Symposium

The Western Alliance Symposium returns to lovely Lorne this year!

The Western Alliance Symposium is an opportunity to reconnect with colleagues and forge new collaborations, and to showcase some of the fantastic research from across western Victoria and beyond. The event will also feature a showcase in collaboration with Deakin Rural Health, as well as the ever-popular Symposium cocktail function at the Lorne Hotel rooftop.

The Call for Abstracts is NOW OPEN. 

Oral presentation abstracts are invited from those working in health services, primary care and universities describing a project that aims to change health policy, practice or outcomes in the regional and rural Victorian setting.

Announcing our Keynote Speakers (more to come!)

Fiona Cornforth

Fiona is of the Wuthathi and Maluligal peoples and holds national roles for creating meaningful systems change, contributing knowledge on what heals, as well as the power and strengths of First Peoples’ cultures to lead that change. She has served as CEO of The Healing Foundation, is the inaugural Director of Yardhura Walani at Australia’s National University, and a founding board director of the National Centre for Action on Child Sexual Abuse.

In all spaces, Fiona shares a message of celebration and gratitude for the greatness of ancestors, Elders, and the ontology and authority that holds individuals, families and nations.

Professor Karin Verspoor

Distinguished Professor Karin Verspoor is Dean of the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT. 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. She has made significant contributions through her interdisciplinary work in digital health, bioinformatics, and cheminformatics.

For over two decades, Karin has been applying her AI skills in the biomedical domain, receiving numerous awards and accolades during this time. Most recently, she was selected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, and for the past few years she has consistently been recognised as a top 2% scientist by Elsevier/Stanford. Karin is also a champion of diversity and inclusion, participating in strategic initiatives at RMIT to support women and girls in technology.

Professor Michele Callisaya

Michele is a Professor of Physiotherapy at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research, University of Tasmania.  Her research focuses on improving access to allied health for people with progressive neurological conditions. She has been awarded over $43 million in research funding and has published over 200 research papers or book chapters. She is the principal investigator for a MRFF funded project “Implementing ParkinsonNet to improve equitable access to high quality care for people with Parkinson’s disease in rural and remote Australia”.

Michele is also a board member of the National Parkinson’s Alliance who developed Australia’s first National Action Plan for Parkinson’s and is co-lead of the University of Tasmania Parkinson’s MOOC online course that has reached over 30,000 people worldwide.