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Alison Hey-Cunningham +61 2 9515 6651    

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alison.hey-cunningham@sydney.edu.au

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Centre of Research Excellence in Pulmonary Fibrosis
Respiratory Medicine and Sleep Unit
Level 11, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital
Camperdown NSW 2050

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Chief Investigators

 

Prof Tamera Corte

Tamera Corte, BSc(Med), MBBS, FRACP, PhD, is a Consultant Respiratory Physician and Director of Interstitial Lung Disease in the Department of Respiratory Medicine at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, and Clinical Professor at the University of Sydney. She is Chief Investigator on the Centre of Research Excellence for Pulmonary Fibrosis, which strives to improve and extend the lives of patients living with pulmonary fibrosis through the development of a comprehensive and integrated program of basic and clinical research and education across Australia.  She is the founding Chair of the Steering Committee for the Australian Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis Registry, the Australasian Interstitial Lung Disease Registry, and leads her clinical and translational Pulmonary Fibrosis research group at the University of Sydney. 

Publications


AHolland

Prof Anne Holland

Anne Holland is Professor of Physiotherapy at Monash University and Alfred Health in Melbourne. Anne’s research program investigates supportive therapies for people with chronic respiratory disease, with a focus on COPD and pulmonary fibrosis. Her recent clinical trials have tested new models of pulmonary rehabilitation to improve access and uptake, including low cost home-based models and telerehabilitation. She is currently leading a multi-national trial of ambulatory oxygen for people with fibrotic lung disease. 

Anne has published over 330 peer reviewed journal articles and her publications have been cited over 18000 times, including in 15 clinical guidelines for chronic lung disease, pulmonary rehabilitation and physiotherapy. Anne Holland is the current President of the Thoracic Society of Australia and NZ, the first allied health professional to hold this role. She currently chairs guideline working groups for the American Thoracic Society (Pulmonary Rehabilitation) and the European Respiratory Society (symptom management in advanced lung disease).

Publications


Prof Dan Chambers

Dan is a thoracic and transplant physician with special interests in immunology and interstitial lung disease. He is Director of the World Lung and Heart-lung Transplant Registry – the first Australian to hold that position. He is co-chair of the Scientific and Education Committee of the Transplantation Society of Australia and New Zealand and sits on the Pulmonary and Programming Committees of the International Society for Cellular Therapy. He is Executive Director of Research, Metro North Health and Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, The University of Queensland.

Dan’s research focuses on the pathogenesis of lung fibrosis, new diagnostic methods and biomarkers, and therapeutic discovery. His research has been supported by > $25 million in competitive grant funding and he has authored more than 160 research papers. He has been a Principal Investigator for numerous clinical trials of all phases in interstitial and other lung diseases including IPF. Dan is Immediate Past Chair of the Pulmonary Fibrosis Australasian Clinical Trials Network (PACT) and is on the Steering Committee of the National Lung Biobank.

Publications


Prof Philip Hansbro

Philip Hansbro is Deputy Director of the Centenary Institute and Inaugural Director, Centre for Inflammation at Centenary Institute/UTS. Phil has developed an internationally renowned research group that is making major contributions to understanding the pathogenesis and developing new treatments for chronic respiratory diseases. He makes internationally important contributions that have identified novel therapeutic avenues and therapies that are under further study. This is achieved through developing new mouse models that recapitulate the hallmark features of human respiratory disease. He interrogates these models in integrated approaches (inflammation, immunity, histology, physiology, lung function, gas exchange analysis) to understand human disease and develop new treatments. His work is translational and is performed along with human work.

Publications


Prof Joanne Dickinson

Joanne Dickinson is a principal research fellow at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research investigating the genetic drivers of complex disease and leads their cancer research program. Jo has established multiple clinically annotated genetic resources in the genetics of eye disease, multiple sclerosis, prostate, vulvar and blood cancers and these resources underpin multiple active Menzies research programs which have had a significant international impact in their respective fields. She has been instrumental in building genomics research infrastructure capability at the Menzies including a $1.2 million upgrade of genomics facilities in 2018. Jo Dickinson holds adjunct appointments with School of Law (UTAS) and Menzies School of Health, Charles Darwin University. 

