Professor Louise Baur graduated in medicine from The University of Sydney in 1981 and subsequently trained in general paediatrics in Sydney and London. She was awarded a PhD in the area of paediatric nutrition from The University of Sydney in 1993. Louise is Professor of Child & Adolescent Health at The University of Sydney, and Associate Dean of The Children’s Hospital at Westmead Clinical School. She is a consultant paediatrician and Head of Weight Management Services at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Sydney, where she runs multidisciplinary clinical services for obese and pre-diabetic children and adolescents. Louise is also a member of the Prevention Research Collaboration based at the University of Sydney. The latter group undertakes a range of policy-relevant research in the areas of obesity, nutrition and physical activity.

Professor Baur’s research interests include the prevention of childhood obesity, the antecedents of obesity and the metabolic syndrome in childhood, the complications of paediatric obesity and the effective management of obesity and related disorders in a variety of clinical settings.

Professor Baur is on the Editorial Board of Pediatric Obesity (and was its Founding Editor-in-Chief from 2005-2010), is Founding Director of the Australasian Child & Adolescent Obesity Research Network and is a member of the NHMRC’s Prevention & Community Health Committee. She has a range of roles with the World Obesity Federation and is currently a member of the World Health Organization’s Working Group on the Science and Evidence for Ending Childhood Obesity. Louise is also a Director of World Vision Australia.

In 2010, Professor Baur was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) “for service to medicine, particularly in the field of paediatric obesity as a researcher and academic, and to the community through support for a range of children’s charities”.

Professor Adrian Bauman is an internationally recognised public health physician, researcher and teacher, with a special interest in physical activity and health research, practice and policy. He has a large research program around prevention, and is ranked among the leading public health researchers in the world. His research has made major contributions to prevention science, especially to understanding the many health benefits of increasing physical activity and reducing sitting time. He has had many leadership positions, and translates research into community-relevant findings that have influenced our understanding of prevention and physical activity, and made a difference to health of all Australians.

Professor Anderson is an international authority on the causes and management of stroke, and other aspects of cardiovascular disease. He conceives and conducts innovative largescale, collaborative, inter-disciplinary, epidemiological and clinical trials. His research generates reliable evidence to inform health care providers and policy makers in Australia and overseas, in their decisions regarding optimal strategies for the prevention and treatment of stroke and serious cardiac events. As well as promoting clinical and public health policies and capacity-building activities across the globe, particularly in Asia, he has published 300+ original scientific articles, books chapters and technical reports.

Professor Alexander has made globally significant contributions to the science of gene transfer and translation through to therapeutic applications in genetic and acquired diseases of childhood. He has played a pioneering role in the establishment of the gene therapy field in Australia, providing leadership in the formation of a specialist society, contributions to regulatory oversight, the introduction of gene transfer technologies to the Australian biomedical community, and through undertaking ground-breaking clinical trials. He has also been highly influential in championing the importance of basic science in paediatric medicine and in the development of an integrated approach to rare disease research.

Professor John Aitken’s research has laid the foundations for our current understanding of oxidative stress in the pathophysiology of male infertility and shaped the techniques that are currently being used to diagnose and address this condition. He has also pioneered the use of mass spectrometry to create the first definitive proteomic inventories of spermatozoa, creating databases that are now being used by gamete biologists all over the world. He has published >500 articles, which have been cited >25,000 times, generating an h-index of 85. In recognition of his services to science John was named as the NSW Scientist-of-the-year in 2012.