Dr Brett Abbenbroek is the Program Manager of Sepsis Australia and the Asia Pacific Sepsis Alliance (APSA) in the Critical Care Program at The George Institute. His APSA responsibilities extend to a coalition of 23 countries across the Asia Pacific, managing region-wide initiatives in education, research and quality improvement for better outcomes in sepsis survivors. Stopping Sepsis - National Sepsis Action Plan. These responsibilities also extend to APSA which is a coalition of 23 countries across the Asia Pacific to manage regionwide initiatives in education, research and quality improvement for better outcomes in sepsis survivors.

Brett is a Registered Nurse with over 40 years of experience in clinical, education, research and management roles in critical care and emergency; and extensive international experience in establishing cardiac surgical and critical care services in China, Croatia, Indonesia, Nepal, and Vanuatu. His leadership role for critical care service planning in NSW includes the statewide integrated service model for intensive care and medical retrieval, NSW ECMO Helicopter Medical Retrieval Service, and the statewide electronic Record for Intensive Care. He established a health service planning and management consultancy business, leading to project management roles within the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care (ACSQHC) on the national eHealth and electronic medication safety program, and development national clinical care standards for health service accreditation.

In 2018, Brett completed his doctoral studies on the efficiency and effectiveness of critical care service models, and the association with organisational reliability and outcomes for patients and the nurse workforce (‘The Hot-Floor Study’). This work informs the Australasian Health Facility Guidelines for new and redeveloped ICUs. His track record in implementation research, linking research and practice, is exemplified in national and international studies on the efficacy of sepsis detection tools for incorporation into the ‘National Consensus Statement: Recognising and Responding to Acute Physiological Deterioration’; point-of-care testing for sepsis in remote Australia and for First Nations peoples; consumer based prioritisation for best practice in post sepsis models of care and associated clinical indicators for monitoring and evaluation within the Australian Health Service Safety and Quality Accreditation Scheme; and translation of global sepsis best practice guidelines through global Delphi expert consensus research into context specific guidelines for clinicians practicing in low resource settings.  

In his current role, Brett is driving implementation of the Stopping Sepsis National Action Plan and Sepsis Clinical Care Standard, and projects to reduce the impact and burden of sepsis. 

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. 

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.

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.

Deepti is an early-career researcher with over eight years of experience in public health research. Currently, she serves as a Research Fellow in the Injury Division at The George Institute for Global Health, India. With training in Social Work and Public Health Management, Deepti has been working in injury prevention since 2019. Her core areas of expertise include evidence synthesis, policy and systems analysis, and project management. Deepti is particularly passionate about research around drowning prevention, child road safety, and snakebite envenoming. Her work is grounded in evidence-based methodologies aimed at developing practical and context-specific solutions to injury-related challenges.

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.

Professor Clare Arnott is Director of the Cardiovascular Program at The George Institute for Global Health and Associate Professor in Medicine at UNSW Sydney. 

Prof Arnott’s research focuses on women’s heart disease, heart failure, cardiovascular imaging, and cardio-kidney-metabolic (CKM) disease. Her work has significantly influenced national health policy and clinical management. 

As an experienced clinical trialist and the recipient of $28 million in research funding, Prof Arnott is an expert in investigating novel cardiometabolic treatments and pregnancy-related cardiovascular diseases including pre-eclampsia and pulmonary hypertension. 

She is also Pagent Director of Heart Lung Clinical Research at St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, Director and Founder of the Women’s Heart Clinic at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, and Senior Staff Specialist Cardiologist at St Vincent’s Hospital and Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney.

Prof Arnott is a Fellow of the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand and the European Society of Cardiology, and member of the ANZACT Steering Committee, as well as serving on the editorial board of Heart, Lung and Circulation. 

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.