Emerging Thought Leaders from 2022

Our Emerging Thought Leaders are early-mid career researchers and operational subject matter experts, selected for their passion to improve health and their drive to expand the reach of their insights in order to influence change.

Amanpreet Kaur

Research Fellow, The George Institute for Global Health

Dr Amanpreet Kaur is a registered clinical psychologist with M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from NIMHANS, Bengaluru. Her areas of focus at The George Institute are reducing stigma related to mental health, improving mental health awareness and care, and development and implementation of psychosocial interventions. Amanpreet’s research interests include mindfulness and mindfulness-integrated psychological interventions, tele-medicine, palliative care, psycho-oncology, caring of carers, and development of intervention and training programs for both clinical and non-clinical populations.

Amy Vassallo

Research Fellow, The George Institute for Global Health

Dr Amy Vassallo is a Research Fellow in the Global Women’s Health Program at The George Institute for Global Health. Her research focusses on understanding sex and gender-based blindness and bias within health and medical research and evidence-based solutions, including policy reform, to address these gaps. She is passionate about using innovation and evidence to improve health related outcomes for all.

Anna Campain

Biostatistician, The George Institute for Global Health

Dr Anna Campain is a biostatistician and joined The George Institute in 2018. She works extensively with routinely collected and linked health data. Anna has a special interest in using large and rich data to explore health patterns in high-risk or vulnerable populations. It is important to her that her research has a tangible impact, informing changes in clinical guidelines, health policy and resource management.

Bincy Mathew

Research Officer, The George Institute for Global Health

Bincy switched to research some years ago – finding it to be creative, intellectual and fulfilling, and a large part of her (her identity). Troubled by questions of the impact (in the short, medium, and long term) of her research on the lives of urban homeless people she works with, she is keen to translate her vision of research by working on/implementing ideas of co-production.

Carinna Hockham

Research Associate, The George Institute for Global Health

Carinna Hockham is a non-communicable disease epidemiologist with a keen interest in women’s health. Her research primarily involves the use of large population databases and routinely-collected health data to examine sex- and gender-based differences in chronic kidney disease risk factors, health outcomes and clinical management. She also works part-time as the Program Manager for the UK arm of the Global Women’s Health Program at The George Institute.

Faraidoon Haghdoost

PhD Candidate, The George Institute for Global Health

Faraidoon is a medical doctor from Kurdistan, Iran, and a researcher at The George Institute for Global Health. Faraidoon is interested in studying headache disorders, especially migraine disease, contributing to growing awareness of the need for headache-specific research and starting a headache-specific research group based on headache patients’ needs.

Faraidoon is interested in social media and engagement with scientists, healthcare providers and people with headache disorders.

Hueiming Liu

Senior Research Fellow, The George Institute for Global

Hueiming is a Senior Research Fellow, leading the process evaluation stream within the Centre for Health Systems Science. Her research focuses on the need for co-design of interventions with end-users, for innovative and efficient methods in theory-driven evaluations, and for an integrated population and health systems approach, to reduce health inequities. She is a conjoint Senior Lecturer, UNSW Sydney, and an Advanced Trainee in Public Health Medicine.

Kenneth Yakubu

Research Assistant and PhD candidate, The George Institute for Global Health

Yakubu trained as a family physician in Nigeria. His past research/advocacy efforts have focused on the expression of family medicine within an African context and understanding learning needs of trainees in family medicine. He is a PhD Student at The George Institute and UNSW Sydney. His Thesis will focus on human rights-based approaches for a sustainable global health workforce.

Manushi Sharma

Research Fellow, The George Institute for Global Health

Manushi Sharma is a public health professional with experience in health economics, health systems and policy research. She has a rich experience of working with developing country governments, think-tanks, and research organisations in the public and private sector. Presently, she is a Research Fellow at The George Institute for Global Health where she manages the Primary Health Care Research Consortium, a global LMIC-led network primary healthcare research network.

Mercian Daniel

Program Manager, The George Institute for Global Health

Mercian Daniel has a M.Phil. in psychiatric social work and a Ph.D. in public health. He has over 15 years of clinical, research, program implementation, and teaching experience working at different global, national, and regional hospitals, institutes, universities, and NGOs. Currently he provides operational leadership on the SMART mental health trial and leads a study (ANUMATI) to enhance resilience among older adolescents living in urban slums.

Pengpeng Ye

PhD candidate, The George Institute for Global Health

Pengpeng Ye graduated from the University of Adelaide, Australia with the degree of Master of Public Health in 2012. He is a third-year PhD candidate at The George Institute for Global Health and UNSW Sydney. His PhD thesis is focusing on the integration of falls prevention service into National Essential Public Health Service Package through epidemiology analysis, policy review, barriers and facilitators’ identification and participatory co-design.

Priya Limbu

Research assistant, The George Institute for Global Health

Priya is an aspiring researcher who believes in empowering the community to improve their health and develop solutions that best fit their needs. She has experience in extensive fieldwork, team building, and management. She is keen on developing leadership quality to engage stakeholders to improve health accessibility in remote settings. She holds a Master’s in Public health from the SRM University, Tamil Nadu.

Sandhya Kanaka Yatirajula

Senior Research Fellow, The George Institute for Global Health

Dr. Yatirajula Kanaka Sandhya or Sandhya for short, holds a PhD in social medicine and community from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has extensive experience of working on women's health and rights and sexual reproductive health and rights of women and adolescent girls from marginalised communities. As part of her work on empowering women and girls, she also engaged with men and boys to promote gender justice. Sandhya currently works as a senior research fellow with The George Institute for Global Health and is based in the Delhi office.

Sanne Peters

Senior Lecturer, The George Institute for Global Health

Sanne Peters is an Associate Professor at The George Institute for Global Health and Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London. She holds a joint appointment at UMC Utrecht. Her research focuses on sex differences in the aetiology, prevention, and treatment of non-communicable diseases, mainly cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Using large databases, she aims to quantify where those differences exist and to identify the underlying factors.

Shangzhi Xiong

PhD candidate, The George Institute for Global Health

Shangzhi Xiong, aka Benson, is a PhD candidate at The George Institute for Global Health and the UNSW Sydney. Enrolled in 2020 fall, his main research interests include primary health care, non-communicable diseases, and digital health. Besides work, Shangzhi is also a marvellous fan of movies, music, and song-writing.

Siddhardha Devarapalli

Research Fellow, The George Institute for Global Health India

Dr Siddhardha Devarapalli believes that research and teaching experience builds the confidence to influence change for good. Siddhardha trained in Population Studies with a Master of Population Studies from International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai; M.Phil/Ph.D in Population Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University and works in Public health, Epidemiology and Health systems at the Institute of Health Systems, Hyderabad and the George Institute for Global Health, India.

Sikhumbuzo Mabunda

Research Assistant and PhD candidate, The George Institute for Global Health

Dr Sikhumbuzo Mabunda is a South African Public Health Medicine specialist, a PhD candidate, and a research assistant at UNSW Sydney and The George Institute for Global Health. His PhD is focused on improving understanding of the design and implementation of training policies to provide better care to underserved populations in selected Southern African countries.

Xuejun Yin

PhD candidate, The George Institute for Global Health

Xuejun Yin's research has a strong focus on interventions that can have the greatest impact on health outcomes at a population level, and involves both qualitative and quantitative methods. She has participated in large scale cluster random control trials, population implementation studies around salt reduction strategies in low and middle-income countries, and exploratory studies to improve the health system and inform health policies in China.