Julie Brown heads the Injury Program at The George Institute for Global Health, Australia and is a Professor, School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney. She works across the continuum of the public health model from defining problems, identifying risk and protective factors, developing and testing interventions to monitoring and evaluating the implementation of interventions designed to reduce the burden of injury, and has demonstrated expertise in multi-disciplinary research methods. Her career vision is to reduce the health burden attributable to injury by delivering tangible ways to prevent road crash-related injury and unintentional injury more broadly. Prior to completing her PhD at UNSW in 2008, she worked for over 20 years in vehicle and equipment safety research and policy development for the NSW government. Insight into research needs for regulatory and policy development from this experience continues to frame her research.

Jacek is a Research Fellow with a primary focus on housing and health in the  Guunu-Maana (Heal), Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Program. They are committed to advocacy and developing culturally-grounded solutions to improve housing and health, directly informed by the priorities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities in Sydney and across NSW. Their practice is informed by collectivist, respectful, reciprocal, and relational elements akin to Indigenous and decolonising approaches to research.

Jacek’s PhD was guided by Dharawal and Bidjigal people at La Perouse, aiming to understand the meanings of home and priorities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in mainstream (not Aboriginal-community-controlled) social housing in Sydney. Together with Aboriginal social housing tenants, tenant advocates and social housing providers, they developed free housing resources to support tenants navigate NSW's complex social housing system.

As of 2026, Jacek is involved in housing research projects and collaborations, working cross-institutionally alongside colleagues in public health, the built environment, law, and human geography. They sit on the Management Committee of the Eastern Area Tenants Service, a Sydney-based tenant advocacy service, are part of the HEAL Network and a member of UNSW’s Australian Human Rights Institute. 

Jacek joined The George Institute for Global Health in 2018, initially as a Project Officer supporting commissioned research, and the early development of the Institute’s practice of consumer and community engagement in health research. Subsequently they were a Research Associate in the Injury Program, and Coordinator of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, before undertaking their PhD between 2021 and 2025. In addition to research, Jacek has led organisational change, establishing and Chairing the Institute’s first Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Working Group in 2019, and spear-heading initiatives to improve cultural safety with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, gender equity and LGBTQI+ inclusion. 

Coming from a Software Engineering background with several years’ of experience, Nipuna was offered a UNSW Scientia PhD Scholarship in 2018 under Associate Professor Julie Brown, to work on a digital intervention as a mobile app to help parents prevent falls in children < 1 year and the intervention is to be developed based on behaviour theories, thus working as a Digital Behaviour Change Intervention (DBCI).

Nipuna is passionate about Digital Behaviour Change Intervention development, to improve people’s health and looks forward to exploring the potential of DBCIs for public health problems.

Surekha Garimella is a Senior Research Fellow at the George Institute, working on the ARISE Hub – a project aimed at strengthening accountability mechanisms for improving equitable health and well-being for people living and working in informal urban spaces. Surekha holds a Bachelor's degree in Nutrition, a Master of Science in Nutrition & Food science, a Master of Philosophy in Applied economics, and a PhD in Public Health, Gender and Work.

Her research interests are in gender, women, work and political economy; Gendered health systems and accountability; feminist theory and practice and ethics of research practice. She has worked in implementation and research in gender, nutrition, health and wellbeing among women, children and adolescents in informal urban settlements in Delhi and Tamil Nadu as well as researched on the health and wellbeing experiences of women workers in urban informal settlements in Delhi.

Catherine Brenner is a Non-Executive Director of Scentre Group (Westfield), Djerriwarrh Investments, Carindale Property Trust and Schools Plus, and Chair of Australian Payments Plus. She is also a Panel Member of Adara Partners.

Catherine was previously Managing Director at ABN AMRO Australia & New Zealand (formerly BZW). She is the former Chair of AMP and served on the boards of Catherine was previously Managing Director at ABN AMRO Australia & New Zealand (formerly BZW). She is the former Chair of AMP and served on the boards of Coca-Cola Amatil, Boral, Sydney Opera House and the Art Gallery of NSW.

Catherine joined the Board in August 2019 and is Chair of the Audit Committee and Member of the Risk Committee.

Anthony Delaney is a Fellow of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine and the College of Intensive Care Medicine. He is a Professorial Fellow in the Division of Critical Care at the George Institute for Global Health, also holding appointments as Associate Professor at Sydney Medical School, University of Sydney and an adjunct Associate Professor at the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Research Centre, in the Department of Epidemiology and Preventative Health at Monash University. He maintains a clinical role as Senior Staff Specialist in the Malcolm Fisher Department of Intensive Care Medicine at The Royal North Shore Hospital.

