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.

Professor James was awarded a PhD in Physiology and Biochemistry from UNSW in 1985. He subsequently undertook postdoctoral research and an Assistant Professorship in the United States at Boston University and the Washington University in St Louis. Upon returning to Australia, he held a position at the IMB University of Queensland. In 2002, he became Head of the Diabetes Program at the Garvan Institute, before joining the Charles Perkins Centre in 2014 as Head of the Biology Domain. Throughout his career, David has made significant contributions to our understanding of metabolism and its regulation by factors such as insulin and exercise. More recently, his research has expanded into systems biology, with a particular focus on how genes interact with environmental influences to drive metabolic disease.

Population

Professor Natasha Nassar

Professor Nassar is Financial Markets Foundation for Children Chair in Translational Childhood Medicine and Head, Clinical and Population Translational Health Research, Children’s Hospital at Westmead Clinical School. She is also Data Lead, Leeder Centre for Health Policy, Economics and Data and an NHMRC Leadership Fellow.

Professor Natasha Nassar is a perinatal and paediatric epidemiologist and has held ongoing NHMRC fellowships from PhD initiation in 2003 to current NHMRC Investigator Grant (L1) for 2021-2025. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Sydney and then completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research under the mentorship of Professors Carol Bower and Fiona Stanley. She is a leader in conducting research involving data linkage of administrative, clinical, and research data to establish population-based data cohorts to follow-up individuals’ health, development, and well-being over time. She is passionate about the training and development of PhD and early career researchers and engaging with consumer, clinical and advocacy groups in genuine co-design and co-production of research. This ensures the investigation of real-world clinical and policy-relevant issues and impactful research across the lifespan.

In 2018, Natasha was appointed Populations Domain Leader at CPC, a role in which 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.