Jo Dickinson has an established track record in the ethical, legal and social issues associated with human genetic research. Over her career has been awarded $30 million in grant funding.

Publications


Prof Andrew Palmer

Prof Andrew Palmer is a New Star Professor of Medical Research and the Head of the Health Economics Research Unit at Menzies, working in the field of health economics since 1994. He is a leader in the subject of health economics in chronic diseases, has conducted research and published extensively in many disease areas including aged care/dementia, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, kidney disease, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, osteoporosis, alcoholism, growth hormone deficiency, rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular disease and oncology.

Publications


Prof Yuben Moodley

Professor Yuben Moodley is the head of the Stem Cell Therapy Unit at the Institute for Respiratory Health, a Consultant Respiratory Physician at Fiona Stanley Hospital and Associate Professor of Respiratory Medicine at the University of Western Australia.

His research interests are finding biomarkers in exhaled air in the diagnosis and monitoring of lung conditions such as Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) as well as investigating mechanisms of repair and fibrosis and finding novel cellular therapies for these lung diseases.

His achievements include investigating the role of exhaled nitric oxide in interstitial lung diseases and delineating novel signal transduction pathways in patients with IPF. More recently, the focus on the role of placentally-derived cells for lung therapy has yielded interesting results.

Publications


Prof Joseph Powell

Joseph Powell is the Director of Cellular Science, at the Garvan Institute for Medical Research, and Director of the University of New South Wales Cellular Genomics Futures Institute. His research is focused on understanding the functional mechanisms by which genetic variants contribute to disease susceptibility at a cellular level, and ultimately achieve therapeutic and diagnostic outcomes.

Prof Powell obtained his PhD from The Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh, in 2010.  Following his PhD he joined Prof Peter Visscher’s (FAA) group at the University of Queensland. During this time, he was instrumental in forming and leading a large international consortium to study the genetic control of gene expression, the Consortium for the Architecture of Gene Expression (CAGE). In 2015, he was recruited as an independent group leader by the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, where he pioneered scRNA-Seq; building a comprehensive team consisting of robust molecular wet-lab, cutting edge technology, end-to-end bioinformatics pipelines for multiple single cell systems, and new R-packages for analysis of large-scale single cell RNA data cohorts. He is the founding director of SeqBio, a company developing single cell diagnostic methods for lung diseases.  

Publications


A/Prof Luke Knibbs

Luke Knibbs (BSc, MPH, PhD) has over 12 years’ post-PhD experience, during which he has built a research program around understanding the burden of disease due to anthropogenic air pollution and transmission of bacterial respiratory pathogens via bioaerosols in people with chronic lung disease, and novel methods for assessing exposure to both risk factors. Knibbs was based at the School of Public Health at UQ, where he was Associate Professor of Environmental Health until 2021. In mid-2021, he commenced as an Associate Professor with the University of Sydney School of Public Health. He has a background spanning atmospheric science and GIS (BSc), air pollution exposure assessment (PhD), public health and epidemiology (MPH), and aerosol physics (postdoc); he remains research-active in these areas.

Publications


A/Prof Natasha Smallwood

A/Prof Natasha Smallwood is a consultant respiratory physician with clinical expertise and research interests in breathlessness, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pulmonary fibrosis, symptom management and severe lung diseases. She completed her undergraduate medical degree at Nottingham University, UK (1999), as well as her initial postgraduate medical training in the UK, before moving to Australia. In addition to her respiratory qualifications, she holds postgraduate qualifications in medical leadership, palliative care and epidemiology. Prior to moving to the Alfred Hospital and Monash University (2021), she was a consultant respiratory physician at the Royal Melbourne Hospital for 12 years, where she led the Advanced Lung Disease and Domiciliary Oxygen Services.

 A/Prof Smallwood is the Head of the Chronic Respiratory Disease laboratory at the Central Clinical School, Monash University and leads a Breathlessness and Advanced Respiratory Disease Clinic at the Alfred Hospital, Melbourne. She has over 90 publications and holds major research grants. In addition to her academic and clinical roles, she hold multiple leadership roles, including being a Board Director for the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand, and the Victorian Doctors' Health Program. She is a taskforce member for various national and international respiratory guidelines. In addition to her respiratory research, A/Prof Smallwood has interests in organisational leadership, crisis preparedness and gender equality.

Publications