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SPEAKERS & CHAIRS

Lorne Becker is Co-Chair of the Cochrane Collaboration Steering Group, convenor of the Cochrane Publishing Policy Group and Umbrella Reviews Working Group. He has been a Cochrane author since 1997 and was previously coordinator of the Cochrane Primary Health Care Field. He received his MD from the University of Western Ontario, and spent his career practicing and teaching family medicine at a number of medical schools in Canada and the US. Until his retirement in 2004, Lorne was Chair of the Department of Family Medicine at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York.

Edwin Chan is Head of Epidemiology at the Singapore Clinical Research Institute and an adjunct Associate Professor at the Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School. He has served as the Director of the Singapore Branch of the Australasian Cochrane Centre since its inception and is the Chair of the Local Organising Committee of the 17th Cochrane Colloquium. He has previously served as Head of Biostatistics & Evidence-based Medicine at the Clinical Trials & Epidemiology Research Unit and as Head of Scientific Management during the establishment of the National Registry of Diseases Office.

He is an expert advisor to the Health Sciences Authority on biostatistics, trainer and advisor to the Singapore Ministry of Health on clinical practice guidelines development, a member of a Research Ethics Committee of the National Healthcare Group and the EBM committees of the Singapore General Hospital and the National University Hospital. His interests are in the teaching of critical appraisal skills and epidemiology, diagnostic test evaluation and decision-making.

Rachel Churchill is a Reader in Psychiatric Epidemiology at the University of Bristol in the UK. She has been involved with the Cochrane Collaboration since 1994 and is the Coordinating Editor of the Cochrane Depression, Anxiety and Neurosis Review Group. Before moving to Bristol, she established a Section of Mental Health Evidence-based Policy and Practice in the Health Services Research Department at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) in London and worked part-time for a year on secondment as a Clinical Evidence Specialist with the Center for Evidence-based Policy at Oregon Health and Science University in the US. Rachel’s research interests include evaluating the effectiveness of a range of interventions, particularly psychological therapies, for people with affective disorders. She has also led a number of projects on mental health legislation intended to inform the development of government policy. More recently, she has become involved in projects using overviews and multiple treatments meta-analysis to try and summarise and improve the accessibility of review findings.

Jonathan Craig is a paediatric nephrologist at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Sydney and holds a personal Chair in Clinical Epidemiology in the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney where he is Director of the Clinical Epidemiology training programs. Jonathan’s research is focused on preventing and treating kidney disease in children and adults, and child health more generally. He is on the editorial board for the American Journal of Kidney Disease, Nephrology and Evidence-Based Child Health. He recently co-edited the textbook Evidence Based Nephrology. Jonathan is the Co-ordinating Editor of the Cochrane Renal Group and the incoming Co-Chair of the Cochrane Collaboration Steering Group... but his real job is trying to run marathons as fast as he once did and ferrying his three children to random sporting events, mostly hockey tournaments.

Ova Emilia is a lecturer in Obstetrics and Gynaecology and Medical Education at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She received her MD from Gadjah Mada University in 1989 and has several qualifications in medical education, including a PhD in clinical teaching from the University of New South Wales, Australia. Ova has been involved in several projects related to reproductive health, including as an Educator in the SEA-ORCHID Project, and was one of the first in Indonesia to become involved in Cochrane activities. Her research interests include reproductive health, medical education and professional training, and she is the editor of the Indonesian Journal of Medical and Health Professional Education.

Zbys Fedorowicz is employed as a consultant to the Ministry of Health in Bahrain, is Director of the Bahrain Branch of the UK Cochrane Centre and a member of the Cochrane Collaboration Steering Group. He is a graduate of the Royal Dental Hospital of London and his clinical experience has included postings in Holland, South Africa, Namibia and, for the last 30 years, the Middle East (UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain).

