Professor Amanda Henry
Amanda Henry is Program Head, Women’s Health at The George Institute for Global Health and Professor of Obstetrics in the Discipline of Women’s Health, School of Clinical Medicine, UNSW Medicine and Health. Her professional background is as a Clinical Academic and Obstetrician, with a clinical practice focussed on high-risk pregnancy at St George Hospital, Sydney.
Her research focus, including her current NSW Health Early-Mid Career Cardiovascular Fellowship, is on how pregnancy complications, particularly hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and gestational diabetes, can affect women’s lifelong health. She leads a program of work on early intervention and improving systems of care to advance long-term cardiovascular health outcomes for women after a hypertensive pregnancy. Amanda is also an active researcher and research supervisor in the areas of high-risk pregnancy and pregnancy/postpartum clinical trials, and teaches pregnancy care to both undergraduate and postgraduate students. Amanda has a strong emphasis on collaborative research projects to drive improvements in Women’s Health, and in addition to her role with the George Institute, researches collaboratively with medical, midwifery and Allied Health colleagues, as well as consumer and community partners, both locally and nationally. She also promotes Women’s Health research translation into guidelines, policy and practice through her professional society roles, including as Councillor for the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Society of Obstetric Medicine of Australia and New Zealand.
Our impact
Experts come together for urgent action on perinatal mental health in India
Heart Foundation recognises George Institute researchers with latest grant funding
Prof Jason Wu
With a PhD in Biomedical Sciences and MSc in Biostatistics, Jason received post-doctoral training in nutrition epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is a Professor and the Head of the Nutrition Science Program at the George Institute for Global Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales. His research and teaching focuses on reducing diet-related diseases through implementing innovative ‘Food is Medicine’ interventions, modelling the impact of population-level food policies, and determining the role of dietary factors for cardiometabolic diseases prevention and treatment. Jason's research has been published in top medical and nutrition journals including Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, BMJ, Circulation, and American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. He has over 150 publications and has received many highly competitive awards, fellowships and grants, with total research funding of more than $14million to date.
How do we turn global promises on NCDs and mental health into real change in our region?
Policy statements and recommendations
Advancing the Global Dialogue on Food is Medicine
Professor Mark Woodward
Mark Woodward is Chair of Statistics, Epidemiology and Women’s Health at Imperial College London and Professor of Medical Statistics at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He is also a visiting /honorary professor at the universities of Dundee, Glasgow and the West Indies. He is an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. Mark was Professor of Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford from September 2013 to July 2020 and has also been a professor at the universities of New York, Sydney and Johns Hopkins (adjunct).
He is the author of over a thousand scientific articles and two text-books on statistical methods in medical research, one of which has its fourth edition commissioned for 2025. He was named by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics as one of ‘The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds’ in each of the last 11 years. As of June 2025, he has a H Factor of 188 with total citations of 164,594; 16 of his papers have over a thousand citations.
Mark has led four major international studies and directed the analytical research on three landmark collaborative studies, worldwide. His work on cardiovascular risk scores formed the basis of national guidelines in Scotland, and his work on kidney disease was used to produce new staging criteria for this disease. His total career grant awards total over £100 million from 64 successful applications.
He also has extensive experience in student teaching, postgraduate supervision and mentoring, including 14 PhD and 20 MSc students successfully completed. He has given training workshops in Botswana, China, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Uganda, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Mark served on the governing council of the Institute of Statisticians and the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) and is a fellow of the RSS, the European Society of Cardiology and the New York Academy of Medicine. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Physicians of Thailand.
He has wide experience of development aid work in Africa and Asia, having undertaken 25 missions for aid agencies, such as the WHO. He has also assessed grants for six national medical research councils (including NHMRC) and served on the editorial boards of seven international journals.
Reframing impact documentation in African contexts: exploring ethical and culturally safe storytelling in global health research
Kenneth Yakubu
Yakubu is a Research Fellow with the Guunu-maana (Heal) Aboriginal & Torres Strait Research Program and the Health Systems’ Program on Implementation for Health Equity. He also co-leads The George Institute’s Ubuntu Initiative for Partnerships in Africa.
The Guunu-maana (Heal) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Program at The George Institute drives meaningful and ethical research and advocacy to transform the health and wellbeing of First Nations peoples and communities. The George Institute’s Health System’s Program on Implementation for Health Equity aims to enhance health and social outcomes in underserved communities by improving knowledge of research methodologies that address health equity through implementation research and embedding process evaluations within applied research. Through the Ubuntu Initiative, The George Institute seeks to expand the scope of its research engagement with researchers and institutions on the Africa continent in a culturally safe, people-centred and sustainable way.
Yakubu’s research interests includes understanding and improving governance at the intersection of health and social systems, improving the health of multi-cultural communities, conducting and evaluating complex interventions aimed at promoting health equity.
Yakubu is a Fellow of the West African College of Physicians as well as the Nigerian Postgraduate Medical College in Family Medicine. In addition to his clinical training, he earned an MPhil (Family Medicine) from Stellenbosch University in Cape Town, South Africa, and an MBA (Health Units Management) from the Cyprus Institute of Marketing. While in Nigeria, his research and professional efforts were focused on understanding and improving the learning experiences of undergraduate and graduate trainees in family medicine, as well as identifying family-centred approaches to improving health service delivery.
He completed his PhD at the University of New South Wales Faculty of Medicine and Health in Sydney and his PhD Thesis investigated global and domestic governance systems for skilled health worker migration, the extent to which they feature human rights norms, and the opportunities for achieving equitable global health workforce distribution.