Session 17: Digital research infrastructure for healthy communities  

Wednesday, 4th December 3.00PM AEST | Breakout session

Digital infrastructure will play a pivotal role in advancing health and medical research worldwide. This session will explore the latest innovations in digital research infrastructure and their transformative implications for building healthier communities.

We will discuss the integration and regulation of digital tools in health research, while examples from around the globe will demonstrate how these advancements are revolutionizing research processes, facilitating new discoveries, and contributing to better public health outcomes. Join us to discover how digital infrastructure is reshaping the future of health research and improving lives globally.

Moderator

Ian Smith has a background in both industry and research and up until 2020, was Vice-Provost at Monash University. In this leadership role, he had responsibility for research strategy, infrastructure and alliances.  Ian is now Professor Emeritus and consults for academic, government and industry organisations; he is a board director and chair of several national and international senior government and non-government governing and advisory boards. 

Panellist

Professor Graeme Jackson is the Clinical Director of the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne Australia, a Neurologist at Austin Health and a Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne. Professor Jackson’s research is in advanced MR imaging and epilepsy, and the classification and understanding of malformations of cortical development. He has received the American Epilepsy Society award for clinical research, the Lombroso award, Austin Health’s distinguished research award, and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia achievement award for highest ranked practitioner fellow in 2008. His contributions include 352 primary data peer-reviewed scientific papers, with 18,691 total ISI citations (30,977 Google Scholar). In 2021 Professor Jackson secured the largest single Federal Government investment made to epilepsy research in Australia, $30 million. 

Panellist

Dr Merran Smith is the inaugural Chief Executive of Australia’s Population Health Research Network (PHRN). PHRN which was established in 2009, is a national research infrastructure focused on the linkage of health and human services data across the Australian population. It receives core funding from the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and co-funding from a range of government agencies, universities and research institutes. 

Panellist

Tim Hubbard is Director of ELIXIR, the European research infrastructure for biological data, and Professor of bioinformatics at King’s College London. Until 2024 he was seconded to Genomics England for the 100,000 genomes project and Health Data Research UK. Previously he was Head of Informatics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and one of the organisers of the sequencing of the human genome. 

Panellist

Professor Wojtek James Goscinski is the Chief Executive Officer of the National Imaging Facility, Australia’s advanced imaging network. NIF is a partnership of university, medical research institute and government science agency partners, that operates under the Commonwealth Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Prior to this, he was the founding Coordinator and Platform Director of MASSIVE, a national high performance data processing and analytics facility at Monash University with national impact and an international profile. Professor Goscinski is an Adjunct Professor of Practice at Monash University, in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences.