Professor Dominic Mallon is the Head of Clinical Service, Immunology at Fiona Stanley Hospital.

Dominic is a clinician who practises a broad range of immunopathology, allergy and clinical immunology looking after both children and adults with immunological and allergic disorders. Dominic also collaborates in clinical research projects into the mechanisms of tolerance induction in immunotherapy for allergic diseases; and impairment of tolerance mechanisms in autoimmunity.

During 2020 Dominic became involved in clinical redesign, leading the successful establishment of the Virtual Immunology Clinic at Fiona Stanley Hospital.

Dominic is also Coordinating Principle Investigator of the Western Australian Covid-19 Immunity Collaborative (WACIC) – a Future Health Research and Innovation funded prospective cohort study of nature and duration of immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in naturally infected and immunised subjects who live in WA.

Distinguished Professor Griffiths is an active and respected molecular geneticist with more than 30 years’ experience. DProf Griffiths established and heads the Genomics Research Centre at QUT undertaking research focused on identifying genes involved in common traits and disorders including migraine, cardiovascular disease risk traits, memory and concussion.

For this research she has established a significant bank of population genomics resources including case-control, multigenerational pedigree and genetic isolate (from Norfolk Island) cohorts. She is also Director of the Centre for Genomics and Personalised Health which aims to discover better methods of diagnosing disease, develop targeted treatments based on genetic information, and training the next generation of translational genomics scientists.

In addition, DProf Griffiths is a passionate advocate of the translation of medical research through commercialisation and is the Director of the MTP Connect and industry led Bridge and BridgeTech programs, undertaking commercialisation training for the pharmaceutical and medical devices-technology fields across Australia, respectively. DProf Griffiths’ own genetics research at the Genomics Research Centre has led to diagnostic breakthroughs for several neurogenetic disorders, including familial migraine, ataxia, epilepsy and hereditary stroke. Her research has appeared in more than 400 peer-reviewed international journals and she has obtained significant competitive and industry research funds to support her research team

Dr. Ronny Baber works in the Institute of Laboratory Medicine, Clinical Chemistry, and Molecular Diagnostics at the University Hospital Leipzig. He is the head of the Leipzig Medical Biobank and the Preanalytical laboratory in the Leipzig Research Center for Civilisation Diseases (LIFE). Dr. Baber is a member of the working group in the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) which supports the ISO TC 276 responsible for ISO 20387 on biobanking and other related standards and BBMRI-ERIC workgroups for the evaluation of CEN standards.

He is a voted member of the Steering Committee of the “German Biobank Alliance” (GBA) with responsibilities for stakeholder management and part of different working groups in the GBA (e.g. Education, Stakeholder, Quality, Industry Collaboration). Since September 2017 he is designated as part of the Executive Board of the European, Middle Eastern & African Society for Biopreservation and Biobanking (ESBB). In 2020 he also joined the Ethics Committee at the Medical Faculty of the University Leipzig. 

Dr. Madden graduated with a BVSc degree from The University of Queensland in 2013. Since then she has undertaken a Small Animal Medicine and Surgery internship at Veterinary Specialist Services on the Gold Coast. Since completing this internship, Dr. Madden has been employed by Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary, Australia Zoo and Zoos Victoria (Healesville Sanctuary). During this time Dr. Madden gained membership to the Australian and New Zealand College of Veterinary Scientists by examination in Australian Wildlife Medicine. Currently Dr Madden is the Head Veterinarian for Village Roadshow Theme Parks where she oversees the veterinary health and care of Sea Worlds marine animal collection, Paradise Countries native terrestrial collection and all wildlife rescues that occur through the Sea World Research and Rescue Foundation.  

Prior to her veterinary studies Dr. Madden completed a Bachelor of Science, Animal studies majoring in wildlife biology. During this degree she completed her honours research year studying the reproductive biology of the short beaked echidna. After completing these studies, Dr. Madden was employed by Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary and Australia Zoo working in their presentations and Big Cat departments as a zookeeper.

