WAGER Management Committee
In accordance with the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Enabling Grant guidelines WAGER has established a properly constituted Management Committee which operates under defined terms of reference. The Committee provides management and oversight of the 'day to day' running of WAGER, including access to WAGER Data Collections where approved by the Custodians.
The Committee currently consists of the following members:
Professor Lyle Palmer
University of Western Australia
Professor Palmer is an internationally renowned geneticist and epidemiologist who is an expert in the genetics of complex respiratory diseases. He is the Foundation Chair in Genetic Epidemiology at the University of Western Australia, where he is also a Professor in the Schools of Medicine & Pharmacology and Population Health. He is the founder of the Laboratory for Genetic Epidemiology in the Western Australian Institute for Medical Research. Before returning to Western Australia in mid-2003, he was an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Director of Statistical Genomics at the Channing Laboratory, Boston. Professor Palmer is the head Chief Investigator on the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Enabling Grant for the WA DNA Bank.
Professor D'Arcy Holman
University of Western Australia
Professor D'Arcy Holman is known across Australia for his contributions to health services research, advice to governments, community organisations and the health professions, and his passionate teaching of public health methods. His diverse backgrounds in academia and public administration include Director of the Health Promotion Development and Evaluation Program, which evaluated the WA Health Promotion Foundation, and Assistant Commissioner for Planning and Director of Epidemiology in the Health Department of WA. His present interests focus on innovative and robust methods for the study of utilisation and outcomes of health care, particularly applications of data linkage and spatial analysis and the evaluation of hospital and community-based health interventions.
Professor Fiona Stanley AC
Telethon Institute for Child Health Research (TICHR)
Professor Stanley studied medicine at the University of Western Australia and undertook further training in the United Kingdom and United States of America in epidemiology, biostatistics and public health. She is the Founding Director of the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in Western Australia, Professor in the School of Paediatrics and Child Health at University Of Western Australia and the Executive Director of the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth, a national organisation that was formally constituted in June 2002 with an agenda to improve the health and well-being of young Australians. Professor Stanley was Australian of the Year in 2003.
Professor Nick de Klerk
Telethon Institute for Child Health Research (TICHR)
Professor de Klerk joined the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in 2000 after leading the Occupational Respiratory Epidemiology Group in the Department of Public Health at the University of Western Australia for 10 years. Before that he gained broad experience in biostatistics and epidemiology both in Western Australia and England. He is currently the Head of Biostatistics and Genetic Epidemiology at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research.
Professor James Semmens
Curtin University of Technology
Professor Semmens is the Head of the Health Services Research Group in the School of Public Health at the Curtin University of Technology. The group supports research through the creation and maintenance of research data and technical infrastructure, facilitation of a network of collaborators, and provision of training opportunities. Prof Semmens is also the Research Director of the WA Safety and Quality of Surgical Care Project, which was established to promote best practice in surgical and procedural care, and was the co-initiator and Project Manager of the Western Australian Audit of Surgical Mortality from 1998-2005. His expertise is in the biostatistical analysis of record linked health data and its use in evaluating the clinical epidemiology of important diseases, health care utilization and patient outcomes. He also has an interest in clinical governance, genetic epidemiology and genomics, biospecimen databases and bioinformatics.
Associate Professor Frank van Bockxmeer
Royal Perth Hospital
Associate Professor van Bockxmeer is the Director of the Cardiovascular Genetics Laboratory at Royal Perth Hospital, and Co-ordinator of the Royal Perth Hospital DNA Repository. His research interests include the genetic determinants of cardiovascular disease with emphasis on disorders of lipoprotein metabolism and the role of genes in folate and B-group vitamin metabolism in vascular disease.
Dr Merran Smith
WA Department of Health
Dr Smith is the Director of Information Collection and Management within the WA Department of Health.
Dr Nik Zeps
Department of Radiation Oncology, Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and St John of God Pathology
Dr Zeps is the Research Manager for Radiation Oncology at SCGH and also at St John of God Pathology. He is a member of the Australian Health Ethics Committee (AHEC) and provides ethics consultancy to SCGH. He is a founding member of the Australasian Biospecimen Network (ABN) Oncology Subgroup. Dr Zeps is chair of the Cancer Australia National Research Advisory Group. He has an interest in developing prognostic and predictive markers for cancer, in particular for those of the breast, bowel, ovary and prostate.
