Our 2026 Annual Meeting, Scanning Horizons: Science, Health and the Decade Ahead, will tackle some of the most pressing strategic questions facing the health and medical research sector. How should Australia set priorities for future research investment? How is geopolitical disruption reshaping international research collaboration and funding? And how do we ensure that equity and inclusion are embedded in the way we plan for the future?

Alongside these big-picture discussions, the program also spotlights frontier science and innovation – from the role of AI in health decision-making to the links between urban environments and chronic disease prevention.

As well as a diverse scientific program, the meeting will include our annual gala dinner, the induction of the Academy’s new Fellows and a celebration of our prestigious honorific award winners.

Program information will be published here as it is released. 

Sir Jeremy Farrar OBE FRS FMedSci is the Assistant Director-General for Health Promotion, Disease Prevention and Care at the World Health Organization (WHO), where he leads the organization’s work on communicable and non-communicable diseases, health across the life course, health promotion and social determinants of health, and the impacts of environment and climate change on health. He previously served as WHO Chief Scientist (2023–2025), and prior to this, spent 10 years as Director of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest funders of health research.

A clinician scientist by training, Sir Jeremy spent more than 17 years as Director of the Clinical Research Unit Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. His clinical and scientific interests span integrated health sciences across a range of public health priorities including emerging infections, influenza, infections of the brain, HIV, dengue, typhoid, malaria, tuberculosis, snakebite, and antimicrobial resistance.