Dr Madden specialises in Australian Wildlife Medicine and has extensive experience in rehabilitation, chemical restraint, preventative health programs, zoonotic disease, and threatened species programs in a wide range of species.

Dr Howell is a Research Fellow at Deakin University's Centre for Integrative Ecology and an Honorary Associate Lecturer at The University of Newcastle. Dr Howell’s research focuses on developing economic arguments for the uptake and optimization of emerging technologies for more effective wildlife conservation. Dr Howell’s current postdoctoral research is a cross-disciplinary project evaluating new approaches for monitoring wildlife populations (e.g., kangaroos, waterbirds, and koalas) using drones and emerging aerial-imagery approaches. Dr Howell also has a keen research interest in developing cross-disciplinary policy arguments for the development of assisted reproductive technologies for threatened wildlife. This includes several modelling studies on the genetic benefits and cost-effectiveness of assisted reproduction in wildlife which have attracted international media attention.

Dr Merritt is a Principal Research Scientist for the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, based at Kings Park and Botanic Garden in Perth. Dr Merritt’s research interests include fundamental and applied aspects of the biology, physiology, and ecology of seeds. His work focuses on supporting the ex situ conservation of Western Australia’s plants through conventional seed banking and cryopreservation, and on developing techniques for the propagation and use of seeds for ecological restoration and threatened species translocations. He is a member of the National Steering Committee for the Australian Seed Bank Partnership, and the IUCN Seed Conservation Specialist Group.   

Dr. Castelhano received her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and Master of Veterinary Science degrees from the University of Lisbon, Portugal. Serving as an Associate Research Professor at Cornell University, the Director of the Cornell Veterinary Biobank (CVB), and the Dog Aging Project Biobank, she has over 16 years of experience in the standardized collection, processing, storage, and distribution of high-quality biospecimens and associated data.  

Dr. Castelhano is a member of the Education and Training Committee at the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories (ISBER), where she creates educational opportunities for biobankers worldwide, and has contributed to the writing of the 4^th edition of the ISBER Best Practices: Recommendations for Repositories. A frequent speaker at biobank conferences and symposiums, Dr. Castelhano was invited by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) to represent the U.S. position in biobanking as an ISO expert and delegate. With her contribution, ISO 20387: General Requirements for Biobanking was published, the first ISO standard created specifically for biobanks.   

In April 2019, Dr. Castelhano led the CVB through third-party conformity assessment by the American Association of Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA) to become the first biobank in the world to receive accreditation to the ISO 20387 standard. She also serves in the ISBER COVID-19 task force, assessing the needs of biobankers worldwide during the pandemic, to inform the next generation of standard documents and to create targeted improvement opportunities, particularly for biobanks with limited resources. 

Dr Gail Alvares is a Senior Research Fellow in the CliniKids Autism Research Team, leading a program of research into autism and mental health. She has extensive experience coordinating large multi-site clinical trials and research projects, and lead coordinated the Australian Autism Biobank, currently the largest detailed biological and clinical repository of information about autism in Australia. She has extensively published (62 journal articles, 4 book chapters) and been awarded competitive grant funding (>$1.2 million as lead investigator, >$2.6 million as associate/co-investigator). In 2016, she was awarded a “Top 5 Under 40” award by ABC’s Radio National and is passionate about science communication of research outcomes to the community. 

Professor Jarman is interested in applications of genomics in environmental research. He has worked extensively with environmental DNA analysis and its application to diverse ecological questions. Biobanking of environmental DNA or samples that contain it is one of his specific interests in this area as this is the only way to utilise the potential for environmental DNA to measure long-term ecological change. His research interests also include genomic analysis of animal population biology. A specific interest in this area is the development of epigenetic clocks to measure animal age from tissue samples. The calibration of these clocks requires sets of tissue samples from animals of known age and he worked with biobanked material to develop the first epigenetic clocks for estimating the age of whales. He is currently Professor of Biodiversity Genomics at the University of Western Australia and has held research positions at Curtin University, the University of Porto, CSIRO and the Australian Antarctic Division.

