Professor John A Myburgh AO, MBBCh (University of Witwatersrand), PhD (University of Adelaide), FCICM FAHMS FAICD, is Professor of Intensive Care Medicine, University of New South Wales; Director of the Professoriate and Immediate-Past Director of the Critical Care Research Program at the George Institute for Global Health, Sydney, Senior Intensive Care Physician and Director of Research at St George Hospital, Sydney.

He is Leadership Fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council and honorary Professor at the Monash University School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine.

He has delivered over 45 years of clinical practice, designed and conducted over 75 basic science and clinical trials in fundamental areas of Intensive Care Medicine, including catecholamine pharmacology, traumatic brain injury, fluid resuscitation, acute kidney injury, endocrine dysfunction and sepsis.

He has published over 350 peer-reviewed research publications,(including 17 papers in the New England Journal of Medicine and 7 in JAMA) and 45 book chapters and monographs. His h-index is 78, calculated from 244 publications yielding over 23700 citations, with a citation trajectory of 900 to 2570 citations per annum from 2010 to the present.

From the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, he has been awarded 2 Practitioner and 2 Leadership Fellowships; 17 Project Grants and 2 Enabling Grants as Chief Investigator; 6 Project Grants and 1 Centre of Research Excellence grant as Associate Investigator for a total of over A$68M since 1998. In addition to 5 Medical Research Future Fund grants, 15 international, 26 institutional peer-reviewed grants and 5 unrestricted commercial grants, his total cumulative career research funding is over A$125M.

He is a Foundation Member and Past-Chairman of the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society Clinical Trials Group. In 2006, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Research Centre at the Monash University School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine.

In 2006, he established the Division of Critical Care and Trauma at the George Institute for Global Health and has developed programs of research including new opportunities for clinician-researchers for over 20 PhD, post-doctoral and masters’ students and over 50 honorary appointments. He has delivered over 500 presentations at national and international scientific meetings since 1994, including over 50 plenary presentations at major scientific congresses.

He has received five major research awards including the International Sepsis Forum Award in 2007 and two University of New South Wales Research Excellence awards in 2010 and 2013. He was listed on the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society Honour Roll in 2013 and the National Health and Medical Research Council Peer Review Honour Rolls from 2015-2026. He served on the Council of the World Federation of Societies of Intensive and Critical Care Medicine for six years and as Secretary-General from 2017-2019.

He has reviewed manuscripts for over 35 national and international journals and sits on 2 journal editorial boards. He has assessed grants for 12 funding agencies including the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Medical Research Council of the United Kingdom and the Canadian Institute for Health Research.

In addition to his research profile, he has made a substantive contribution to education in Intensive Care Medicine, both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels over the last 30 years. He was instrumental in establishing the College of Intensive Care Medicine, serving as a Fellowship examiner for twelve years, on the Board for ten years and as the first elected President from 2010-2012.

In the 2014 Queen’s Birthday honours, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for distinguished service to medicine as an intensive care medical practitioner, educator and researcher, and as an international innovator in patient management.

In 2015, he was made a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Science.

In 2017, he was awarded the College of Intensive Care Medicine Medal.

In 2019, he was awarded a Doctor of Science from the Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales.

Dr Kelly Thompson is a National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia Emerging Leader with The George Institute for Global Health. Concurrently she is Director of Research Operations at Nepean Blue Mountains Local Health District. 

She holds a Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Public Health from the School of Population Health within the Faculty of Medicine at UNSW, Sydney. She is a Registered Nurse, with a Bachelor of Nursing from the University of Newcastle, with clinical experience in intensive care. 

Kelly's primary research interest is in health equity in the clinical area of infection and sepsis. She uses population level data to understand and improve equity in health outcomes for survivors of sepsis and critical illness.  

Manoj continues to practise as an Intensive Care Physician and is based part-time at St. George Public Hospital in Sydney, playing a key role in the intensive care research program with Professor John Myburgh. He is also a Conjoint Lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine, UNSW.

