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.

Prof Frank Vajda AM is a neurologist and epileptologist with a special interested in neuropharmacology. He is a leading figure in the clinical pharmacology of epilepsy. He contributed hugely to the development of epileptology globally and his contribution to the literature on the clinical pharmacology of AEDs spans over five decades.

Naomi is a PhD Candidate at the School of Public Health, University of Sydney working on advancing global food security for infants and young children. Naomi Hull is also a Registered Nurse and an IBCLC. She attained a Masters of Public Health (Nutrition) in 2017. Her passion for breastfeeding and lactation began after the birth of her first baby and led to training as a peer support counsellor in 2006. During her Master of Public Health, her interest in the ‘bigger picture’ grew stronger and for this reason, chose to look at the implementation of the Australian National Breastfeeding Strategy (2010-2015) as the topic of her Dissertation. Naomi went on from there to become the National Coordinator of the World Breastfeeding Trends Initiative – bringing together the Australian team who have now completed two assessments of Australia’s policies and programs in 2018 and 2023. From 2019-2023 Naomi worked in the National Support Office of the Australian Breastfeeding Association, as a Senior Manager. She continues to feel strongly about finding a way to improve the breastfeeding experience for families by way of advocating for policy change in Australia.

Karleen Gribble has been researching and publishing on aspects of women’s infant feeding practice and beliefs for over a decade. Her research interests include adoptive breastfeeding, long-term breastfeeding, infant feeding in emergencies and peer-to-peer milk sharing. She also has an interest in children’s rights, childhood trauma, adoption and child protection. Karleen has numerous papers on these subjects published in peer-reviewed journals. She is frequently invited to speak on her research to professional and lay audiences in Australia and Internationally. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at the University of Western Sydney and a member of the international interagency collaboration the Infant and Young Child Feeding in Emergencies Core Group.

Dr Jennifer McCann (PhD, RNutr) is a lecturer in nutrition sciences and a nutrition placement coordinator at the Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition (IPAN), Deakin University. Research interests include: population and public health nutrition, children’s diets, environmental influences on diet, family influences on diet, diet and academic outcomes. Jennifer has a Masters of Human Nutrition and Graduate Certificate of Public Health from Deakin University as well as a BSc and an Honours Diploma in Medical Laboratory Technology.