Dr Raelene Endersby co-leads the Brain Tumour Research Program – part of the Telethon Kids Cancer Centre at the Telethon Kids Institute in Perth, WA. She completed a PhD in the field of leukaemia in 2003 at the Harry Perkins Institute for Medical Research, and then undertook postdoctoral training in the Neurobiology and Brain Tumour Program at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis (USA).

In 2011, Raelene was awarded a Fellowship to return to Australia where her translational research team seeks to discover improved treatments for childhood brain cancers. This multi-disciplinary and collaborative team uses a suite of preclinical models to understand the underlying biology of paediatric brain tumours, as well as to evaluate novel agents and identify the best therapies that should progress to clinical trial. Raelene is passionate about performing high-quality research and actively seeks a diversity of opinions in her work especially from those with non-traditional and non-academic career paths.

Dr. Lara Mouttham obtained a PhD in Zoology and Wildlife Conservation from Cornell University in 2016 in collaboration with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) as part of the Cornell-Smithsonian Joint Training Program for her work on primordial follicle activation and ovarian tissue cryopreservation in cattle and domestic cats. In addition to her graduate research and subsequent postdoctoral fellowship, she maintained the SCBI Genome Resource Bank which stores gametes and genetic materials from wildlife species.

She joined the Cornell Veterinary Biobank (CVB) at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in 2018, where she is now a research associate and the Assistant Director of Biobank Laboratory Services. She is part of the quality management team that prepared the CVB to be the first biobank in the world to achieve accreditation to ISO 20387 in 2019 and has been actively involved in maintaining its accreditation status since. She is also an assessor for the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA), performing assessments of other biobanks for accreditation to ISO 20387. Her areas of interest include biospecimen science, quality management systems, cryobiology, and translational biobanking in support of medical advancements for both humans and animals. She is passionate about educating fellow scientists on the importance of quality assurance in research and introducing the public to the field of biobanking.

Dr Greta Frankham is a conservation geneticist and wildlife forensic scientist at the Australian Centre for Wildlife Genomics (ACWG) at the Australian Museum Research Institute. She completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2012 and her academic research has focused on the conservation genetics of threatened Australian marsupial species. When she joined the ACWG in 2011 she also moved into the field of DNA-based wildlife forensics.

Dr Frankham was part of the team that established the ACWG as the first ISO17025 accredited wildlife forensics lab and biobanking facility in Australia. Her research interests now span conservation and forensic science, working on species such as; long nosed potoroos, eastern pygmy possums, long nosed bandicoots, koalas (as part of the Koala Genome Consortium), echidnas, red-tail black cockatoos, shingleback lizards and Hawksbill turtles. Dr Frankham also regularly carries out casework for a range of state and federal agencies involved in wildlife and biosecurity compliance in Australia.

Julie Hibbert is an early career postdoctoral researcher passionate about improving sepsis diagnosis, particularly in preterm infants. Julie is a Research Project Manager with the Neonatal Infection and Immunity at Telethon Kids Institute and Murdoch University in Western Australia. Julie has over 15 years of experience in medical research, of which 7 years have focused on managing and coordinating clinical studies in human neonates. Julie’s current research combines cellular and molecular ‘omics’ methodologies to discover biomarkers that improve neonatal sepsis diagnosis. Along with this, Julie is working on improving the feasibility of small blood sample collection in neonatal clinical studies to maximise progress, translation, and impact of research findings.

Dr Jessica Buck uses her unique training in both neuroscience and cancer to tackle the challenges of childhood brain cancer research. Dr Buck is an early career cancer researcher, specialising in finding better treatments for kids with brain cancer. In particular, since radiotherapy is an important part of treatment for childhood brain cancer, she works to find new combinations of drugs that increase the effectiveness of radiotherapy.

She completed her Bachelor of Biomedical Science at the University of Newcastle in 2013. Following this she moved to the UK, where she completed her MSc in Neuroscience and a DPhil in Oncology in 2019 from the University of Oxford. She is currently a Forrest Research Fellow in the
Brain Tumour Research Program, based at the Telethon Kids Institute and the University of Western Australia.

