Annual Conference 2025

Tom Snow is Chair of Snow Medical Research Foundation, which has invested over $260 million into the Australian medical research sector. Tom Snow is also Chairman of Canberra Airport and was a founder and Co-Chair and of the Equality Campaign, which led and won the successful YES postal plebiscite.

He is a founder of Whitehelm Capital, one of the world’s largest independent infrastructure managers. As a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, he has had roles including director of Perth Airport, Canberra Airport, Bankstown Airport, Port of Adelaide / Flinders Ports, Etihad Stadium, Peninsula Link, International Parking Group and Whitehelm Capital. Tom Snow was born and raised in Canberra and has served as Chair of the Canberra Convention Bureau and director of the Australian Science Festival. He is a Rhodes Scholar and is a proud father of three kids.

Professor Sir John Savill graduated in Physiological Sciences from Oxford in 1978 and in Medicine from Sheffield in 1981, receiving a PhD (London) in 1989 after a MRC Clinical Training Fellowship at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School.

Following a spell as a Wellcome Senior Clinical Research Fellow at RPMS, in 1993 he moved to the Chair in Medicine at Nottingham; subsequently relocating in 1998 to the University of Edinburgh as Professor of Medicine where he set up and became the first Director of the University of Edinburgh/Medical Research Council Centre for Inflammation Research.

Between 2002 and 2017 John served as the University’s first Vice-Principal and Head of the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, being knighted in the 2008 New Year’s Honours List for services to clinical science. From June 2008 to September 2010, John was Chief Scientist for the Scottish Government Health Directorates (part-time).

In October 2010 he was appointed as Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council, demitting in March 2018. In June 2017 John was appointed to Edinburgh’s Regius Chair of Medical Science by HM The Queen, retiring from that post in 2023.

He has been Executive Director of the Melbourne Academic Centre for Health (MACH) since July 2019.

Professor Ken Smith is WEHI’s seventh director.  He commenced in April 2024 after returning to Australia from the UK, where he had been Head of the Department of Medicine at Cambridge University since 2010.

Throughout his 30-year career, as both a researcher and clinician, Ken has been renowned for his high-quality, innovative research and its impact on patient outcomes. Ken has strong international scientific research links and networks and brings a global outlook to take WEHI into a new era.

He has been instrumental in forming alliances between industry and academia and has first-hand experience in founding start-up companies and commercial experience with the pharmaceutical industry in the UK, US and Europe.

He completed his Doctor of Philosophy at WEHI through the University of Melbourne, supervised by former WEHI director, Sir Gustav Nossal AC, and Professor David Tarlinton. His Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery is from the University of Melbourne.

Ken is a qualified consultant physician (nephrology and general internal medicine) and pathologist (clinical immunology).

Professor Shelley Dolan joined the RMH in August 2023 as Chief Executive, having previously served as the Chief Executive of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. Shelley has successfully led large specialist tertiary hospitals in the UK, including as Chief Executive of Kings College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Deputy Chief Executive of the Royal Marsden Hospital.

Shelley is a highly respected clinical and research leader with an impressive track record in health care, having successfully led major organisational and cultural change in Victoria and the United Kingdom (UK).

Shelley has a PhD in the early diagnosis of sepsis in cancer patients and a master’s degree in advanced practice nursing. She is a Professor (Enterprise) of the Melbourne School of Health Science at the University of Melbourne and is Chair of the Western & Central Melbourne Integrated Cancer Service, a Board member of the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre Alliance, the Melbourne Academic Centre for Health, Melbourne Genomics and CRC Participant Director on the Board of Oncology One. In November 2022, the Minister for Health and Aged Care appointed Shelley as a Member of the Cancer Australia Advisory Council.

Since 2019 Derek Van Dyk and the Snow Medical Team have worked with Tom Snow and the Snow family to establish the initial strategy and direction of the Snow Medical Research Foundation.

Derek has a commercial research background in biotechnology coupled with science and innovation policy experience in Government and university sectors. He completed his PhD at UNSW in biopharmaceutical production and proteomics.

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Professor Phil Hodgkin has helped transform understanding of immune regulation with innovative theories and novel experimental approaches. His mathematical models of immune responses are foundational for the SCIH.

Phil’s research is focussed on the problem of how immune cells process information and regulate outcomes. This has required inventing methods for integrating molecular and cellular dynamics to make predictions of immune function at multiple scales.

Phil the former President of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Immunology. He is recognised as one of the pioneers of systems immunology.

Dr Paul Lyons guides the team of scientists and clinicians at the Snow Centre to create a research environment that will facilitate groundbreaking research into real-world clinical applications.

With over 20 years of experience at the University of Cambridge, Paul is well-equipped to bridge the gap between scientific discovery and clinical impact.

Professor Jo Douglass is the James Stewart Professor of Medicine and Head of the Department of Medicine in the Melbourne Medical School. She also holds the position of Director of Research at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

From 2012 to 2020, Jo was head of The Department of Immunology and Allergy at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. She is an active clinician with clinical practice and teaching in asthma, especially severe asthma, allergic diseases, and Immune Deficiencies. She is an active researcher with current funded projects in severe asthma, especially Thunderstorm asthma and practice in the genomics of immune deficiencies alongside collaborators at WEHI.

She is widely published, with over 100 original publications.

Professor Daniel Gray’s team employs new genetic, single-cell, and imaging-based technologies to address how the immune system makes decisions in the context of autoimmune disease, infection, and cancer.

Daniel’s contributions have come through a mixture of large, collaborative, consortia-based research programs, as well as more focused, hypothesis-driven projects to make fundamental discoveries with translational impact.

