Domain leaders

Biology

Professor David James FAA

Professor David James is the Leonard P Ullmann Chair of Metabolic Systems Biology at the Charles Perkins Centre. He is also a Professor in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences and School of Medicine at the University of Sydney.

David undertook his PhD at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and his undergraduate degree and Honours at the University of New South Wales. David has made major contributions to our understanding of insulin action. In the late 1980s he published a series of journal articles in Nature describing the identification and characterization of the insulin-responsive glucose transporter GLUT4. He then focused his efforts on unveiling the cellular and molecular control of insulin-stimulated glucose transport. David has also made contributions in the area of SNARE proteins, signal transduction, and, more recently, in systems biology.

Population

Professor Natasha Nassar

Professor Natasha Nassar is a perinatal epidemiologist and the newly appointed Financial Markets Foundation for Children Chair in Translational Childhood Medicine, based at the Charles Perkins Centre Westmead and the University of Sydney Children’s Hospital Westmead Clinical School. Her work focuses on maternal, pregnancy and neonatal risk factors and their impact on infant and child health and development.

As the Charles Perkins Centre Population Domain leader, she works to foster new and existing collaborations within the University's vast network of faculties, institutes and hospitals already conducting research in this area.

Society and Environment

Professor Alex Broom

Professor Alex Broom is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and Director of the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies. He is recognised as an international leader in sociology, with a specific interest in health, illness and care. His work takes a person-centred approach, qualitatively exploring the intersections of individual experience and social, political and economic context.

He is particularly focused on the ways in which health is collectively produced through social practices and economic and political systems. As the Charles Perkins Centre's Society and Environment Domain lead, he encourages work focused on the inseparability of context and disease, and how any meaningful progress in improving health outcomes needs to account for this complexity. 

Solutions

Professor Tim Shaw 

Professor Tim Shaw is Director of the Research in eHealth and Implementation Science Group (RISe) in the School of Medical Sciences. He specialises in building partnerships across industry, services, government, communities and academia to deliver high impact research translation. His research focuses on how digital health can support new models of care as well as clinical decision support. He has a particular interest in how technology can support equity of access and is leading research into how technology can improve access to care in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. He co-led the development and is a research leader in the $110 million Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre.

As the Charles Perkins Centre's Solutions Domain lead, Tim's focus is on facilitating how research at the Centre can be translated into practice, especially among early- and mid-career researchers, and how research can be guided by priorities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.