As a Kamilaroi woman, Jessica also aims to increase the number of young Aboriginal women working in, studying, and enjoying STEM. She regularly hosts students and interns, and is involved in a number of mentoring programs.

Professor Paul Kennedy is Head of the Computer Science school in the Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney (UTS). He leads the Biomedical Data Science Laboratory in the UTS Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute and is co-director of the UTS Ontario Tech Joint Research Centre for AI in Health and Wellness. His research focuses on biomedical data science, particularly in paediatric cancer; text analytics of social media data and scientific literature; and bioinformatics approaches for use in vaccine discovery.

Since 2003, he had co- led projects with the Children’s Hospital Westmead, developing AI methods to predict patient outcomes. He is currently developing approaches to map population-level cancer treatment pathways. He is on the ISO/IEC SC42 committee for standards development in Artificial Intelligence.

Professor Palmer relocated to Adelaide from Toronto in 2014 to take up a new opportunity as Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at the University of Adelaide. He is currently leading the creation of several new resources in Adelaide, including the South Australian Family Connections Project. Before moving to Adelaide, Professor Palmer was a Senior Principal Investigator and Program Director at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, and a Professor of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Obstetrics & Gynecology at the University of Toronto.

Together with many partner organizations across Ontario, Professor Palmer led a large-scale expansion of the provincial capacity in translational epidemiology. From 2010 to 2014, he was the founding Executive Scientific Director of the Ontario Health Study (www.ontariohealthstudy.ca/), the largest population-based cohort study (n=230,000) ever undertaken in Canada. Prior to moving to Canada, Professor Palmer was the foundation Winthrop Chair in Genetic Epidemiology and the founding Director of the Centre for Genetic Epidemiology & Biostatistics at the University of Western Australia, where he was also a Professor in the Schools of Medicine & Pharmacology and Population Health. Whilst in Perth, he was responsible for establishing over ten major clinical and general population-based cohorts, including the WA Twins Register, in addition to National research programs in glioma and mesothelioma.

Until 2003, he was an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Director of Statistical Genomics at the Channing Laboratory, Boston. His background includes training in clinical epidemiology, human genetics, bioinformatics, and biostatistics. He has a particular interest in the areas of life-course genetic epidemiology, the developmental origins of health and disease (DoHAD), and chronic disease clinical and genetic epidemiology. Professor Palmer has been recognized for his leadership role in biomedical research by numerous awards, including Fulbright and Churchill Fellowships. He has chaired and/or given invited symposia at over 60 international scientific meetings, has delivered over 300 invited lectures, has produced over 300 publications, and has co-edited a commercially successful encyclopedia of genetic epidemiology that has become a standard reference work. Professor Palmer has extensive experience in constructing and using ‘big data’, particularly linked health data, for translation-oriented research. His research team in Adelaide is focused on applying deep learning methods to clinical problems and is active in producing new software and methods for data analysis and visualization.

Margaret Wood is a passionate consumer representative and is the Co-Chair and inaugural member of the Telethon Kids Cancer Centre Community Reference Group in Perth. This Community Reference Group provides a consumer and community perspective on research activities across the Telethon Kids Cancer Centre. Margaret is actively involved in working with cancer researchers as a research buddy since 2015 and is also Associate Investigator on a number of cancer research projects and attends laboratory meetings to hear and discuss the progress of these projects. She brings her lived experience as a parent in consenting to paediatric cancer biobanking and the paediatric cancer journey. This highlighted to Margaret the critical need for cancer research and to develop more effective therapies. Margaret is a member of the Consumer and Community Involvement Program which is an enabling platform of the Western Australian Health Translation Network.   

Professor Georgina Hold is the Head of the IBD research program at UNSW Microbiome Research Centre, St George Hospital as well as chairing the local health district human research ethics service.  

