Independent Advisory Board

The Independent Advisory Board provides oversight of the AI Alliance as an organisation, monitor progress of planned initiatives against defined milestones and budgets, monitor risks, and assist in identifying strategic engagement opportunities.

Professor Kathryn North AC

Professor Kathryn North AC is Chair of the AAAiH Advisory Board. Professor North is Director of the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) and the David Danks Professor of Child Health Research at the University of Melbourne. Professor North is a national and international leader in Genomic medicine. Professor North has led an NHMRC-funded national network of over 80 institutions – the Australian Genomics Health Alliance (AGHA) since 2016. Professor North chaired the National Health and Medical Research Council Research Committee from 2012-2018, and has chaired the International Advisory Board of the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (UK) since 2015. She is a member of the Board of the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre. In 2014, she was appointed as a Foundation fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Science, and in 2020 joined the Academy’s Board. In 2020, she joined the Board of the Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes (AAMRI) as President-Elect.

Associate Professor Grant Blashki

Associate Professor Grant Blashki is a practicing GP at the Better Health Network in South Melbourne and an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne at the Nossal Institute for Global Health. His main areas of work include Primary Mental Health Care, Climate Change, and Digital Healthcare. He has co-edited nine books, including one titled Artificial Intelligence: For Better or Worse. Associate Professor Blashki has published over 140 peer-reviewed journals and has been teaching the University of Melbourne’s Masters subject, Planetary and Global Health, for over a decade. He has played a significant role in public communication as the lead clinical advisor for Beyond Blue for five years, during which he made 500 media appearances. Currently, he is a fellow of the Climate Council and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Monash Sustainable Development Institute.

Professor Enrico Coiera

Professor Enrico Coiera is Director of the Centre for Health Informatics, Australian Institute of Health Innovation, and Foundation Professor in Medical Informatics, Macquarie University. Trained in medicine with a computer science PhD in Artificial Intelligence (AI), he has a research background in industry and academia, with a strong international research reputation. He spent 10 years at the prestigious Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories, Bristol, UK, and has overseen the development and trial of multiple e-Health interventions. He was awarded the François Grémy Award by the International Medical Informatics Association in 2015, and was named the Australian Field Leader in Medical Informatics in 2021. In 2017, he was one of ~100 scientists worldwide elected as a Foundation Member of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences in 2018, and a Member of the International Academy of Quality and Safety in Healthcare in 2020.

Ms Tracey Duffy

Tracey Duffy leads the Medical Devices and Product Quality Division at the Therapeutic Goods Administration. Her team is responsible for the regulation of software (and artificial intelligence – AI) when the software is intended for therapeutic purposes. She is also a member of the International Medical Device Regulators Forum – a group of medical device regulators from around the world who aim to accelerate international regulatory harmonisation and convergence, including for software and AI.

Dr David Hansen

David Hansen is CEO and Research Director of the Australian e-Health Research Centre at CSIRO – Australia’s national science agency. The AEHRC is CSIRO’s digital health research program and a joint venture between the CSIRO and Queensland Health. With over 150 scientists and engineers the AEHRC is Australia’s largest digital health research centre, undertaking research in data semantics and interoperability, genomics, medical imaging, artificial intelligence and machine learning across healthcare. David is on the board of the Australian institute of Digital Health and is a member of the Connected Care Council for the Australian Digital Health Agency. Prior to joining CSIRO, David held senior positions leading technology research and development for SRS with LION Bioscience Ltd and before that the European Bioinformatics Institute. 

Ms Emma Hossack

Emma Hossack is the CEO of the Medical Software Industry Association (MSIA Ltd). She is also a Director of the Australian Digital Health Agency, Council member of the National Aged Care Advisory Council, a Director of the University of Melbourne Law School Foundation Board and member of the National Office of Cyber Security’s (NOCS) Executive Cyber Council. Prior to this Emma was the CEO of several software companies, a commercial lawyer, and Board member of several not for profit and advisory committees for health and privacy including being President of the International Association of Privacy Professionals ANZ. In 2021 Emma was awarded a Telstra Health Brilliant Women in Digital Health inaugural Award. Emma holds a B.A (Hons), LLB and LLM. Emma is mother of triplet girls and enjoys marathon running.

Professor Daniel MacArthur

Professor Daniel MacArthur is a human genomicist with over two decades of experience at the interface between human biomedicine, large-scale genomics, and data science. From 2012-2019 he served as Co-Director of the Medical and Population Genetics Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and led the development of the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD), the world’s largest accessible resource of human genetic data. In 2020 he returned to Australia as the inaugural Director of the Centre for Population Genomics, a joint initiative between the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Sydney and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Melbourne, focused on leveraging large-scale genomic and analytical tools to build a more equitable foundation for genomic medicine. He also leads the Australian Alliance for Secure Genomics and AI in Rare Disease (AASGARD) consortium, a national effort to validate and apply new analytical tools in the diagnosis of severe genetic diseases.

Ms Rosemary Smith

Rosemary is Ngarabul woman from NSW and the Executive Manager of Policy and Consulting at the Lowitja Institute,  Australia’s only Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community controlled health research institute. Rosemary has worked in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and welfare policy and program design across commonwealth government, private sector consulting and not-for-profit organisations for over a decade. Rosemary holds a Masters in Social Change and Development and a Bachelor of Social Science. Rosemary is heavily invested in and committed to contributing to the achievement of better health and welfare outcomes for her people and is experienced in utilising different policy levers to advocate and influence policy change which will create real impact within her community. She currently specialises in guiding and supporting effective Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander codesign and engagement, program and policy design, implementation and evaluation.

Professor Karin Verspoor

Professor Karin Verspoor is Executive Dean of the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. She is a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health, a 2021 “Brilliant Woman in Digital Health”, and was selected as a finalist in the Women in AI Australia/New Zealand Awards 2022 for “AI in Innovation”. She is also a Director of BioGrid Australia. Karin is passionate about using artificial intelligence to enable biological discovery and clinical decision support from data. Her work has a specific emphasis on the use of natural language processing to transform unstructured data in biomedicine into actionable information. Karin held previous posts as Director of Health Technologies and Deputy Head of the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, as the Scientific Director of Health and Life Sciences at NICTA Victoria Research Laboratory, at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and at Los Alamos National Laboratory.