Dr Kerry Hancock is a General Practitioner and has over 35 years’ experience in clinical practice. Dr Hancock established her own general practice, Chandlers Hill Surgery in 1985 in the outer southern suburbs of Adelaide.
For the last 25 years Dr Kerry Hancock has had a special interest in general practice based respiratory medicine and maintains strong affiliations with professional and consumer organisations such as RACGP, the International Primary Care Respiratory Group, Lung Foundation Australia, Asthma Australia, National Asthma Council of Australia, and Cancer Australia.

A/Prof Alex Polyakov is a Consultant in Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Reproductive Biology practicing in Melbourne.
Dr Polyakov has broad experience in many aspects of obstetrics and gynaecology as well as gynaecological conditions that may require surgery and experience in advanced laparoscopic techniques.

Jessica Kaufman is a research fellow in the Vaccine Uptake Group at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and an Honorary Fellow of La Trobe University and the University of Melbourne. Her areas of expertise include vaccination-related communication and social science. Her current research includes exploring the experiences of children tested for COVID-19 and developing interventions to improve uptake of routine and COVID-19 vaccines among key risk groups. Jessica is an editor and author with the Cochrane Consumers and Communication review group, which publishes systematic reviews on health communication and participation interventions.

Associate Professor Katie Attwell is a political science and public policy scholar at the University of Western Australia, where she leads the interdisciplinary VaxPolLab. She is also an Honorary Fellow of the Wesfarmers Centre of Vaccines and Infectious Diseases at Telethon Kids Institute. A/Prof Attwell currently holds a four-year research fellowship funded by the Medical Research Future Fund of Australia (MRFF) and the University of Western Australia. She has supported Australian state and federal governments with vaccine communications, developing interventions for vaccine confidence, and policies for routine and COVID-19 vaccinations, as well as leading research collaborations on vaccination policymaking in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Bangladesh, and Malaysia. She focuses on ways to share her vaccination social science and vaccination policy expertise with global policymakers, to support the growth of vaccination social science, to build the capacity of vaccination social science researchers, and to assist countries in responding to challenges to their immunisation programs or the rollout of new vaccines.

Dr Sharayah Carter is a lecturer specialising in Nutrition and Dietetics at RMIT University. With over 10 years of experience as an Accredited Practising Dietitian, she has a strong background in teaching, clinical practice, and private practice. Sharayah earned her PhD focusing on intermittent fasting for Type 2 Diabetes treatment. Her primary goal is to explore the link between dietary patterns and chronic disease risk, empowering individuals to make informed decisions about their health.

My research and teaching interests lie in understanding the individual differences in how our bodies respond to the food we consume. I use these differences to design more personalised and precise nutrition interventions.

My teaching and research has focused on mind-body questions. I practice psychiatry in a variety of primary care settings, and I specialize in psychosomatic medicine. I’ve spent the past 30 years training physicians to be both family doctors and psychiatrists. My first book Treating the Aching Heart (2007), presents a guide to the circular relationships among depression, stress, and heart disease. My second book, Toxic Stress (2024), explores how some kinds of stress are killing us early and what we can do about it. Over the last ten years I have posted blogs on two themes: Pearls from our Stress Response System, and the Art and Science of Making Contact.

Yvonne Nolan is Professor in Neuroscience, a Science Foundation Ireland Investigator and an Investigator in APC Microbiome Ireland, University College Cork (UCC). She leads a research team investigating the impact of inflammation and lifestyle influences such as exercise, stress and diet on brain plasticity, gut health, mental health and memory throughout the lifespan, especially during adolescence and middle age. She is a cell, animal model and translational neuroscientist. She has secured research funding as Lead PI from Science Foundation Ireland, Reta Lila Weston Trust, Marigot Ltd, Irish Research Council and Vasogen Inc., Canada. She was consortium lead on a European Centres of Excellence in Neurodegeneration (COEN) project. She has extensive experience of graduate education, supervision, and mentoring, having supervised >40 Early Career Scientists. Yvonne is Vice Head of Graduate Studies in Medicine and Health at UCC, where she has strategic oversight of education for doctoral degrees in the health sciences. Yvonne graduated from NUI, Galway with a BSc in Biochemistry and a PhD in Neuropharmacology. She was a visiting fellow at McGill University Montreal, Canada and held postdoctoral positions in Trinity College, Dublin before joining UCC as academic staff.

Sebastian Dohm-Hansen is a PhD student in the Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience, University College Cork. He holds BSc’s in Psychology and Molecular Biology from Lund University, Sweden, and a MSc in Neuroscience from King’s College London, UK. Throughout his time in academia, Sebastian has specialized in the science of memory, adult neurogenesis, psychiatric genetics, aging, and exercise. His main interest lies in bioinformatics and data science. Prior to all of this, he dabbled in music.

Sunil Bhar is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Swinburne University of Technology. He is Director of the Swinburne Wellbeing Clinic for Older Adults, a free counselling service for aged care residents. He is a clinical psychologist and has won more than $8M in grants as chief investigator focused on mental health programs for older adults. His research and contribution to practice has been recognised through several awards. In 2014, he was awarded the Alastair Heron Prize for excellence in ageing research and practice by the Australian Psychology Society. In 2015, he was awarded a citation for outstanding contribution to student learning in geropsychology by the Office of Learning and Teaching. In 2018, he won the Swinburne Dean’s award for research, and in 2019, he won Swinburne’s research impact award. Alongside his research and teaching activities, Professor Bhar has maintained a clinical practice for 30 years.

Adjunct Professor Tanya Davison is a Clinical Psychologist, with a research and clinical background in mental health, and a particular interest in designing and evaluating psychological interventions to facilitate positive outcomes for individuals and lead to practice changes within healthcare and aged care systems.

The intestinal epithelium offers the first interaction between commensal bacteria, pathogens and our bodies’ largest immune system. Inappropriate immune responses drive inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) or excessive inflammation during infection. My research focuses on the epithelial enteroendocrine cells (EECs), which release peptide hormones in response to nutrients allowing their efficient digestion. EEC alterations are strongly associated with inflammation, yet the possibility of interactions between our gut’s endocrine and immune systems remains overlooked. Understanding the mechanistic cross-talk between enteroendocrine and immune cells will identify the immunoendocrine axis as a key feature of intestinal health which could be therapeutically targeted during disease.