Georgina is an internationally renowned translational scientist whose interest is understanding the impact of gastrointestinal microbes on human health and disease. Her research is both patient and translationally focussed to understand the contribution that gut microbes play in diseases and potentially develop therapeutic strategies to maintain and restore health. She leads Australia’s first prospective IBD cohort study which has recruited over 750 participants since 2019, collecting biospecimens every 3 months from participants. Her lab has an internationally renowned reputation for biospecimen microbiome analysis. This has been achieved by a) developing robust protocols for collecting and processing the most clinically relevant samples, and b) ensuring the science is clinically driven. Georgina leads a multi-disciplinary research program comprising clinicians, microbiologists, nutritionists, epidemiologists, bioinformaticians and public health analysts to address multi-faceted research questions. Her research portfolio is strongly embedded in the biobanking arena, as well as the research ethics space to the point that in 2008 she decided ‘if you can’t beat them – join them!’; joining the North of Scotland Research Ethics Service, specialising in biobanking, and supporting the initiation of the Grampian Biorepository – one of the first Scottish biobanking initiatives. 

Georgina is also a strong advocate for public engagement in research and making sure medical research is communicated to the wider public audience. She has organised numerous public lecture series, published over 250 articles and obtained significant competitive and industry funding to support her research work.  

Dr. Jugnu Jain is the CEO and co-founder of Sapien Biosciences, one of the top ten biobanks in the world, based in India. Dr. Jain is a cell and molecular biologist with more than 30 years’ experience in life sciences and healthcare industry. Dr. Jain has a PhD in Genetics from Cambridge University, UK, and postdoc training in Immunology from Boston’s Dana Farber Cancer Institute, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. Dr. Jain gained drug discovery experience at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, USA, where she handled several projects successfully across multiple therapeutic areas including autoimmune-inflammation, cancer, diabetes and neurobiology. 

In 2011, Dr. Jain returned to India to devote her global experience, skills and resources to co-found Sapien, a pioneer sustainable biobank, in partnership with Apollo Hospitals. Sapien has ethically obtained ~280,000 human samples with associated medical, diagnostic and treatment data. The real-world data is digitized and integrated with samples, genetics and images in a structured manner.  These valuable patient samples and data are being used for the discovery and validation of novel diagnostics and drugs for the development of better personalized treatments for future patients. 

Dr. Jain has been the recipient of many entrepreneur excellence awards including the prestigious “Women Transforming India” bestowed by the Niti Aayog, Govt of India. 

Dr. Alan Humphries the curator of the Australian Pastures Genebank, which is located at SARDI, in South Australia. The APG is a collection of temperate and tropical legumes, grasses and forbs that benefit Australian agriculture and the environment. The APG contains some 84,000 accessions representing 2619 species collected from 178 countries. Today Alan will discuss the conservation, monitoring, distribution, and information systems used in this biobank of agricultural plants.

Dr Jonathan Daly is an aquatic cryobiology specialist based at Taronga Conservation Society Australia and the University of New South Wales, and leads the Cryopreservation Sub-program of the federally-funded Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program. He has more than 18 years’ experience in cryopreservation in aquatic species and has worked on cryopreservation of coral gametes, larvae, symbionts, and fragments since 2016 in Australia, Hawaii, French Polynesia, and the Caribbean.  Dr Daly has led coral biobanking activities in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park since 2016 and is a world leader in the development of advanced cryopreservation technologies for coral reef species. He is co-chair of the global CRC Working Group on Coral Cryopreservation and Repository Building, and a member of the Coral Biobank Alliance group of living coral biorepositories.

Dr Amanda Rush is a Research Fellow (Health Policy Analysis) at the Menzies Centre for Health Policy and Economics, University of Sydney. She has a mixed methods PhD on the policy and funding implications of the current model for biobanking, including a bibliometric analysis of outputs, a cost analysis of biobank supported publications and a national survey of biospecimen users. Her publications focus on biobank value and sustainability, capacity building, certification and accreditation, research governance, and stakeholder engagement and perspectives. She also has a particular interest in the ethical issues related to biobank participation, and has been the biobanking research representative on the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network Human Research Ethics Committee for the past 8 years. Amanda was an Associate Editor for the most recent International Society of Biological and Environmental Repositories Best Practices: Recommendations for Repositories, and is an Editorial Board member for the journal Biopreservation and Biobanking.

