Andrew is a clinical epidemiologist with over 20 years’ experience in international public health, sexually transmitted and infectious disease research. Andrew has held a joint appointment with the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research (PNGIMR) and the Kirby Institute for Infection and Immunity in Society, Faculty of Medicine, UNSW Sydney, since 2010. In the last 20 years he has designed and led multi-disciplinary research teams in Australia, Kenya, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tanzania, United Kingdom and Vanuatu. In 2007, he established an international collaborative research group at the PNGIMR, where he was head of the Sexual and Reproductive Health Unit and Deputy Director from 2010 to 2015. His research in the last decade has focused on evaluating innovative solutions to improve women’s reproductive health in high-burden, low-resource settings.
Andrew is lead investigator of an NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence in Cervical Cancer Control grant (C4 CRE; 2017-22) and an NHMRC Project Grant to evaluate the impact of 2-dose and 1-dose HPV vaccination schedules on community level HPV prevalence among adolescent girls in South Africa (2019-24); and leads an NHMRC-funded field trial of point-of-care HPV testing and treatment for cervical screening in PNG (2015-20). He is a member of the PNG National Technical Advisory Committee on HPV Vaccination (2016-present) and the PNG National Technical Working Group on Comprehensive Cervical Cancer Control (2017-present). He has been a board member of the PNG National Cancer Foundation since its inception in 2013. He jointly organised a regional meeting on cervical cancer in the Pacific, held in Fiji and attended by representatives from seven countries, WHO, UNFPA, and UNICEF that led to a joint Call to Action on Cervical Cancer Elimination (December 2019). He was subsequently asked to take a lead role in progressing the elimination agenda in PNG and Vanuatu from 2020.