Professor Alex Brown

Professor Alex Brown is the Professor of Indigenous Genomics at The Kids Research Institute Australia and The Australian National University. He is an internationally leading Aboriginal clinician/researcher (Yuin Nation) who has worked his entire career in Aboriginal health in the provision of public health services, infectious diseases and chronic disease care, health care policy and research. He has family connections to Nowra, Wreck Bay and Wallaga Lake on the far south coast of NSW.

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Alex was the Aboriginal Health Equity Theme Leader SAHMRI from 2013 – 2023 and has been a Professor of Medicine at the University of Adelaide since 2019.
He has established three highly regarded research groups over the last 15 years and has built a career spanning public health, quantitative clinical epidemiology, mixed-method health service research, qualitative research, and implementation science, with an increasing focus on novel clinical trials in cardiometabolic disease within Indigenous communities.  

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In March 2023 he was the first Indigenous scientist appointed to the CSIRO Board.

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Professor Jason Kovacic

Jason graduated from University of Melbourne Medical School in 1994, and then undertook residency and cardiology training at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney. Jason then completed a PhD at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute (VCCRI) in Sydney in 2007, followed by a postdoc at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. He then moved to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, where he established his research program focusing on vascular diseases, while also practicing as a clinical cardiologist.

After over a decade in New York, in 2020 Jason returned to Australia to become Institute Director and CEO of the VCCRI. He now holds the position of the Robert M. Graham Chair and Professor of Cardiovascular Research at University of NSW and is also Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, USA.

He is the President of the Australian Cardiovascular Alliance (ACvA), and Co-Chair of the NSW Chapter of the Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes (AAMRI).

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