His postgraduate qualifications include Fellowship of both the Royal College of Physicians in the United Kingdom and Australia and Fellowship of the College of Intensive Care Medicine.

Research interests include large scale clinical observational and randomised trials. Further specific areas of research interest include the role of fever in severe infections and acute brain injury, Intensive Care Unit Acquired Weakness and Early Mobility, and Outcome Evaluation in Critical Care Medicine research.

Associate Professor Naomi Hammond is an internationally recognised critical care and sepsis nurse research leader. She heads the Critical Care and Sepsis Australia Programs at The George Institute for Global Health and serves as Executive Director of Research for Northern Sydney Local Health District in Sydney, Australia. Naomi holds multiple academic and leadership appointments, including Honorary Professorial Nurse Research Fellow in the Malcolm Fisher Department of Intensive Care Medicine at Royal North Shore Hospital, NHMRC Emerging Leader Fellow, Conjoint Associate Professor at UNSW Medicine & Health, Treasurer of the Asia Pacific Sepsis Alliance, and Chair of the Australian Critical Care Nurses Research Advisory Panel.

With over $30 million AUD in competitive research funding (including over $8 million AUD as CIA), Naomi has successfully led national and international research programs and multidisciplinary teams across healthcare and academic settings. She has collaborated and led research that has resulted in more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, including in NEJM, NEJM Evidence, JAMA, and Intensive Care Medicine. She has been recognised as Australia’s leading researcher in Critical Care by The Australian Research Magazine in 2024, 2025 and 2026. Her work focuses on improving outcomes for sepsis and critically ill people through evidence-based interventions.
 

Pallab leads Research department at The George Institute for Global Health, India. He trained as a psychiatrist at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, received training in public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, as well as Johns Hopkins School of Public Health where he pursued his Masters and Doctoral training, respectively.

Professor Maulik has worked with the World Health Organisation (WHO), Geneva on Project Atlas and other mental health programs, and clinically as a psychiatrist in India and Australia. He has worked for more than 25 years in global mental health and has research network across multiple countries and institutions where he is affiliated with and with whom he collaborates on many projects.  

His particular research interests include social determinants of health, especially mental health services, mental disorders, international mental health, and intellectual disability. He is a Principal Investigator or co-investigator on many large mental health projects in India and abroad. He primarily focuses on delivering affordable and accessible mental health care for disadvantaged and marginalized communities in India, while using technology-enabled solutions to enable the health system to function more efficiently. He also leads a significant programme of work on stigma related to mental health. He was an Intermediate Career Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance Fellow from 2014-19 and currently is a Senior Fellow of the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance.

Dr Parisa Glass is the Director of Innovation and Enterprise for The George Institute for Global Health. In this role, she leads Health 10x Accelerator in partnership with UNSW Sydney. Health 10x accelerator supports startups developing affordable and scalable solutions to some of the most pressing unmet medical needs, globally. 

Parisa also leads UNSW Clinical Research Unit (CRU) which is collaborative program with The George Institute. UNSW CRU supports clinical researchers across UNSW network with operational and academic expertise, systems and tools to conduct high quality and impactful research efficiently and in accordance with best practice guidelines.  

Parisa has a PhD in Biomedical Science and a Masters Degree in Business Administration (MBA). Parisa also holds a Senior Lecturer position with UNSW Sydney.

Parisa joined The George Institute for Global Health in 2008. She has over twenty years’ experience in health and university sectors in an operational and academic capacity. Her expertise is in operational leadership & optimisation, strategic planning, coaching & mentoring, managing change, financial management, program development and management, contract negotiations, stakeholder management and recruiting and developing top talent.

Professor Simon Finfer AO is a Professorial Fellow in the Critical Care Division at The George Institute for Global Health, Adjunct Professor at the University of New South Wales and Professor of Critical Care, School of Public Health, Imperial College London. 

Simon leads the Sepsis Research Program at The George Institute which is focussed on the design and conduct of robust high-quality RCTs that will reduce death and disability due to sepsis in Australia and around the world. 

