Speakers & Program
Download the final conference program (low resolution)
Plenary Speakers
Graham Brown
Graham Brown, formerly Head of Victorian Infectious Diseases Service, Royal Melbourne Hospital, is the James Stewart Professor of Medicine, Head, Department of Medicine (RMH/WH) and Director of the Nossal Institute for Global Health in the University of Melbourne. He has a long record of infectious diseases research, particularly focusing on the immune response to Plasmodium falciparum malaria in humans and efforts to develop a malaria vaccine. He has been a member of several international advisory groups on malaria, including as Chair of Steering Committees on malaria and immunisation for the World Health Organization Tropical Disease Research Program and member of the Advisory Committee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Children’s Vaccine Program. He has been the local Site Director for the global GEOSENTINEL programme that contributes to international surveillance of infectious diseases in travellers, with the goal of developing the evidence base for the provision of advice to international travellers. His other interests include clinical aspects of pneumonia, development of decision support systems for antibiotic prescribing, mathematical modeling of Infectious Diseases and improved understanding of nosocomial infections. He has played a leadership role in debates on ethics in medical practice and research.
Mike Catton
Michael Catton, BSc (Hons), MBChB, FRCPA. Dr Mike Catton is Director, and Head of Virology at VIDRL a Victorian, national, and international reference laboratory. VIDRL has three WHO Collaborating Centre designations: (Influenza, Virus Reference and Research, and Biosafety), two WHO regional reference laboratories (measles, and poliovirus), as well as national reference laboratories for viral haemorrhagic fevers, poliovirus and measles. Mike’s professional interests are in molecular viral diagnostics, and emerging viruses. He is a member of WHO’s Biosafety Assessment Group, and has undertaken WHO consultancies around Asia. In 2003 Mike led a collaborative effort to develop Australian laboratory capacity for responsiveness to SARS. In 2007 his group jointly discovered a new arenavirus as the cause of a cluster of deaths among Victorian transplant patients.
Bart Currie
Bart Currie is an Infectious Diseases Physician at Royal Darwin Hospital and Professor in Medicine at the Northern Territory Clinical School, Flinders University. He is also Head of the Tropical and Emerging Infectious Diseases Division of the Menzies School of Health Research at Charles Darwin University. Areas of interest include clinical and epidemiological aspects of tropical and emerging infections, development of treatment guidelines and clinical toxinology.
Timothy Davis
Tim Davis is Professor of Medicine at the University of Western Australia and a consultant physician at Fremantle Hospital. He has had an interest in tropical medicine since working as a Research Fellow in the Oxford-Mahidol-Wellcome Unit in Thailand between 1987 and 1990. He has carried out studies on malaria pathophysiology and treatment in China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Nepal, and is currently involved in collaborative projects in Papua New Guinea and Malaysian Borneo.
Hume Field
Dr Hume Field is an internationally recognized authority on emerging infectious diseases associated with wildlife. He is a veterinary epidemiologist with particular experience in the design and implementation of wildlife surveillance programs and in investigations of disease emergence from wildlife. He played a key role in the identification of fruit bats as the natural reservoir of Hendra virus, and conducted the initial investigations of the ecology of Hendra virus and Australian bat lyssavirus in Australian bats. He was a member of the international taskforce investigating the 1999 Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia, and a member of two WHO missions investigating the origins of the SARS outbreak. His current research focus includes risk factors for henipavirus spillover, and investigations of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats. He is currently employed by the Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries in Brisbane, Australia.
John Mackenzie
John S Mackenzie is Professor of Tropical Infectious Diseases in the Division of Health Sciences at Curtin University of Technology, and inaugural holder of the Premier's Fellowship. He is also Deputy CEO of the Australian Biosecurity CRC for Emerging Infectious Diseases. He was formerly Professor of Microbiology at the University of Queensland, and held various positions at the University of Western Australia. He has served as Secretary-General of the International Union of Microbiological Societies (IUMS), as Past President of the Australian Society for Microbiology, and as Past President of the Asian-Pacific Society for Medical Virology. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and in 2002 he was appointed as Officer in the Order of Australia for services to public health research and to education. In 2005, he was the inaugural recipient of the Academy of Science Malaysia's Mahathir Science Award for Excellence in Tropical Research. He serves as a member of various national international committees including the Steering Committee for the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network of WHO, a member of the Technical Advisory Group for the Asia Pacific Strategy for Emerging Diseases of WHO, a member of the International Health Regulations Roster of Experts as an expert in laboratory issues, and a Member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests have been in mosquito-borne virus diseases and emerging zoonotic viruses. He has published over 270 scientific papers, edited three books and contributed to major texts in the areas of Japanese encephalitis virus and other mosquito-borne viruses, emerging zoonoses, and influenza.