Zbys has authored reviews with several Cochrane groups, including Upper Gastrointestinal & Pancreatic Diseases, ENT, Eyes & Vision, Oral Health, Colorectal Cancer, Cystic Fibrosis & Genetic Diseases, and Prostatic Disease & Urologic Cancer. His principal research interests are in the methodology of systematic reviews and in healthcare research priority setting in lower and middle income countries. He has recently co-authored two books on cross-cultural health care.

Paul Garner is Head of the International Health Group at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and a specialist in research synthesis. For the last 17 years, he has helped mainstream research synthesis to tropical diseases, mainly through the Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group. Currently he is Director of a Consortium committed to preparing and updating systematic reviews relevant to middle and low income countries, working closely with the World Health Organization, and using this research to promote evidence-based health policy and practice.

Paul's work experience includes UK National Health Service; Papua New Guinea as a District Medical Officer and epidemiologist at the PNG Institute of Medical Research; researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine from 1988 before moving to the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in 1994.

Paul Glasziou is Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine in the Department of Primary Care at the University of Oxford. Paul is the author of over 150 peer-reviewed publications in medical decision making, clinical trials, systematic reviews and evidence-based medicine. He is editor of the BMJ's journal Evidence-Based Medicine and the author of six books related to evidence-based practice. Paul continues to work as a part-time General Practitioner and in 2008 was awarded an NHMRC Australia Fellowship.

Davina Ghersi (MPH, PhD) has been with the Department of Research Policy and Cooperation at the World Health Organization since 2006 where she is responsible for the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform and the Guidelines Review Committee. Before joining WHO Davina was Senior Research Fellow in the School of Public Health of the University of Sydney, Director of the Systematic Review & Health Care Assessment Team at the NHMRC Clinical Trials Centre and responsible for the Australian Clinical Trials Registry.

Davina is joint Co-ordinating Editor of the Cochrane Breast Cancer Group, co-convenor of the Cochrane Prospective Meta-Analysis Methods Group and has served as a member of the Cochrane Collaboration Steering Group. Her research interests include publication bias, selective reporting and methods of improving the quality and relevance of clinical research.

Jeremy Grimshaw is the Director of the Clinical Epidemiology Program of the Ottawa Health Research Institute, Director of the Centre for Best Practices at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre. He holds a Canada Research Chair in Health Knowledge Transfer & Uptake, and is Co-ordinating Editor of the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care Group. In 2008-09, Jeremy led the team that conducted the Strategic Review of The Cochrane Collaboration.

Russell Gruen is Professor of Surgery and Public Health at Monash University, Director of the National Trauma Research Institute and a surgeon at The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. He is an editor of the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care Group and the director of its Australian satellite. He received a PhD for his study of the delivery of surgical services to remote and Aboriginal communities in northern Australia and was a Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy at Harvard University.

The focus of Russell’s recent research has been clinical quality improvement, optimising systems of surgical and trauma care, and knowledge translation and exchange. He established the Global Evidence Mapping (GEM) Initiative to bring together people interested in exploring new ways of organising, contextualising, visualising and making available research evidence in broad content areas in order to describe and present existing research evidence, and to identify evidence gaps. Russell and his wife, Theresa, have two sons, Spencer and Kody, with whom he enjoys playing music and pursuing outdoor activities, especially Australian Rules Football and biking.

Maimunah Hamid is Deputy Director-General of Health (Research and Technical Support) at the Ministry of Health Malaysia where she is responsible for programmes and services related to health research, planning and development, engineering, medical device, and integrated traditional and complementary medicine. She attained her MBBCh from Cairo University in 1979 and MPH from University Malaya in 1985. In 2004 she was appointed a Fellow of the Academy of Medicine Malaysia and is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, University Malaya.

Maimunah has been involved in Health Systems Research since the inception of the HSR programme in Malaysia in 1985. Previously, she was Director of the Institute for Health Systems Research, Ministry of Health Malaysia, and headed the WHO Collaborating Centre for Health Systems Research and Quality Improvement from 1988 to 2008. She has led several national and international projects, including the Malaysian Evidence Informed Policy Network (EVIPNet Malaysia), part of EVIPNet Asia, a global WHO initiative to bridge the gap between scientific evidence and informed policy decision making.