Simon has obtained over $50M in research funding and authored or co-authored over 250 peer-reviewed papers with 20% of those in the highest-ranking medical journals. He served as a guest editor for the New England Journal of Medicine from 2012 to 2014 and is currently an editor of the Oxford Textbook of Critical Care and the Critical Care Section Editor of the Oxford Textbook of Medicine. 

Simon was a founding member and is a past-Chair of the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society (ANZICS) Clinical Trials Group, past chair of the International Sepsis Forum, and past Vice President of the Global Sepsis Alliance. He is the Director of the Australian Sepsis Network and Asia Pacific Sepsis Alliance. 

A Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, Simon was appointed an Officer (AO) in the Order of Australia in the Queen's Birthday Honours List 2020 for "distinguished service to intensive care medicine, to medical research and education, and to global health institutes." 

Professor Sophia Zoungas is Executive Director of The George Institute for Global Health Australia and a practising endocrinologist.

A clinician scientist and trialist, she is internationally recognised for her leadership in diabetes, cardiorenal health, and healthy ageing, and for research that has shaped clinical practice and public health policy globally.

Her work focuses on large-scale clinical trials and cohort studies addressing the prevention and management of chronic disease, with particular impact on global clinical guidelines for blood pressure and glucose control in diabetes.

Professor Zoungas has led major international initiatives, including the ADVANCE and ADVANCE ON studies, and serves as lead of the Australian Diabetes Clinical Quality Registry, which promotes best-practice diabetes care.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, with prior senior academic leadership roles at Monash University.
 

Prof Stephen Jan is Director of Health Systems Science at the George Institute for Global Health, Conjoint Professor of Health Economics at the University of New South Wales, and Professor of Health Systems at Imperial College London. He holds Adjunct Professorships at City University of Hong Kong and Walter Sisulu University in South Africa and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. His areas of expertise are health systems, economic evaluation, health financing, choice experiments and health sector priority setting.

Dr. Zhang Puhong, Senior Research Fellow, Associate Professor and doctoral supervisor of the University of New South Wales.

He is currently the Associate Director of The George Institute for Global Health(China). The main research areas are diabetes management, nutrition and lifestyle, maternal and child health and digital health.

He is currently a member of the Standing Committee of big data branch of Chinese Nutrition Society, a member of the Standing Committee of medical and industrial integration of Chinese Institute of Command and Control, and China leader of Action on Salt China Unit.

In the past 10 years, as the project leader, he has been funded nearly 20 research projects by Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases (GACD), the International Diabetes Federation (IDF), the State Ministry of Science and Technology, the British Medical Research Council (MRC) and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Australian Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and other institutions, with a total scientific research fund of 170 million. The projects cover the vast majority of provinces, cities and autonomous regions in China.

More than 80 scientific research papers have been published in journals including The Lancet, BMJ, PLoS Medicine, Hypertension, Nutrients and JMIR.

He has led the establishment of more than 20 information systems, including “Salt Reduction Promotion”, “EduSaltS Cloud classroom”, “Food prophet”, “SmartDiabetes”, “1000 days”, “mHealth-based Integrated Management for Children with Illness” and Mobilephone-based electronic data collection system”, which are used to support public health education, disease management and the improvement of scientific research.

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 including Taiwan, Korea, 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.
 

Associate Professor Cheryl Carcel is the Head of the Brain Health Program at The George Institute for Global Health. She also works part-time as a clinical neurologist. Cheryl is an NHMRC Emerging Leader Fellow, an Australian and New Zealand Stroke Organisation Emerging Stroke Clinician and Scientist and a World Heart Federation Emerging Leader in Stroke. Other appointments include editorial board member for Stroke journal, guest editor for Cerebrovascular Diseases journal and World Stroke Organization co-chair for the scientific statement on Sex Differences in Stroke. 

A/Prof Carcel’s research focuses on health equity, in particular working on sex and gender differences, women’s brain health and policies encouraging disaggregation of data by sex and gender. She has extensive experience and interest in clinical trials, stroke prevention and treatment, migraine and cognition as well as supervising and mentoring students and junior colleagues.