Invited Speakers

Associate Professor Ana Baumann's research agenda focuses on the intersection of implementation science, adaptation science, and healthcare equity. She works to identify strategies that facilitate the implementation of evidence-based interventions in low-resource settings and historically underserved populations, nationally and globally. Ana has collaborated with several investigators in adapting and implementing evidence-based interventions in usual care, in different settings and with different disease areas (e.g., sickle cell disease, hypertension, mental health, cancer).​

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​Professor Sandra Eades AO is a Noongar woman, with family from the Minang and Goreng mobs in south-west Western Australia, who has made pioneering contributions to the epidemiology of Aboriginal child health. Beginning as a GP, Sandra became the first Aboriginal medical doctor to be awarded a PhD, for her studies on the causal pathways and determinants of health among Aboriginal infants in the first year of life. Sandra has an exceptional track record as one of Australiaʼs most significant Indigenous health leaders, with senior roles including Dean of Curtin University Medical School, Chief Medical Advisor – First Nations for Australia's Heart Foundation, and a Board Director of the Burnet Institute.
 

Sir Bill served as Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2016 to 2017 and prior to this held ministerial roles in finance, health, education, housing, infrastructure and revenue in a parliamentary career spanning three decades. While in government, Sir Bill developed Social Investment, a policy innovation for dealing with complex needs of the most vulnerable families and communities. He sponsored development of the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), a world-leading repository of linked public service data designed for use by social scientists and non-government organisations. Sir Bill serves on the boards of organisations including the Paul Ramsay Foundation, the Centre for Independent Studies, Wesfarmers Ltd and Todd Corporation.

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Professor Julian Elliott is one of the world’s leading innovators in the production and use of research evidence. He is the co-founder and CEO of the Future Evidence Foundation, a non-profit organisation that produces Covidence, the most widely used software for evidence synthesis, and developer of the Living Evidence model: trustworthy summaries of science that are kept up to date with the latest research. This model was widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic and is now being adopted worldwide, including through the Alliance for Living Evidence, a global collaboration established by Julian and supported by the Foundation.​

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Associate Professor Ingrid Hickman is a Principal Research Fellow in Implementation Science with the University of Queensland ULTRA Team for Clinical Trial Capability, affiliated with the UQ Clinical Trial Centre in Brisbane Queensland. She is co-chair of the Australian Clinical Trials Alliance (ACTA) Special Interest Group in Translating research into practice (TRIP-SIG) and has led a national survey of implementation science training needs in the Australian and New Zealand clinical trial workforce. She has invested in innovative strategies to engage clinical trial teams to enhance trial design and delivery with implementation science with the goal to make RCTs fairer, faster and better.

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Robyn Mildon, PhD, is a global leader in research translation, implementation science, and policy evaluation. She is the Founding CEO of the Centre for Evidence and Implementation (CEI), which operates across Australia, Singapore, the UK, and Norway, and works in over 18 countries.

Robyn holds academic appointments at the National University of Singapore and Monash University, and she chairs the Evidence and Implementation Summit 2025. She played a key role in establishing the CHILD and BISI initiatives at NUS.

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Cillian Nolan is Executive Director of J-PAL Europe, where he leads efforts to promote rigorous evaluation and evidence-based policy across Europe and in development cooperation. Previously, he served as J-PAL Europe’s Director for Policy, advancing partnerships and synthesising lessons from global social program evaluations. Before J-PAL, Cillian spent over a decade researching conflict and policy responses, including roles at the International Crisis Group and as co-founding Deputy Director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict in Southeast Asia. He has also worked with Harvard’s HPCR and NPR.

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Associate Professor Nicole Rankin, PhD and Churchill Fellow, is an implementation scientist and Head of the Evaluation and Implementation Science Unit, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne. Nicole’s research interests include lung cancer screening and early detection and capacity building in implementation science. She was awarded a contract from Cancer Australia to develop the National Lung Cancer Screening Program Guidelines, released in April 2025. Her team is currently conducting the ‘Ready to Screen’ implementation trial to measure intention to screen for lung cancer. 

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