Influenza and COVID-19 vaccination update

Kristine Macartney is a paediatrician and infectious disease specialist. She is a medical graduate of the University of NSW and has over 20 years of experience in vaccinology.

She has experience working in the US at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she was a founding member of the US Vaccine Education Center. Her Doctorate of Medicine was on rotavirus infection, in particular the mucosal immune response to novel vaccine candidates. She is interested in all aspects of vaccine preventable disease research, particularly policy development, vaccine safety and prevention of viral diseases. She is the Senior Editor of the Australian Immunisation Handbook. Kristine is a Staff Specialist in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead and has a conjoint academic appointment as Professor in the Discipline of Child and Adolescent Health at the University of Sydney.

Kanta Subbarao was appointed Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Melbourne at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in 2016. Prior to her arrival in Melbourne, she was Chief of the Emerging Respiratory Viruses Section of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, (National Institutes of Health) in the US from 2002 to 2016 and of the Molecular Genetics Section of the Influenza Branch at the US Centers for Disease Control and prevention from 1997 to 2002. Previously, she was Chief of the Molecular Genetics Section of the Influenza Branch at the CDC in Atlanta (1997–2002). 

Kanta is a virologist and a physician with specialty training in paediatrics and paediatric infectious diseases. Over a career spanning 30 years, she has worked on molecular virology and vaccine development for emerging viruses that pose a potential pandemic threat, including influenza viruses, SARS and MERS and SARS-CoV-2 coronaviruses.    

An internationally recognized leader in the field of influenza with a sustained record of research excellence, Kanta has published 234 peer-reviewed publications in leading international biomedical journals and 92 reviews, chapters or commentaries. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. She serves on the editorial boards of PLOS Pathogens, Cell Host & Microbe, the Journal of Virology, Med and Cell.

Allen Cheng is an infectious diseases physician and professor in the School of Clinical Sciences at Monash University. He is a member of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) and the National Respiratory Infections Surveillance Committee. Previously, he was Chair of the Advisory Committee for Vaccines (2017–22), Co-Chair of ATAGI (2018–21), Deputy Victorian Chief Health Officer (2020–21) and a member of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (2020–22). Allen is a past president of the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases (2020–22).

Ben Smith is an infectious diseases specialist and general paediatrician. He joined NCIRS in January 2021 and is involved in vaccine clinical trials and policy work.

Helen Quinn is an Acting Associate Director at NCIRS and has a conjoint academic appointment as Senior Lecturer in the University of Sydney Children’s Hospital Westmead Clinical School. She has 19 years’ experience working in immunisation and vaccine preventable diseases across the areas of disease surveillance, vaccine safety and vaccine policy. Helen is the senior technical editor of the Australian Immunisation Handbook and has been an author on 96 publications.

Bette Liu is a medically trained epidemiologist with extensive national and international experience in the design, conduct and analysis of large-scale epidemiological studies using record linkage of administrative heath data, and e-medical records. She trained in medicine and public health at the University of Sydney and obtained her doctorate in epidemiology from the University of Oxford. She leads the Population Health group at NCIRS, which focuses on using big data to evaluate vaccine programs to inform communicable diseases control policy.