Associate Professor Jodie Ward is the Program Lead of the National DNA Program for Unidentified and Missing Persons at the Australian Federal Police and Director of the Australian Facility for Taphonomic Experimental Research (Australia’s body farm) at the University of Technology Sydney. This unique joint appointment facilitates her valuable contribution to the research, development and application of forensic human identification techniques for missing persons investigations in Australia. She has held previous operational forensic roles with the NSW Forensic and Analytical Science Service, NSW Police Force and Australian Federal Police, and academic forensic roles with the Canberra Institute of Technology and University of Canberra. She is a Churchill Fellow, International Commission on Missing Persons expert panel member, Missing Persons Advocacy Network board member, Forensic Genomics editorial board member, and Australian Academy of Forensic Sciences, Australian and New Zealand Forensic Science Society and International Society of Forensic Genetics professional member.

Dr. Claire Ferguson is a Senior Lecturer and researcher in the School of Justice, Faculty of Law at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane Australia. Claire’s work seeks to bridge the gap between academic research and forensic case work in complex death investigations. While she has published over 40 academic articles in many traditional journals, she also uses the research to inform training and expert consultancy for assisting police, attorneys, and Coroners investigating missing persons, equivocal deaths, and suspected homicides.

My clinical role has been a Paediatric Intensive Care Specialist for more than 30 years.  Other positions include national examiner for two Australasian colleges – Intensive Care and Physicians (Paediatrics).  I have an interest in population health and epidemiology, and hold a Master’s in Public Health degree, and my current research focus is Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy (SUDI).  I have chaired the Queensland Paediatric Quality Council since 2012 and the Council is investigating SUDI, as well as lessons learned from adverse events in hospitalised children.   

Dr Kathryn Turner is a Psychiatrist and Executive Director of Metro North Mental Health, a large mental health and addiction service in Brisbane, Australia. She has had a longstanding interest in education, training, and continuous improvement of quality and safety in healthcare systems, evaluation, and a focus on culture in the workplace. Dr Turner led the implementation of the Zero Suicide framework in her previous service, the Gold Coast Mental Health and Specialist Services. Her publications have demonstrated significant positive outcomes of this work. Dr Turner implemented a Restorative Just Culture framework into the service, providing support for consumers, carers, clinicians and the organization to heal, learn and improve following the loss of a consumer to suicide. In 2018, she was awarded the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists Margaret Tobin Award for administrative psychiatry.

Michael Buckland is a senior staff specialist and Head of the Department of Neuropathology at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney. He is also a Clinical Associate Professor in Pathology at the University of Sydney. A/Prof Buckland provides diagnostic neuropathology expertise to all three NSW forensic centres, operates the state CJD reference laboratory, and has busy ‘second opinion’ service for brain biopsy diagnostics.  A/Prof Buckland also has a strong research interest in the cellular and molecular changes underlying neurological disease. He is the Director of the Australian Sports Brain Bank, co-director of the MS Research Australia Brain Bank, and has published over 90 peer-reviewed scientific papers. These papers include the first reports of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in retired players of rugby league and Australian rules football.

Avelina is a Wangkamadla woman from Central-West Queensland and is the President of the Indigenous Lawyers Association of Queensland.  Avelina was admitted to the profession in 2009 and called to the Queensland bar in 2017. She has a general practice with focus on coronial, health, regulatory and administrative law jurisdictions. Before joining the private Bar, Avelina worked as a Government Legal Officer for the Coroners Court of Queensland, Office of the Health Ombudsman and Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.

Klaire is the principal lawyer and Director of the Coronial and Custodial Justice Practice at Caxton Legal Centre. She is responsible for the management of the Queensland Coronial Legal Service which is a program operated by Caxton Legal Centre and Townville Community Law. The Queensland Coronial Legal Service provides legal advice and support to families at all stages of the coronial process including representation at inquests. Klaire has significant experience working with families in the coronial jurisdiction as well as expertise in human rights, administrative law and other civil law areas. Klaire has worked in community legal centres and at Legal Aid Queensland for her entire career and has a passion for social justice and human rights issues.

Kylie is a barrister at the Victorian Bar and Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School where she teaches in the Masters program on human rights law in Australia.

Kylie is widely published on the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities, including co-authoring the Annotated Victorian Charter of Rights (Second edition, Lawbook Co, 2019).

In addition to her practice at the Victorian Bar, Kylie provides training to government and public authorities on administrative law and the Charter.

She holds first class honours undergraduate degrees in Law and Commerce from the University of Melbourne and a Masters of Law (first class honours) from the University of Cambridge.

Prior to being called to the Bar, Kylie was Associate to the late Honourable Justice David Hunt AO QC at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1999 and a Research Fellow for the Honourable Professor James Crawford AC SC FBA (now a Justice of the International Court of Justice) from 2002-2005.

Professor Jeanine Young is a registered nurse, midwife, and neonatal nurse.

Jeanine’s has a special interest in the development of evidence-based, culturally appropriate and practical strategies and educational resources to support families with young infants to incorporate Safe Sleep recommendations into the care of their baby. A particular focus is the development of individually tailored, community based, wrap around care interventions to address the multiple disadvantages experienced by families with social vulnerabilities who experience the greatest burden of infant mortality.

Jeanine is a ministerial appointment to the Queensland Child Death Review Board, and member of the Red Nose National Scientific Advisory Group, and Queensland Paediatric Quality Council.

Jeanine was awarded Member of the Order of Australia in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2020 for her significant contributions to medical research, tertiary education and nursing.

Lindy Willmott is a Professor of Law and member of the Australian Centre for Health Law Research in the Faculty of Business and Law at the Queensland University of Technology. She researches extensively in the end-of-life field, particularly in relation to assisted dying. She has co-authored multiple texts as well as the website ‘End of Life Law in Australia’, and is involved in empirical research projects funded by the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council. Lindy co-leads a project funded by the Commonwealth Department of Health to provide legal training to medical specialists, nurses and allied health professionals and projects funded by the Victorian and Western Australian Departments of Health to provide legal training to medical practitioners on voluntary assisted dying. She was formerly a  Board member of Palliative Care Australia and Commissioner with the Queensland Law Reform Commission.

Sidney Dekker (PhD Ohio State University, USA, 1996) is Professor and Director of the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and Professor at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Delft University in the Netherlands. Sidney has lived and worked in seven countries across four continents and won worldwide acclaim for his groundbreaking work in human factors and safety. He coined the term ‘Safety Differently’ in 2012, which has since turned into a global movement for change. It encourages organizations to declutter their bureaucracy and provide people freedom-in-a-frame to make things go well—and to offer compassion, restoration and learning when they don’t. An avid piano player and pilot, he has been flying the Boeing 737 for an airline on the side. Sidney is bestselling author of, most recently: Foundations of Safety Science; The Safety Anarchist; The End of Heaven; Just Culture; Safety Differently; The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’; Second Victim; Drift into Failure; Patient Safety and his latest: Compliance Capitalism. He has co-directed the documentaries ‘Safety Differently,’ 2017; ‘Just Culture,’ 2018, ’The Complexity of Failure,’ 2018, and ‘Doing Safety Differently,' 2019. Stanford has ranked Sidney among the world’s top 2% most influential scientists: his work has some 15000 citations and an h-index of 53.