Professor Kerryn Phelps AM was first elected to Council in September 2016. Kerryn is the Deputy Lord Mayor of Sydney and deputy chair of the Corporate, Finance, Properties and Tenders Committee and the Healthy Communities Sub-Committee.
Deputy Lord Mayor, Professor Kerryn Phelps AM is an Australian general practitioner, public health and civil rights advocate, educator, wife to Jackie and mother of three. She was the first woman to be elected as President of the Federal Australian Medical Association and is also a past President of the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association. View more.
Professor Phelps is a passionate advocate for civil rights, particularly equality for the LGBT community and the rights of children. She has a commitment to teaching the next generation of doctors as an Adjunct Professor at Sydney Medical School and Conjoint Professor at University of New South Wales Faculty of Medicine and in the National Institute of Complementary Medicine at the University of Western Sydney.
Professor Phelps is a pioneer in health communication in Australia, appearing regularly on television, radio and in the print media for thirty years, informing the public on health issues. She has been the health columnist for the Australian Womens Weekly since 1991.
Professor Phelps has written several books including a textbook "General Practice: The Integrative Approach". "Ultimate Wellness" was published in 2013, and "The Cancer Recovery Guide" was published in 2015.
She is a keen sportswoman and in 2014 was appointed to the board of Hockey Australia. Kerryn is an ambassador for Barnardos Australia. In 2016 she was named as one of the 100 Women of Influence by the Australian Financial Review.
AWARDS
In 2003 Kerryn was awarded the Centenary Medal for services to Health and Medicine.
In 2011 she was made a member of the Order Of Australia for her service to medicine, particularly through leadership roles with the AMA, education and community health, and as a General Practitioner.
In 2013 Kerryn was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by University of Western Sydney.
In 2016 she was named one of the 100 Women of Influence by the Australian Financial Review.
Studies on Noise & Response in Urban Areas
Lex Brown is Professor of Environmental Planning in Griffith University in Brisbane. His initial training was in civil engineering and urban and regional planning, with a doctorate in environmental acoustics. His academic interests are in tools that interface between the environmental scientist and the planning and design professions through environmental assessments of projects, policies and plans - in this he has worked extensively in both developed and developing countries. View more.
His specialization in acoustics began with research into exposure-response relationships for community response to road traffic noise, and continues across diverse areas of prediction, modelling and management of environmental noise, perception of noise and its effects on human health, and response to interventions and changes in exposures. His work has also included noise and wildlife and, more recently, the emerging study of soundscapes – considering the acoustic environment as a resource, not just as a waste to be managed. In this he has been active within the European COST Action on Soundscapes. He has worked with WHO Europe in the revision of the Guidelines for Community Noise, and with the Expert Advisory Group for the revision of the enHealth guidelines in Australia on the health effects of environmental noise. He is on the Executive Committee of the International Commission on the Biological Effects of Noise and was co-editor of the WHO publication on the Burden of Disease from Environmental Noise.
Creating Healthy, Liveable Sustainable Cities What, Why & How
Professor Billie Giles-Corti is a Distinguished Professor at RMIT University and Director of its Urban Futures Enabling Capability Platform. She is a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Senior Principal Research Fellow and directs the Centre for Urban Research’s Healthy Liveable Cities Research Group. Prior to joining RMIT in 2017, she was a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne and Director of the McCaughey VicHealth Community Wellbeing Unit. For over two decades, she and a multi-disciplinary research team have been studying the impact of the built environment on health and wellbeing. Professor Giles-Corti currently leads an NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Healthy Liveable Communities established in 2014; which works closely with local, national and global policy-makers and practitioners. View more.
She has published over 300 articles, book chapters and reports, and by citations, is ranked in the top 1% of researchers in her field globally. She is an Honorary Fellow of both the Planning Institute of Australia and the Public Health Association, a Fulbright Scholar, and in 2016 was awarded an NHMRC Elizabeth Blackburn Fellowship as the top ranked female fellow in public health in 2015.
Noise, a Public Health Problem
Dr Anna Hansell, from School of Public Health, Imperial College London, is a public health doctor and environmental epidemiologist with special research interests in environmental noise and air pollution and respiratory disease epidemiology. She leads on several national and international studies examining long-term health effects of environmental exposures and has oversight of the Small Area Health Statistics Unit databases containing over 300 million patient records.
Navigating Climate Adaptive Pathways for Indigenous Communities in the Torres Strait
Vic McGrath hails from Thursday Island in the Torres Strait which is situated between Australia and Papua New Guinea. His Indigenous heritage stems from the Mualgal people on Mua Island. Vic has held several positions on ministerial advisory committees to the Australian and Queensland Governments including Indigenous Protected Areas, the Arts and a range of Environmental Management issues and he currently sits on the National Museum of Australia’s Indigenous Reference Group that provides cultural protocol advice on issues such as the repatriation of Indigenous remains from overseas institutions. View more.
Vic currently works for the Torres Strait Regional Authority’s Land and Sea Management Unit across all their theme areas (Terrestrial, Marine, Rangers, People and Coasts & Climate Change). Over more recent years, his key areas of involvement have been with Indigenous Protected Areas, setting up a Traditional Ecological Knowledge Recording System and Climate Change Adaptation & Resilience consultation & planning.
Through the latter, Vic has played a lead role in bringing climate science to communities in the Torres Strait. His involvement is regarded as critical in the development of the Torres Strait Adaptation and Resilience project, particularly in relation to community engagement and translation of often complex scientific ideas in a way that is accessible to Islanders. He is highly regarded at the community level as well as within government and scientific circles for his unique ability to effortlessly transverse cultural, scientific and governance domains.