Sophie Hill (PhD) is Head of the Centre for Health Communication and Participation at La Trobe University, Australia and the Co-ordinating Editor of the Cochrane Consumers and Communication Review Group. She has researched many different health issues for consumer groups, government and health services. Her current research interests are the experiences of people with multi-morbidity, and sharing with consumers and their organisations the knowledge and tools to understand and use Cochrane reviews. Sophie represents Co-ordinating Editors on the Cochrane Collaboration Steering Group.

Sue Kinn started off as a laboratory-based cell biologist, followed by a short spell as a computer analyst/programmer. She has 15 years experience working in public health and health services research, during which time she ran a research programme at a Government-funded research unit, based in Glasgow. She has been involved in a range of research projects, including two Cochrane reviews. 

Sue moved to the UK Department for International Development in 2004 and is currently the team leader for the human development research team. She oversees a budget of about £50 million, funding a wide range of health and education research programmes all focused on reducing poverty. Research
funded by the Department ranges from the development of new drugs and vaccines for neglected diseases, development of new interventions, operations research aimed at finding the most effective ways to deliver interventions and systematic reviews of the literature.

Ken N Kuo is Director of the Center for Health Policy Research and Development at the National Health Research Institutes, Taiwan and Attending Pediatric Orthopedic Surgeon at the National Taiwan University Hospital. He is well-recognised internationally in the field of pediatric orthopedics and has served in various capacities for international and North American societies. In the field of health policy research he is involved in the development of evidence-based medicine and clinical practice guidelines as well as education and e-learning development.

He serves in an advisory capacity to the Taiwanese Department of Health on graduate medical education, health promotion and international health co-operation. His most recent work was co-ordinating the forum for Healthy People 2020 in Taiwan and published the white paper and technical report. As a prominent teacher, he has organised many international educational courses in Taiwan, China, Malaysia, India and elsewhere.

LIM Meng Kin is Associate Professor at the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore and Academic Director of the MBA (Healthcare Specialisation) Program at the NUS Business School. His previous appointments include Chief of the Medical Corps, Singapore Armed Forces and CEO of the Health Corporation of Singapore. He is currently Chairman of Healthcare Committee of the Workplace Safety and Health Council and Vice Chairman of the Singapore Red Cross.

Internationally, he has served on the WHO Western Pacific Advisory Committee on Health Research; consulted for the World Bank, World Health Organization and Asian Development Bank in China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei, Bulgaria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Egypt, Iran, and West Bank and Gaza; and is editorial board member of Health Services Research, Health Policy Systems and Research, and Asian Journal of Health and Information Sciences.

Pisake Lumbiganon is a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Convenor of the Thai Cochrane Network based at Khon Kaen University, Thailand. He graduated from Mahidol University in Thailand and studied clinical epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He has been involved with various WHO-sponsored reproductive health research projects, including many multicentre randomised trials.

He is the co-principal investigator for the SEA-ORCHID project, a collaborative project (2004-09) between Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia that aims to determine whether the health of mothers and babies can be improved by increasing capacity for research synthesis and implementation of effective interventions. He is actively involved in disseminating the concept and implementation of research synthesis in Thailand and South East Asia by working closely with the UK and Australasian Cochrane Centres.

Chris Mavergames is Web Operations Manager/Information Architect for the Cochrane Collaboration, responsible for a team that oversees the Collaboration’s web presence. Chris is currently leading the Webteam in their implementation of Drupal, an open source Content Management System, for managing Cochrane’s websites and in an information architecture redesign of cochrane.org. His background is in library and information science and he has an MLIS degree from Long Island University in New York. Chris is based at the German Cochrane Centre in Freiburg, Germany.

Before joining Cochrane, he served as a metadata librarian at the British Library working on the Archival Sound Recordings project (http://sounds.bl.uk) and as Director of Multimedia Services at the New York City College of Technology. Chris has extensive experience with Web 2.0 tools and technologies and a research interest in the Semantic Web.