He is an international leader in how cell death processes impact T cell responses and immunological tolerance: key goals of the modelling of molecular networks program.

Dr Vanessa Bryant’s team most recently discovered novel causes of rare antibody deficiencies that have directly led to therapeutic intervention and personalised care for children and adults with immunodeficiency.

Vanessa leads the Victorian Node of the recently established MRFF-funded Australian Alliance for Indigenous Genomics (ALIGN) and co-leads the MRFF-funded Australian ImmunoGenomics Network with Stuart Tangye (Garvan). She previously co-led the successful Melbourne Genomics Immunology Flagship Program and Antibody Deficiency Program of Australian Genomics Genetic Immunology.

Vanessa’s skills provide a fundamental molecular and cellular foundation that synergises with clinical pathways of diagnosis and care.

Professor Stephen Nutt is Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and a world-leading expert in molecular immunology. He is a member of the international Immunological Genome Consortium.

Stephen has made significant discoveries relating to the transcriptional processes required for immune cell development and differentiation. Stephen’s research focuses on understanding how gene regulatory networks control cellular decisions in the immune system and how to target these processes with new therapeutic approaches. His leadership in these domains will propel the molecular networks and drug discovery programs of the SCIH.

Matthew Wierzbowski’s PhD project aims to identify the genetic differences that cause allergic antibody classes in some individuals. His work builds on the discovery that antibody class selection is predicted by mathematical formulas. Matthew will analyse switching rates of allergy prone individuals when exposed to a range of signals.

Matthew earned First Class Honours in the Hodgkin Lab focusing on control of B cells.

Dr HoChan Cheon joins the Snow Centre for Immune Health’s digital hub as a biomathematician, software engineer, and data analyst. Currently, he leads the analysis of patient data and is instrumental in designing and implementing software essential for data analysis and statistical testing.

HoChan earned his PhD in Applied Mathematics under the guidance of Professor Ken Duffy at Maynooth University working on T cells Immunology and Immunotherapy. His doctoral research analysed T cell dynamics and developed probabilistic models for T cell behaviour.

Dr Susanne Heinzel brings extensive experience in developing and conducting immune functional assays for SCIH. Her research focuses on genetic mutations and inhibitory drugs on T and B cell responses. Susanne will develop novel methods for measuring cellular responses and implement standardised operating procedures (SOPs).

Susanne is the former President of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Immunology. She has served as a Senior Research Scientist and Clinical Trial Research Coordinator for Vaxine.

Mengxiao Luo is a research officer at WEHI, working with Professor Daniel Gray.

She earned her master’s degree in Biomedical Science at the University of Melbourne. Mengxiao collaborates broadly to tackle challenging questions, including collaboration with the team at Peter Doherty and Monash University.

Julie is a senior postdoctoral researcher in the Immunology division. Her expertise is in immune cell differentiation and gene expression.

She completed her PhD in Immunology in France in 2008. She then worked at the Centre of Immunology of Marseille-Luminy for 3 years, before joining the laboratory of Professor Stephen Nutt at the end of 2011.

Julie is a member of the international consortium Immgen (the Immunological genome project), a collaborative project that builds mouse genomic datasets as a public resource.

Dr Miles Horton is a post-doctoral researcher in the WEHI Immunology division and a paediatrics trainee at the Royal Children’s Hospital.

He was the first student to undergo intercalated medical and research training in an MD-PhD program across The University of Melbourne, WEHI and The Royal Melbourne Hospital. Miles is passionate about the treatment of disorders of the blood and immune system, with a particular interest in genetic immunodeficiency and stem cell transplantation.

Dr Timothy Fazio is a specialist physician and health informatician. Tim is a proud medical graduate of Monash University.

Tim undertook his internship and majority of his physician training at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. He has also worked as a consultant metabolic physician at Westmead Hospital, Sydney – Australia’s only other dedicated adult metabolic diseases unit. His clinical work spans all aspects of adult inborn errors of metabolism, as well as general medicine. He is an examiner for the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, and active in teaching and research including early phase clinical trials.

Dr Samantha Chan is the Deputy Director of Clinical Immunology and Allergy at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

She completed her medical degree at the University of Melbourne (MBBS, BMedSc), undertook specialist physician training (FRACP) at the Alfred Hospital and Royal Melbourne Hospital, and earned a Master of Public Health from the University of London.

Samantha recently submitted her PhD at WEHI, studying the interplay of intrinsic and environmental contributors to immunodeficiency through the use of novel gene therapies.

She has contributed to local and international guidelines on diagnosing and managing inborn errors of immunity and is dedicated to advancing patient care through translational research.

Dr Sabina Ciciriello is the Director of the Rheumatology Department and the clinical lead of the Connective Tissue Disease clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. She has been in public and private clinical practice at Melbourne Health since 2007 and provided regional outreach services to Mildura between 2008 and 2024.

She is a member of Medical Panels and chair of the Australian Rheumatology Association Victoria/Tasmania Heads of Unit committee.

Sabina was granted a PhD by the University of Melbourne. Her PhD focused on improving and measuring the impact of patient education about methotrexate treatment for rheumatoid arthritis.

Associate Professor Peter Hughes qualified from Monash University and undertook his advanced training at the Royal Melbourne Hospital (RMH) and Austin Hospital.

He was awarded an NHMRC scholarship to perform a PhD at WEHI.

Peter has been a consultant nephrologist at the RMH since 2008 and has been the physician in charge of kidney transplantation since 2012. His research interests include transplanting across immunological barriers, thrombotic microangiopathy and complement mediated disease.