Kate has a background in Pharmacology and a PhD in the inflammatory system. She began her employment at TGI in March 2018, mainly working within the renal and metabolic division. Kate’s clinical research operations skills developed whilst working on the REDUCCTION study where she managed sites, coordinated event adjudication processes, maintained data trackers, monitored data collection, upheld ethics and research governance approvals, submitted ethics amendments, coordinated site payments, and maintained close communication with participating study sites. Her expertise has also been lent to other studies including TRIDENT (project forecasting and coordinating outcome adjudications), TRACK (unblinded team member), RESOLVE (event verification), and ATHENA (UAT). Experience has also been obtained in start-up, site initiation, site close-out, protocol and other document development, and exposure to data linkage processes.

Kate currently manages the PERFORM-AKI, ACCESS HD, DISCOVER and REVERSE studies.

Dr Katie Harris is a Senior Research Fellow in the Professorial Unit at the George Institute for Global Health. Her areas of expertise include Biostatistics and Clinical Epidemiology, awarded a PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Leeds, UK. She also holds a Conjoint Senior Lecturer position at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Katie has extensive experience working with big data, including population-based, linked and non-linked datasets, and clinical trials data. Her current research interests are in sex and gender differences, cardiovascular disease and hypertension, and dementia and cognitive decline.

Preety R. Rajbangshi is a Senior Research Fellow at The George Institute for Global Health, India, where she leads India's Global Women's Health Programme. She holds a Master of Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, United States.

Her research focuses on women's health across the life course and strengthening health systems for primary care. With nearly two decades of experience as a researcher and practitioner, she has worked on maternal health, anaemia, and endometriosis. She has prior experience working with government health programmes at national and state levels in India.

Preety brings extensive field experience in community engagement with tribal communities, internally displaced populations, and women workers in tea plantations. Her work aims to address health inequities and generate practice-based evidence to inform action.

Sandhya received her doctoral degree in Social Medicine and Community Health from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her work with The George Institute's mental health programme involves assessing the effectiveness of technology-enabled delivery of mental health care by primary healthcare workers for depression, suicide and stress among adolescents in urban slum communities in Delhi and Vijayawada.

Her research interest includes developing a gendered understanding and analysis of mental health issues in India. Prior to joining The George Institute, Sandhya was at SAHAYOG as the Assistant Coordinator. 

Chhavi Bhandari is Co-Director, Impact & Engagement at The George Institute for Global Health, where she leads a global programme of advocacy and stakeholder engagement to maximise the impact of our health and medical research. Her work focuses on multilateral partnerships and advancing community engagement and involvement.  She also serves as Community Engagement and Involvement Lead for the NIHR Global Health Research Centre on NCDs and Environmental Change, co-chairs the WHO NCD Lab on Women and Girls, and contributes to global health policy through WHO civil society groups. With an MBA and international healthcare experience across India, the UK, Australia, and beyond, Chhavi brings a globally informed yet locally grounded approach to advancing equitable health systems.

Madhuri is the Head of Strategic Partnerships and Commissioned Research at The George Institute for Global Health India and leads research management and capacity building initiatives. She is an India Research Management Initiative (IRMI) Fellow, supported by the DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance. Madhuri is part of the global CORE unit and works with colleagues from other regional offices of the institute.

She has a PhD in life science and a decade of research management experience from her previous positions at the DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance, Public Health Foundation of India and Indian Institute of Health Management Research. She has contributed to several courses, workshops and training programmes in research skills, for early career researchers. Madhuri is interested in creating institutional processes that facilitate quality research and an enabling research environment.

Dr Sultana Shajahan is a Research Fellow at The George Institute for Global Health and the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney. After completing her medical degree in Bangladesh, she earned a Master of Public Health (Research) degree with High Distinction at Macquarie University, Sydney. She then pursued a PhD at The George Institute for Global Health and UNSW, which was awarded in 2026. Her doctoral research focused on high-level evidence synthesis and advanced analyses of large international datasets (including  ADVANCE, PROGRESS, and SCAPIS) to investigate the associations of a wide range of clinically important blood pressure measures with cognitive decline and dementia. For her PhD research, she was awarded the Young Investigator Award at the European Stroke Organisation Conference (ESOC) in 2023. She has also worked several years at The George Institute, leading projects in stroke, women’s health and sex differences. Her research interests lie in systematic reviews, meta-analyses, clinical trials, stroke, vascular dementia and cognition, and women’s health.

Beyond her PhD, Dr Shajahan undertook a  three-month international research exchange program at Linköping University, Sweden, funded by The Swedish National School for Research in General Practice. She was also a Site Physician in the recently completed RECALL-Pilot trial, which tested an online intervention to reduce dementia risk through blood pressure management. 

