake group at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute.

Drawing on a background in both clinical research and public health, Clare’s predominant research focus is health economics analyses alongside implementation science of maternal and childhood anaemia, rheumatic heart disease and meningococcal disease, as well as childhood vaccine uptake programs in low- and middle-income settings in the Asia-Pacific region and Africa. This research involves conceptualising and designing economic evaluation studies to determine the cost-effectiveness of interventions in resource-poor settings alongside randomised controlled trials and observational research. 

Clare also has significant experience in using evidence synthesis to understand how services can be better orientated to support marginalised populations through the design and conduct of systematic and scoping reviews.

Bianca Middleton is a paediatrician and vaccine researcher working in the Northern Territory, Australia. She has a long-standing clinical and research commitment to improving child health in rural and remote northern Australia. Her research expertise includes real-world evaluation of rotavirus vaccine performance among First Nations children, and the delivery of pragmatic clinical trials in rural and remote settings.

Mariano da Silva Marques is a medical doctor who is currently Chair of the National Immunization Technical Advisory Group (NITAG) of Timor-Leste. In October 2023, he was nominated Director of Procurement at the National Institute of Pharmacy and Medical Products within the Timor-Leste Ministry of Health. He completed his Doctor of Medicine at the Latin-American School of Medicine at the University of Ciego de Avila (Cuba) in 2013 and his Master of Primary Health Care Management at the ASEAN Institute for Health Development at Mahidol University (Thailand) in 2020. 

Dr da Silva Marques has previously taught the subject ‘Eradication of infectious disease’ to graduate students of a public health program at a private university. In 2022, he was invited to act as an external observer for the typhoid conjugate vaccines introduction campaign in Nepal. Representing the Ministry of Health, he has also participated in the 38th International Society for Quality in Health Care conference (Brisbane, Australia); co-chaired the Regional WHO South-East Asia (SEARO) Meeting for New Underutilized Vaccine Introduction (Bangkok, Thailand); and chaired the Regional WHO SEARO Meeting for Road Safety (Khon Kaen, Thailand). His contributions at the Timor-Leste NITAG have included recommending the Ministry of Health introduce COVID-19, pneumococcal conjugate and human papillomavirus vaccines in Timor-Leste.

Before being nominated to his current roles, Dr da Silva Marques worked as a general practitioner (GP) at a primary health care facility at the village level; as a GP and immunisation focal point at the community health centre level; and as a medical coordinator, surveillance, monitoring and evaluation, and school health focal point at the district health services level. He is a member of the National Medical Association of Timor-Leste, where he acts as the coordinator of the information and technology department.

Kathryn Tapper is a Clinical Nurse Consultant (CNC) with post-graduate qualifications in immunisation, child and family health, infection control. She holds a Master of Public Health. She has worked within the Public Health Unit (PHU) network as an Immunisation Coordinator for 12 years (Northern Sydney PHU and Illawarra Shoalhaven PHU) and was previously employed by NCIRS, from 2010 to 2015, as the CNC in Adverse Events Following Immunisation (AEFI). She rejoined NCIRS in 2021 and is currently working with the AusVaxSafety team on various adverse event of special interest studies, as well as with the Global Health team on the Philippines AEFI Surveillance System Technical Assistance Twinning Project.

Katie Flanagan is Head of Infectious Diseases at Launceston General Hospital, Director of the Tasmanian Vaccine Trial Centre, a Clinical Professor at the University of Tasmania and an Adjunct Professor at RMIT University. She has been a member of ATAGI since 2019 and was President of the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases between 2022 and 2024. Katie undertook undergraduate and specialist training in Oxford and London (UK). Her PhD, carried out  in Professor Adrian Hill’s group at Oxford, investigated natural immunity to malaria to inform vaccine design. She was Head of Infant Immunology at the Medical Research Council Unit, The Gambia for seven years before relocating to Australia in 2011. Professor Flanagan has led multiple clinical trials of novel and licensed vaccines in Africa, Europe and Australia and has a global network of collaborations in vaccine immunology. Her current research employs systems vaccinology to study vaccine responses at the extremes of age and in pregnancy, non-targeted vaccine effects and the role of biological sex in vaccine responses.