Alan Magill
Colonel Alan Magill MD, FACP is the Director of the Division of Experimental Therapeutics at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) in Washington DC, USA. Dr. Magill is ABIM board-certified in internal medicine and infectious diseases. He has spent the last 15 years developing new generations of vaccines, diagnostics, and drugs directed against malaria and leishmaniasis. He has lived and worked in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Dr. Magill previously served for four years as the Head of Parasitology at the Naval Medical Research Center Detachment (NMRCD) in Lima, Peru, and for two years as the Head of Clinical Research for the Malaria Vaccine Development Unit of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He has dual academic appointments as Associate Professor of Medicine and Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda, Maryland. He is a faculty member for the Gorgas Course in Clinical Tropical Medicine in Lima, Peru, continues to be a sought after speaker on travel and tropical medicine-related topics, and a participant in numerous national and international advisory committees and workshops. He is an active member of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, serving as their CME Courses Director, and is the current President of their Clinical Group. Dr. Magill is President-Elect of the International Society of Travel Medicine (ISTM) where he has been a member since 1992, serving as the Associate Chair of the Scientific Program Committee at CISTM9 (2005) in Lisbon and at CISTM10, (2007) in Vancouver. He is the co-editor of the 9th edition of Hunter’s Tropical Medicine and has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications, 90 abstracts, and 10 book chapters.
Robert Steffen
Robert Steffen is Professor of Travel Medicine at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. There, he is heads the Division of Epidemiology and Prevention of Communicable Diseases and he is also Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Traveller's Health. He also is Adjunct Professor in the Epidemiology and Disease Prevention Division of the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston, TX. Additionally he presides the Swiss Influenza Pandemic Planning Committee, is Vice-President of the Federal Swiss Commission on Vaccination, Co-chair on the Swiss Bioterrorism Committee. He also is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Travel Medicine.
Annelies Wilder-Smith
Associate Professor Annelies Wilder-Smith is a Dutch physician who graduated from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1987. She has extensive postgraduate training and experience in travel and tropical medicine and international health. She did a Masters in International Health at Curtin University, Perth, Australia, and obtained a PhD in International Health from the University of Amsterdam. She has worked in various countries such as China, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Switzerland and Germany. From 2000 to 2006, she was the Head of the Travellers’ Health & Vaccination Centre in Singapore. From Sept 2006 until February 2007 she was based at WHO Headquarters in Geneva to coordinate the revision of the WHO publication International Travel and Health 2007. She returned to Singapore from where she now coordinates the revision for International Travel and Health 2008 for WHO in addition to her full-time position at the National University Singapore as Associate Professor. She is module coordinator on global health issues and communicable diseases for the MPH programme at the National University Singapore, and is Director of the Travellers’ Screening and Vaccination Clinic at the National University Hospital in Singapore. Her research interests are travel health, dengue, meningococcal disease, tuberculosis, SARS, and other emerging diseases. Her main focus in under- and postgraduate teaching is related to travel health, public health, epidemiology, vaccine preventable diseases, general infectious diseases, humanitarian emergencies and community medicine. Prof. Annelies Wilder-Smith has published over 65 scientific papers in international peer reviewed journals. She co-edited the book Travel Medicine: Tales behind the science (Elsevier) and co-edited the book Manual of Travel Medicine & Health (Steffen/DuPont/Wilder-Smith, 2003 and 2007, B.C. Decker Inc) and authored two books (How to take a medical history in Chinese (Armour Publishing ISBN 981-4045-29-2) and Travel Health Guide for International Travellers (Elisher Communications, ISBN 981-04-4160-6). Dr Wilder-Smith is Editorial Consultant to The Lancet and Advisor to GeoSentinel. She is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Travel Medicine. She serves as consultant to various NGOs in Asia and is the research consultant to The Leprosy Mission. Since 2001, she serves as Medical Director for a Community Health Project amongst coastal fishermen in South India.