A/Prof Laura Downey leads The George Institute’s global program for Universal Health Coverage (UHC). She is a conjoint Associate Professor in health economics and policy in the School of Population Health at UNSW, and an Advanced Research Fellow in the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, UK.

Dr Downey's research is focused broadly on evaluating health system performance in relation to UHC goals, and developing innovative solutions to support equitable access to high quality, affordable care for the world's most at-risk populations. She is a passionate advocate for health equity, and in particular gender equity, where she uses data to champion greater visibility of women's health issues and more inclusive and participatory evidence to policy processes. She is a Senior Investigator and the Capacity Strengthening co-lead of a £10million NIHR Global Health Research Centre for Non-Communicable Diseases and Environmental Change, where her research focuses on community-driven multisectoral intervention design, delivery, and evaluation to strengthen health systems to protect populations in India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh from environmental issues such as extreme heat and air pollution. She is an active invited advisor to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and currently a member of the WHO advisory group for the use of Glucagon-like Peptide Receptor Agonists (GLP1-RAs) for the management of obesity. She was an invited expert member of the Health Economics advisory group to the UK Infected Blood Inquiry (2020-2024), whose work directly informed recommendations made by the Inquiry Chair to the UK Government on behalf of the tens of thousands of individuals who were infected with HIV and Hepatitis A, B, and C by the National Health Service. She was an advisor to the Indian federal government between 2015 -2019 to support the establishment of a core Health Technology Assessment (HTA) function within the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and remains an active advisor to the Indian Institute of Public Health, the Indian Council of Medical Research, and numerous State governments across India.

Dr Downey has active research collaborators across Asia, Africa, and Europe and has worked in partnership with global institutions such as the World Health Organisation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank. She has held previous positions with the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) UK, the Centre for Global Development Europe, and University College London.

Dr Kumar is a Public Health researcher pursuing his PhD in the area of ICD-coded sepsis disease burden at the Critical Care Division of the George Institute for Global Health, and working as Research Associate with the Australian Sepsis Network.

Dr Kumar is a physician having a postgraduate degree in clinical pharmacology and an experienced medical researcher with more than 14 years of cumulative academic-industry experience. In addition to his academic achievements, he has worked extensively in various roles ranging from early-to-late phase clinical and medical research. He has extensive clinical trials management and operational experience including large multinational studies. 

Lachlan is an Intensive Care Specialist who works at Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney. He holds appointments as Honorary Research Fellow at The George Institute, and Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney.

Lachlan is an early career researcher having completed his PhD in 2025 (UNSW). He has an interest in Acute Kidney Injury research, as well as sepsis, neurocritical care, burns injury and the quality of ICU survivorship for patients and their carers. He previously completed a masters focused on analytical bias in meta-analysis.  

Niveditha is a medical doctor, trained in clinical research and applied statistics with over 15 years of experience in clinical and public health research. She completed her Masters in Clinical Trials from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and PhD from Deakin University, Australia. She is a recipient of the prestigious DBT/Wellcome Trust–India alliance Intermediate Clinical and Public Health fellowship (2020) for the design and evaluation of a technology-based post knee arthroplasty rehabilitation monitoring strategy. She has been involved in the design and analysis of several multicentre randomised controlled trials in maternal health and cardiovascular disease.

At The George Institute India, she is Program Head of Academic Clinical Trials Unit (ACTU), which aims to expand the capacity to conduct clinical trials for chronic diseases with an emphasis on quality and efficiency. She is also actively engaged in optimising management of clinical trials data using less resource-intensive methods. Prior to joining The George Institute, she worked for the Public Health Foundation of India, as an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Public Health-Delhi.

Dr Maddie Heenan is a public health researcher, program manager and policy expert. She is a Project Manager in the Health Systems Science division at The George Institute for Global Health and an Associate of the Australian Human Rights Institute at UNSW. Maddie brings extensive experience in health systems research, program management, strategy development, partnerships and stakeholder engagement, knowledge translation and strategic communication.

Her research interests include public health governance and regulation, policy development and implementation, research–policy partnerships, political economy, food and alcohol policy, and the commercial and social determinants of health. She also has expertise in qualitative evaluation and applied policy research.

Maddie has worked closely with government through policy dialogues, co design processes and commissioned research projects. She has served as an independent evaluator and provided advisory support across a range of public health and policy initiatives. An experienced facilitator, public speaker and negotiator, her career spans academia, policy, advocacy, government relations and program delivery.