Whilst his work has covered a wide array of cultural and natural issues, he has been a champion of building deeper understanding of what climate change means for Torres Strait homelands and the region’s natural environment. Vic has received several awards for his contributions to the Torres Strait community and was recently named as the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility’s 2016 Champion in the Individual category.
Pathways to Healthy Urban Living
Co sponsored by
Mark J Nieuwenhuijsen PhD is the director of the Air pollution and Urban Environment group and director of the Urban Planning, Environment and Health Initiative at ISGlobal, Barcelona. He has an interest in exposure assessment, epidemiology, and health risk/impact assessment with a strong focus and interest on healthy urban living and is/has been involved a number of studies around the topic. Amongst others, he led the international TAPAS study (http://www.tapas-program.org/), examining the health impacts of active transport in six European cities and the EC funded PHENOTYPE (www.phenotype.eu) study, examining the relations between green space and health. View more.
He was an investigator in ICEPURE (www.icepure.eu), that examined exposure to and health effects of solar UV exposure, ESCAPE (www.escapeproject.eu) (and related (VE3SPA), that examined the long term health effects of air pollution, NIH funded CAVA which aimed to validate smartphone based data collection methods, EC funded CITISENSE (http://citi-sense.eu/) that aimed to empower citizens using smartphone technology Currently he works on EC funded HELIX (http://www.projecthelix.eu/), that examines the early life exposome and childhood diseases, EC funded EXPOsOMICs (http://www.exposomicsproject.eu/) that examines the air pollution and water exposome and health, the EC funded PASTA study (http://www.pastaproject.eu), which promotes active transportation through sustainable transport, and the EC funded BlueHealth project evaluating the relationship between blue space and Health. He has edited 3 books on Exposure Assessment and on Environmental Epidemiology, and has co-authored more than 300 papers published in peer reviewed journals.
Health & the Climate Crisis Evidence for Pursuing a Low-carbon Economy
Jonathan Patz, MD, MPH, is Professor & John P. Holton Chair in Health and the Environment. He is also Director of the Global Health Institute (http://www.globalhealth.wisc.edu/) at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and has faculty appointments in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Population Health Sciences. Patz co-chaired the health expert panel of the first US National Assessment on Climate Change and was a convening lead author for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. For 15 years, Dr. Patz was a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC) – the organization that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. In 1994, Dr. Patz convened the first-ever session on climate change for the American Public Health Association and authored the organization’s first policy resolution on climate change in 1995. View more.
Dr. Patz has written over 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers and reports, and co-edited two textbooks and a 5-volume encyclopedia addressing the health effects of global environmental change. He organized the first climate change/health briefing to an EPA administrator in 1997 and has been invited to brief both houses of Congress (http://tinyurl.com/climate-health-history) and has served on several scientific committees of the National Academy of Sciences. From 2006 to 2010, Dr. Patz served as Founding President of the International Association for Ecology and Health. In addition to his contribution in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Patz received an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellows Award in 2005, shared the Zayed International Prize for the Environment in 2006, earned the distinction of becoming a UW-Madison Romnes Faculty Fellow in 2009, won a Fulbright Scholar award in 2014, and was recipient of the Homer Calver Award of the American Public Health Association (APHA) for Environmental Health Leadership in 2015 http://ghi.wisc.edu/ghi-in-action/patz-receives-apha-award-for-environmental-leadership/ ).
Professor Patz earned medical board certification in both Occupational/Environmental Medicine and Family Medicine and received his medical degree from Case Western Reserve University (1987) and his Master of Public Health degree (1992) from Johns Hopkins University.
Air Pollution & Human Health in China
Xiaoming Shi, MD, PhD is an epidemiologist and public health expert in China. He is the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health (NIEH), Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention that is responsible for investigating, monitoring and evaluating health effects of environmental exposures nationally. His major research interests include environmental hazards and health effects, healthy aging, and the control and prevention of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). He has contributed to establish the National Human Bio-Monitoring Project, which has been set up and implemented in China since 2016. Currently, Dr. Shi is leading a large-scale project systematically assessing the acute health risks of air pollution in China, and is in the process of developing a national environmental public health tracking project. He has experiences working with numerous NCDs and aging studies in Chinese populations.
The Global Burden of & Public Health Action for Asbestos-Related Diseases
Ken is Professor and Director of the Asbestos Diseases Research Institute (ADRI), University of Sydney. After graduating from the School of Medicine, Keio University (Japan) and accomplishing clinical residency, he moved to the University of Occupational and Environmental Health, Japan. There he studied and worked for 31 years including 16 years as the Professor of Environmental Epidemiology and Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Occupational Health. He has engaged in epidemiologic research of occupational diseases, with special interest on asbestos-related diseases. View more.
He has been serving as consultant/advisor to the WHO and other UN specialized agencies on a number of occasions, examiner/advisor to academic institutes in several Asian countries, is a former Board Member of the International Commission of Occupational Health and former President of the Asian Association for Occupational Health. He currently serves as the WHO Expert on Chemical Safety/Environmental Epidemiology (International Health Regulations) and is a Fellow and Executive Council Member of the Collegium Ramazzini. At ADRI, Ken hopes to further strengthen the excellent track record on studies of disease mechanism and clinical trial and complement the research portfolio with his area of expertise. He received the Jorma Rantanen Award from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in 2011 and the Selikoff Lifetime Achievement Award from the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (NGO in USA) in 2014.