Alta Schutte is a SHARP Professor and Theme Lead for Cardiac, Vascular and Metabolic Medicine at UNSW Sydney; and Professorial Fellow at The George Institute Australia. She holds honorary appointments at the North-West University and University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. She is the Past President of the International Society of Hypertension, Company Secretary of the Australian Cardiovascular Alliance, and Co-Chair of the Australian National Hypertension Taskforce.

Alta is a leading researcher with extensive experience in clinical trials and population-based studies in the field of blood pressure, hypertension and cardiovascular health. She has been the Chief Investigator of several multidisciplinary studies, published >450 papers in the field, and supervised over 85 postgraduate students. She is Chief Investigator of several Australian-funded trials and is a NHMRC Investigator Grant Leadership Fellow.

She is involved in numerous international consortia, such as the Global Burden of Disease study, the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, May Measurement Month global blood pressure screening campaign, World Health Organization working groups and the Lancet Commission of Hypertension. She is the senior author of the 2020 International Society of Hypertension Global Hypertension Guidelines. She is Associate Editor of the journal, Hypertension, and has received numerous international awards for her work, most recently the 2022 American Heart Association’s Harriet Dustan Award, and 2023 Peter Sleight Excellence Award in Hypertension Clinical Research from the World Hypertension League.

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.

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.

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.
 

Georgia is a Senior Policy and Advocacy Advisor for the Impact and Engagement team at The George Institute, based in the Sydney office. Georgia supports the Institute’s advocacy and political engagement activities in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. Her main programmes of activity include women’s health, preventive health, and improving health systems to achieve equity.

Georgia White is an experienced policy professional focused on global health both within government and the non-profit sector. Prior to joining The George Institute, she worked for several years at a global non-profit focused on HIV and TB in New York City. She has also worked as a senior policy adviser within the Victorian Government and in Cambodia as part of Australia’s official development assistance program. Georgia has a Bachelor of Arts in Communication from the University of Technology, Sydney, and a Master in Health Policy from The University of Sydney. 

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.