Steve McDonald is Co-Director of the Australasian Cochrane Centre and a member of the Cochrane Collaboration Steering Group. Steve is involved in developing and supporting Cochrane activity and networks in Australasia and Asia. He is the co-ordinator of the SEA-ORCHID Project that links Australia with four countries in South East Asia to promote evidence-based practice and research synthesis in the area of pregnancy and childbirth. Steve is part of the local organising group for the Singapore Colloquium and a co-convenor of the Cochrane Collaboration's Training Working Group.

Tomás Pantoja is a family physician and an Assistant Professor within the Family Medicine Department at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. In addition to his medical qualifications, Tomas holds a Master of Science in Health Management from Imperial College, London and a Postgraduate Diploma in Evidence-Based Health Care from the University of Oxford. His research interests, which lie primarily within the field of primary health care, include the evaluation and improvement of quality of care, development and implementation of clinical practice guidelines and economic evaluation.

In the last two years he has been involved in research projects related to the use of evidence in practice and policy environments, participating in the resource group of EVIPNet Americas and promoting the establishment of evidence-to-policy networks in the region. He is an editor of the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care Group, an author with the Cochrane EPOC and Breast Cancer Groups and a member of both the Campbell & Cochrane Economics Methods Group and Health Equity Field.

Mark Petticrew is Professor of Public Health Evaluation in the Public and Environmental Health Research Unit at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His research has involved primary research on the health effects of housing, urban regeneration, transport and employment interventions, and involves assessing the potential effects of such interventions on health inequalities. He has recently worked on systematic reviews of the effects on health and health inequalities of employment, housing, transport and tobacco control policies. Mark is one of the convenors of the Cochrane/Campbell Health Equity Methods Group and an editor of the Cochrane Public Health Review Group.

Norman Swan is a multi-award winning broadcaster and journalist. He is host of the Health Report on ABC Radio National and a much sought-after speaker, facilitator, panel chair and creator of hypotheticals. One of the first medically qualified journalists in Australia, Norman was born in Scotland, graduated in medicine from the University of Aberdeen and later obtained his postgraduate qualifications in Paediatrics. Norman also edits his own newsletter, The Choice Health Reader, which is published in partnership with CHOICE. He has been the Australian correspondent for JAMA and BMJ and regularly consults for the WHO. In late 2008, Norman chaired a meeting of the world’s Health Ministers in West Africa which aimed to pursue the goal of making health policy evidence-based.

Jin Ling TANG is Professor of Epidemiology at the School of Public Health of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is Assistant Director of the School of Public Health for external affairs and head of the Division of Epidemiology. He also heads the Hong Kong Branch of the Chinese Cochrane Centre and the Peking University Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. His major research interests include systematic reviews, evidence-based medicine, clinical evaluation of traditional Chinese medicine and prevention of cardiovascular diseases. He is currently the convenor of the Asia Pacific Network for Evidence-Based Medicine and the co-translator of the Chinese version of the BMJ Clinical Evidence.

David Tovey has been the Editor in Chief of The Cochrane Librarysince January 2009. He worked previously as Editorial Director for the BMJ Evidence Centre, which is the division of the BMJ Group that produces Clinical Evidence and its counterpart for the publicBestTreatments, BMJ Point of Care and Best Practice. Until 2003 David worked as a General Practitioner in an urban practice in South London for 15 years. During that time he also undertook roles in continuing professional development for primary care professionals and was a clinical governance lead for a Primary Care Group.

Jimmy Volmink is Co-Director of the South African Cochrane Centre and Deputy Dean (Research) at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University. In addition to his research on HIV, TB, cardiovascular disease and nutrition, he is actively involved in research capacity development and knowledge translation activities. He was elected to membership of the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2000 and currently serves as a Council member of that body. Jimmy is a former member of the Cochrane Collaboration Steering Group.