Craig recently established the ‘Western Australian Biobanking Model’ and is currently leading statewide efforts to implement and sustain the Model in his role as Statewide Biobanking Director (Acting) with PathWest and related work with the WA Department of Health.

Previously, Craig was National Director of the Australian Arthritis and Autoimmune Biobank Collaborative (A3BC) from inception in 2016 to 2022, building the project from its small headquarters at the Kolling Institute in Sydney, into 8 operational nodes across the country. The A3BC collect and link a broad array of longitudinal biospecimens and datasets, including Commonwealth health data.
In invited advisory roles, Craig was Chair of the Kolling Institute Data and Informatics Committee and is currently a member of the ISBER Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) Working Group, who are drafting the upcoming 5th Edition ISBER Best Practices.
Craig has worked in many health and medical research projects, including roles with university, state health, hospital, biotech and charity. Of note, Craig guided the foundations of NSW biobanking and bioinformatics strategy while employed by the NSW Office for Health and Medical Research and has worked with several national biobank groups.

Samantha is the Quality Manager of the Victorian Cancer Biobank (VCB), a network of five Tissue Banks together with a Central Operations node located across Metropolitan Melbourne. Samantha uses her 15+ years of experience working as a scientist in ISO-accredited forensic laboratories and donor tissue banks in Australia and USA to oversee the Quality and Improvement program across the VCB Network.  

Samantha holds a BSc (Pathology) and MSc (Biomedical Science) from The University of Melbourne and is an ABNA Management Committee member. She is a NATA Technical Assessor, an ISBER Standards Community of Practice member and writing contributor for the ISBER Best Practices (5th edition). 

Susan Garrison is a licensed veterinary technician (LVT) with over twenty years of clinical experience specializing in shelter medicine, anesthesia, medical genetics and clinical research. She received her AAS and BT degrees in Animal Science from the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill. She received her AAS degree in Veterinary Science Technology from SUNY Delhi (summa cum laude). She joined Cornell University Hospital for Animals at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine as an LVT in 2003.  She began her biobanking career with the Cornell Veterinary Biobank (CVB) in 2008, where she currently serves as the Assistant Director of Biobank Clinical Services. Susan oversees clinical biospecimen recruitment, collection, tissue preservation and storage. She also acquires and manages relevant clinical data associated with these samples, consulting with board-certified veterinary specialists for phenotypic confirmation to ensure accurate data entry in the CVB database. She is involved in project management, tissue sample and blood derivative distributions, and handling client and researcher communications during studies and ahead of clinical trial protocol development. She is part of the quality management team that prepared the CVB to be the first biobank in the world to achieve accreditation to ISO 20387: 2018 General Requirements for Biobanking in April 2019 and has been actively involved in maintaining its accreditation status since.

Susan is also an instructor for American Association for Laboratory Accreditation Workplace Training (A2LA WPT) training biobankers and A2LA assessors in understanding the requirements of ISO 20387: 2018. Susan is the co-author of several biobank and medical genetics related peer-reviewed articles and recently (August 2022), for the first time, became the first author of an article published in Biopreservation and Biobanking (Garrison SJ et al. Banking on the Last Gift: Cornell’s Signature Program of Postmortem Tissue Procurement. Biopreservation and Biobanking. 2022 Aug 5).

Her areas of interest include biospecimen science including cryopreservation and storage, quality management systems, clinical research and translational medicine biobanking. She enjoys speaking with clinicians and researchers about the importance of high-quality biospecimens in reproducible research and utilizing biobanks for this purpose. She also enjoys introducing the public to biobanking and recruiting precious animal family members to contribute biospecimens for CVB associated research projects (oncology and osteoarthritis diagnoses of special interest). Susan is passionate about animal health and supporting research for both human and animal medical advancements.