Advisory Group
Associate Professor Paul Chadwick
Paul Chadwick is the Assistant Director for the University College London Centre for Behaviour Change, where he works with academics and practitioners across disciplines and sectors to promote and harness the principles of evidence-based behaviour change to deliver effective programmes of intervention. Paul has a background in clinical psychology and has specialist expertise in many areas including: behaviour change for adults and children, weight management, changing eating and activity behaviours, intervention and treatment evaluation (quantitative and qualitative).
Dr David Espinoza
David Espinoza is a biostatistician employed at the NHMRC Clinical Trials Centre (CTC), University of Sydney since 2011. David has worked on the EPOCH1 IPD-PMA as well as various clinical oncology trials; collaborations with the BODEN institute looking at obesity and consults with the Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention Research. He oversees the randomisation system offered by the CTC statistics team
Associate Professor Alison Hayes
Alison Hayes is Associate Professor in Health Economics at the School of Public Health, University of Sydney, where she teaches economic evaluation within the Masters of Public Health program. Her specialist area is health economic modelling of chronic disease. Her work takes a life-course approach to projecting the consequences of chronic disease, with a strong emphasis on modelling the epidemiology of disease and its associated long term costs and quality of life outcomes. The models combine techniques of patient-level simulation with decision analysis for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of interventions. Alison is internationally recognised for her work in modelling chronic disease, particularly diabetes and obesity and is chief investigator and health economics stream lead on a Centre of Research Excellence in the Early Prevention of Obesity in Childhood (EPOCH). She is Australian convenor of a special interest group in the Economics of Obesity, and a member of the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) which focuses on global analysis of risk factors for chronic disease.
Associate Professor Seema Mihrshahi
Seema is a nutritional epidemiologist with a background is in obesity prevention, global health and women’s and children’s health. Her current research focuses on population-based approaches for the prevention of overweight and obesity in children, particularly in implementing effective strategies to achieve optimal growth in early life and influence the health trajectories of the next generation. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Health Systems and Populations at the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences at Macquarie University in Sydney. Her previous role was as Research Translation Co-ordinator and Senior Research Fellow for the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Early Prevention of Obesity in Childhood (CRE-EPOCH) based at the University of Sydney.
Dr Denise O’Connor
Denise O'Connor is Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director at Monash Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Cabrini Institute, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University. She is Director of the Australasian Satellite of the Cochrane Collaboration Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (AusEPOC) Group, the group responsible for publishing Cochrane reviews of interventions to improve health care delivery and systems. Dr O’Connor’s research is in health services, focusing on the design, delivery, uptake and impact of behaviour change interventions to translate knowledge from research into clinical practice and policy.
Professor Chris Rissel
Chris Rissel is Director of the NSW Office of Preventive Health and Professor of Public Health with the Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney. The NSW Office of Preventive Health focuses on childhood and adult obesity prevention. It includes the Healthy Children Initiative, which comprises a suite of programs aimed to reduce childhood overweight and obesity through addressing healthy eating, physical activity and sedentary behaviours in early child care services, schools, community and recreational settings. He developed the NSW Charter for Children’s Active Travel, and a set of NSW government resources to support the Charter. His current research interests focus on obesity prevention with a particular emphasis on active transport and cycling advocacy.
Dr Kristy Robledo
Dr Kristy Pamela Robledo (PhD, M. Biostat) is an early career biostatistician at the NHMRC Clinical Trials Centre University of Sydney. She has over 12 years of experience in clinical trials research gained from her research-based job at University of Sydney (2008-present). Responsible for the provision of statistical leadership to clinical trial networks in oncology, neonatology, diabetes, cardiovascular and other areas to design, undertake, analyse and report on clinical trials. She has a specific interest in the use of biomarkers in clinical trials research. This includes the statistical methodology within clinical trials, and the use of biomarkers to model longer term outcomes. She is responsible for content development, coordination, and teaching of external short courses in statistics as well as units of study for the Masters of Clinical Trials Research. She is also a lecturer and developed materials for the annual statistical training provided to Australia and New Zealand Radiation Oncology trainees.
Dr Lee Sanders
Dr. Lee Sanders is a general pediatrician and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Stanford University, where he is Chief of the Division of General Pediatrics. He holds a joint appointment in the Center for Health Policy, where he is a co-director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention (CPOP). Dr. Sanders received a BA in History and Science from Harvard University, an MD from Stanford University, and a MPH from the University of California, Berkeley. Between 2006 and 2011, Dr. Sanders served as Medical Director of Children’s Medical Services South Florida, a Florida state agency that coordinates care for more than 10,000 low-income children with special health care needs. He was also Medical Director for Reach Out and Read Florida, a pediatric-clinic-based program that provides books and early-literacy promotion to more than 200,000 underserved children. At the University of Miami, Dr. Sanders directed the Jay Weiss Center for Social Medicine and Health Equity, which fosters a scholarly community committed to addressing global health inequities through community-based participatory research. At Stanford University, Dr. Sanders served as co-medical director of the Family Advocacy Program, which provides free legal assistance to help address social determinants of child health. Fluent in Spanish, Dr. Sanders is co-director of the Complex Primary Care Clinic at Stanford Children’s Health, which provides multi-disciplinary team care for children with complex chronic conditions.