Associate Professor Delaney's major research interests are centred on improving methods of resuscitation of patients with sepsis and septic shock and improving outcomes for patients suffering acute severe brain injuries.

Dr. Shane Galgey MB BCh BAO NUI MRCP MRCS is an Irish trained physician in Gastroenterology, Hepatology, General Internal Medicine, with subspecialty training in HDU and Emergency Medicine.

He is currently works in Academic Project Operations in the divisions of Critical Care and Respiratory Medicine as a Project Manager/CRA. He also works as a Medical Monitor and provides Safety and Medical Advisory for Academic Project Operations Trials in TGI.

He is a keen researcher across TGI’s many therapeutic areas. He has an interest in Health Systems Research, Thought Leadership, Process Implementation Improvement, and Social Entrepreneurship. He recently has contributed to the Institute’s response to COVID-19 and is the Lead Investigator in a report exploring how to optimise clinical trials in the face of change to achieve maximum outputs.

Shane also holds a Conjoint Lecturer Position at UNSW School of Medicine.

Mahesh Ramanan is a Senior Staff Specialist in Intensive Care Medicine at Caboolture Hospital and Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, QLD, Australia. His main research interests include long-term outcomes of critical illness, pragmatic clinical trials and big data. During his training in Intensive Care Medicine, Mahesh completed a Masters degree in clinical epidemiology at the University of Sydney and was awarded a PhD from University of New South Wales under the supervision of Professor Balasubramanian Venkatesh investigating the evolution of trials methodology and recruitment challenges in critical care clinical trials.

Mahesh is the principal investigator of a currently recruiting MRFF-funded cluster-randomised trial of fluid therapy in diabetic ketoacidosis and is a chief investigator and/or management committee member of several NHMRC/MRFF funded clinical trials.

He is the current Chair of the Queensland Critical Care Research Network. Mahesh's vision for the Network is to bring pragmatic research to peripheral, non-tertiary hospitals which have traditionally not played a major role in clinical research.

Anna is working as an Associate Project Manager working on the STARS (stroke) and STEPCARE (cardiac arrest) studies. Since joining The George Institute in 2019 she has worked as a Senior Clinical Research Associate on various studies, both in Critical Care as well as other medical fields.  Prior to her employment at The George Institute, Anna was a Clinical Trials and Research Coordinator for the Intensive Care Units at Western Health, Victoria.  Anna has also worked as a Clinical Research Associate for Orion Clinical Services (CRO) and as a Research Coordinator for the Gastroenterology Department at Box Hill Hospital.  She also has a Bachelor of Biomedical Science with Honors from the University of South Australia, a Postgraduate Diploma in Forensic Science from La Trobe University and a Postgraduate Certificate in Business Administration from Swinburne University.

Rebecca has been at The George Institute Australia for 13 years, and was first part of the project operations team where she started as a clinical trials assistant on Kanyini Guidelines Adherence with the Polypill Study (Kanyini GAP) and then continued her career development within APO becoming a Clinical Research Associate and then a Senior Clinical Research Associate, during this time she has worked on many different projects within various programs at The Institute including renal and metabolic, neurological, critical care, cardiovascular and oncology programs.

Rebecca is now the Quality Assurance officer for Australia where she is now using her experience by supporting and assisting staff and researchers in the Australia office and the global Quality Assurance (QA) Team in their quality activities under the Quality Assurance Framework, Rebecca is also responsible for the coordination, reporting and training on research quality processes within Australia, and together with the Centre for Operational and Research Excellence (CORE) QA team providing training and advice of quality assurance, risk management, and QA training to the Australia office, including the coordination of Good Clinical Practice (GCP) training at The Institute.

Ben is a doctor from the UK and Advanced Trainee in nephrology who is completing a PhD at the George Institute. The focuses of the PhD is improving the outcomes and economics of treating chronic kidney disease with a particular interest in low-and-middle-income countries. Ben is also involved with the Affordable Dialysis Project – an initiative run by The George Institute to develop a system that can provide low cost dialysis to those who currently cannot afford it. He works as clinical advisor for this project.

Professor Simone Pettigrew is the Head of Food Policy. She has qualifications in Economics, Marketing, and Consumer Psychology. Her broad areas of expertise include behavioural psychology, health promotion, health policy, communications, social marketing, and intervention research.

Along with nutrition, her substantive areas of research include obesity, physical activity, alcohol consumption, smoking, active transport, and healthy ageing. Simone sits on numerous advisory committees and regularly performs research consultancies for NGO and government entities. To date, she has published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers and produced more than 160 technical reports for NGOs and government departments.

See Professor Pettigrew's full CV here.