A/Prof Kylie Valentine is Deputy Director of the Social Policy Research Centre. Her research interests include the application of methods and concepts from the sociology of knowledge to new areas and concerns, with a specific focus on social disadvantage and exclusion. She conducts research on how human services are delivered and how they make up populations. kylie also conducts evaluation research on integrated service delivery and programs for children and families, and has expertise in qualitative methodologies and evaluation design. These research projects in the human services investigate the impact of policies aimed to improve the lives of disadvantaged people, especially in the areas of ‘wicked’ problems such as child maltreatment, alcohol and other drug misuse, and homelessness. She is committed to collaborative research and working with the expertise of partners, and in making sure that research is informed by the insights and experiences of practitioners, policy-makers, and the people for whom policies are intended.

Kathryn is the Executive Director at New Zealand Needle Exchange Programme, on the Board of Directors of the International Drug Policy Consortium and member of the Mental Health and Addiction SLA for the South Island DHB Alliance. Kathryn is a member of the Society for the Study of Addiction; Institute of Directors and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Anne Mitchell is a Positive Speaker with Hepatitis SA. She is a Kaurna, Narangga and Ngadjuri woman. Anne feels it is important to tell others about her personal experience with hepatitis C to encourage people from the Aboriginal community to seek treatment for the virus.

Dr Sunil Solomon, MBBS PhD MPH is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He also serves as the Chairman of the YR Gaitonde Centre for AIDS Research and Education (YRGCARE), India. He completed his medical training at the Sri Ramachandra Medical University in India and received a Masters in Public Health and a doctorate in Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins University, US. His research is focused on the epidemiology, clinical management and access to HIV and HCV care among vulnerable populations such as PWID and MSM. He has over 100 peer-reviewed publications and has been elected into the Phi Beta Kappa and Delta Omega honors societies. In 2015, he was one of the first recipients of the Avenir award, a Director’s award from the NIH, USA aimed at identifying individuals who show promise of being tomorrow's leaders in the field of drug abuse and HIV.

Dr Mehlika Toy, Ph.D., is a research scientist at Stanford University. Her research focuses on developing decision models, assessment of potential impact, and cost-effectiveness analysis on chronic hepatitis B infection management. She has developed decision models to help policy making in the Netherlands, Turkey, China and the United States and is continuing to develop models to help countries with their national policies in chronic hepatitis B infection control. Dr. Toy completed her Ph.D. in Public Health at Erasmus University and was a Takemi Fellow in International Health at Harvard University. She serves as a member of the World Health Organization’s Strategic Information and Viral Hepatitis Modeling Reference Group.

Dr Joseph Doyle, Senior Lecturer, Monash University and Alfred Health; Deputy Director, Disease Elimination Program, Burnet Institute, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Dr Lampen-Smith is a Gastroenterologist at Tauranga Hospital, New Zealand. During her training she completed a Masters in palliative care in end stage liver disease and a Fellowship in General and Transplant Hepatology at Princess Alexandra Hospital, Brisbane. She is Clinical Director of The Hepatitis Foundation of New Zealand.