Wendy Smith
Wendy Smith is a clinical nurse educator in child and family health with varied experiences as a lactation consultant, clinical nurse specialist, working in breastfeeding support clinics and telephone helplines. She has qualifications in Nursing, Midwifery, BA Health Science, Child and family Health Nursing, Certificate IV in Leadership and Management and has been a Lactation Consultant for 16 years. In 2017 she embraced opportunity when seconded to work on projects addressing the first 2000 days and obesity prevention strategies within NSW Health including Healthy Kids for Professionals and the Healthy Beginnings program. Her role in Healthy Beginnings involved developing a telephone-based intervention to mothers from third trimester until 3 years of the child’s age, focusing on promoting and optimising child health and mothers’ health and emotional wellbeing. She also coordinated the 2 year data collection for this study. She has written manuscripts and presented on the experiences of a telehealth approach at national conferences and events. Her current role being Clinical Nurse Educator Child and Family Health Nursing in the Sydney Local Health District- Canterbury LGA, Family Partnership Model Foundation Facilitator and Nursing and Midwifery SLHD Education Webinar Working Party.
Dr Lukas Staub
Lukas Staub has a medical degree, postgraduate diploma in applied statistics and a PhD in clinical epidemiology. His research focus is on the evaluation of medical tests for diagnosis and prognosis, including the design and conduct of diagnostic accuracy studies, prognostic studies, clinical prediction models, and systematic reviews of medical tests. He collaborates with clinician researchers on academic test evaluation projects nationally and internationally, and provides methodological advice in relation with evidence interpretation, translation of evidence into practice and policy, and methodological expertise in the development and dissemination of recommendations.
Dr Sarah Taki
Sarah Taki is a Senior Research Officer and Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at the Health Promotion Service, Sydney Local Health District and an honorary research fellow at the University of Sydney. She is an Accredited Practicing Dietitian and has recently completed her PhD which focused on engaging parents in an mHealth intervention which supported behaviours that promote healthy weight gain. Her current research focuses on population-based approaches for the prevention of overweight and obesity in children. She has completed a postdoctoral fellow in the translation and up-scale of the Healthy Beginnings program, an obesity prevention program and is still currently involved in facilitating the development, implementation and evaluation of multiple studies implemented as part of this program. More broadly, she provides support to the SLHD Population Health Department in qualitative research and evaluation.
Professor Rachael Taylor
Rachael Taylor is a Professor and Deputy Head of Department in the Department of Medicine, University of Otago, New Zealand and a nutritionist by training. In 2007 Rachael became the inaugural Karitane Fellow in Early Childhood Obesity, a position developed as part of the University’s “Leading Thinkers” campaign where monies raised through private donations were matched by the government, predominantly for the establishment of endowed chairs. Rachael leads or co-leads several large randomised controlled trials investigating innovative ways of tackling childhood obesity through family and community based initiatives.
Professor Angela Webster
Angela is Director of Evidence Integration at the Clinical Trials Centre, an NHMRC Leadership Fellow, and Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Sydney; and a Physician at Westmead Hospital. Her research themes centre on multi-morbidity; the focus of her research is always on helping clinical decision making by presenting complex data as simply as possible to aid clinician and patient discussions. Recent work has tackled health literacy, risk tolerance, eliciting and integrating patient preferences, and supporting effective patient self-management. She has a strong track record of making better use of existing data through systematic review and data synthesis, data linkage, and trials, to improve health service delivery. Angela has a long-standing association with Cochrane having been the conflict of interest arbiter, and editor for Cochrane Kidney and Transplant. She has also long been involved in international and national clinical practice guideline methodology and content.
Associate Professor Luke Wolfenden
A/Prof Wolfenden is a Health Promotion Program Manager at Hunter New England Population Health, and Joint NHMRC Career Development Fellow and National Heart Foundation Future Leaders Fellow. He is the Director of the National Centre of Implementation Science, a NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence and Joint Co-ordinating Editor of Cochrane Public Health. His research seeks to reduce the burden of chronic disease in the community by identifying effective interventions to reduce modifiable chronic disease risks and strategies to improve their implementation. Much of his recent work has focused on addressing modifiable risk factors in children, including diet, physical activity and obesity.
Associate Professor Charles Wood
Charles Wood, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Duke University, where he practices as a general pediatrician in the newborn nursery and the outpatient teaching clinic. He completed an MPH and the National Research Service Award (NRSA) Primary Care Research Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill prior to his appointment at Duke. His research interests include obesity prevention in the primary care setting, with an emphasis on the role of infancy and early childhood growth patterns as predictors of obesity. His work to date has focused on the role of bottle feeding and infant bottle size on weight gain in formula-fed infants, rapid weight gain in term and preterm infants, racial and ethnic disparities in risk factors for obesity, and research use of electronic health record data.
Associate Professor H. Shonna Yin
H. Shonna Yin, MD, MS is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Population Health at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. She is an academic general pediatrician whose research over the past 15 years has focused on addressing the issue of health literacy as it relates to child health; she is particularly interested in the development, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination of health literacy-informed intervention strategies as a means to address poverty-associated health disparities. Much of her work has centered on early child obesity prevention, including clinical trials funded by NIH/NICHD and PCORI to examine the effectiveness of Greenlight, a health literacy-informed primary care-based intervention to prevent childhood obesity, starting in the first years of life. Her other areas of research focus include addressing medication safety and chronic disease management using a health literacy perspective.
Peter Godolphin
Peter Godolphin is a Senior Research Fellow and medical statistician based in the meta-analysis programme at MRC CTU at UCL. He joined UCL in Autumn 2019, after previously working as a medical statistician at Nottingham Clinical Trials Unit at the University of Nottingham. He works as a statistician on the STOPCAP M1 programme (http://www.stopcapm1.org/), that aims to speed up the evaluation of therapies for metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer. In April 2021, he began an National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Development and Skills Enhancement Award in meta-analysis. In 2023, he was awarded a Young Investigator Award from Prostate Cancer Foundation, entitled: "Optimal methods for identifying and communicating which treatments are best for which people with metastatic hormone sensitive prostate cancer".