Data Linkage Working Party
Prof Natasha Smallwood is the Professor and Director of Respiratory Medicine at the Alfred Hospital (Melbourne) and School of Translational Medicine at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). In addition to her respiratory qualifications, she holds postgraduate qualifications in Medical Leadership, Epidemiology and Palliative Care.
Prof Smallwood has authored over 150 publications and been awarded approximately $12 million as major research grants. She has clinical and research interests in severe lung disease, particularly chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and interstitial lung disease.
Prof Smallwood is the President for the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand, a past Board Director for the Victorian Doctors Health Program (Australia), and holds multiple leadership roles. She is a taskforce member for various national and international respiratory guidelines. She recently worked with the Australian Commission for Safety and Quality in Healthcare to develop the first ever national clinical care standard in respiratory medicine for people with COPD.
A/Prof James Fingleton is Clinical Director Sub-speciality Medicine and a respiratory physician at Wellington Hospital. James is also an Associate Professor at the University of Otago, Wellington. He has a sub-specialist interest in asthma and COPD and was lead for the previous NZ National Asthma audit. He is a Fellow of the Thoracic Society of Australia New Zealand (TSANZ) NZ branch and Co-Chief Investigator of the Australia New Zealand Respiratory Audit Program (ANZRAP).
James also teaches as a Senior Clinical Lecturer at the University of Otago, Wellington and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board and Asthma and COPD guidelines committees of the Asthma and Respiratory Foundation New Zealand.
A/Prof Vidya Navaratnam is a respiratory physician and trained epidemiologist. Her research interests focus on utilising routinely collected health data (including the use of electronic healthcare records) to conduct large-scale epidemiological studies and health services research in people with chronic lung disease.
Dr Amy Pascoe is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Chronic Respiratory Disease Research Group at Monash University and Alfred Health in Melbourne, Victoria. Her research interests include symptom-supportive care, health service delivery, and healthcare equity in chronic respiratory disease.
Associate Professor Shivanthan Shanthikumar is a paediatric respiratory physician and researcher specializing in childhood asthma. He is the lead of the Complex Asthma service at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and head of the Respiratory group at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. Associate Professor Shanthikumar is passionate about bridging the gap between scientific discovery and clinical practice, ensuring that new insights translate into tangible benefits for patients. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, authored to paediatric asthma guidelines through the Paediatric Improvement Collaborative, assessed quality of asthma care in Victoria, and served as a clinical lead of the SaferCare Victoria Improving Childhood Asthma Management program. He regularly delivers education to clinicians regarding childhood asthma. He also works closely with consumers via multiple collaborations with Asthma Australia. Through his clinical care, research, education, and advocacy, Associate Professor Shanthikumar hopes to significantly reduce the burden associated with childhood asthma.
Prof Quint leads the Respiratory Electronic Health Record group, a clinical epidemiology research group whose interests centre on using various sources of de-identified, routinely collected electronic healthcare records to study a number of respiratory diseases. Work centres on maximising the quality, linkage and usage of these data for clinical and research purposes. Many of the outputs are used for informing policy, and in the planning and allocation of resources.
She leads NHSEngland’s Respiratory Data Strategy and is the Associate Director for the HDR UK A+LUK Respiratory Data Catalyst. She partners with the Royal College of Physicians where she is the Analysis Lead for the National Respiratory Audit Programme and is co-lead of the HDR UK Inflammation and Immunity Driver Program. She currently serves as joint Editor-in-chief of the journal Thorax.
Alexander Adamson is a Research Associate in Medical Statistics at Imperial College London, where he conducts analyses for the National Respiratory Audit Programme (England and Wales). He completed his PhD at Imperial in 2022, focusing on the evaluation of strategies to reduce the burden of COPD using Bayesian methods. Prior to this, he obtained a Master’s degree in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford. In addition to his audit work, he is involved in numerous projects using Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) data, a large electronic healthcare record database comprising UK general practice records. His research interests include coding systems, Bayesian statistics, machine learning, and the analysis of large- scale electronic healthcare record data.
Professor Vijaya Sundararajan is the National Director of Health Equity Research, St Vincent’s Health Australia. She initially qualified as a general physician before completing research fellowships in epidemiology and health services research. She is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians.
Upon arriving in Australia, she worked to develop Victoria’s data linkage capabilities, secured funding for the establishment of the Centre for Victorian Data Linkage and served as its Inaugural Director until 2011.
Professor Sundararajan has been a Chief Investigator on 5 NHMRC/MRFF grants, published 216 peer reviewed papers and on the Editorial Board of the journal Health Services Research and the World Health Organization’s Topic Advisory Group on Quality and Safety. She has also served as Head, Department of Public Health, La Trobe University.
Vijaya’s research aims to understand health outcomes in chronic disease from diagnosis to the end of life and to investigate health system efficiency and equity.
