Medical Science Review Board

The MSRB comprises a range of leading experts and includes:

Professor Sharon Lewin AO is a world-leading infectious diseases expert, the inaugural Director of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, a Professor of Medicine at The University of Melbourne and a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Practitioner Fellow. Prof Lewin’s laboratory focuses on basic, translational and clinical research aimed at finding a cure for HIV and understanding the interaction between HIV and hepatitis B virus. She is also the Chief Investigator of a NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence (CRE), and works to bring together Australia’s leading experts in clinical, laboratory and public health research to address the key components required for a rapid and effective emergency response to infectious diseases.

Dr Elane Zelcer is a Commercialisation Advisor and former Executive Director of Monash’s Innovation Precinct. Elane’s career has spanned academic, executive management, director, and management consulting roles, almost exclusively focused on life sciences and medical technologies. Her experience includes private sector, universities, CRCs, and Federal and State government committees. 

Alan Liddle has over 30 years’ experience in developing and commercialising medical and biological therapeutics and in research & executive management in the medical and the biotechnology research sector. Alan is Executive Director of Sangui Bio a company he cofounded in 2014. Sangui is commercialising its discoveries in the role of red blood cells in immune system activation and regulation. Alan co-founded and was CEO & Director of Immune System Therapeutics Ltd from 2001 to 2011. He was also the Founder, CEO & Director of MicroMedical Industries Limited from 1986. Prior to his biomedical career Alan was a neuropsychologist researcher at the University of Sydney. He was the co-inventor of the rehabilitation software program: Dynamind3D. Alan holds a BA (Hons) from the University of Sydney and MBA from the University of NSW and is a fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

Professor Ross Coppel is Senior Deputy Dean and Director of Research of the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University. He is an internationally recognised scientist for his work in the fields of malaria and primary biliary cirrhosis. Ross was a member of the advisory committee that oversaw bioinformatics of the malaria genome project and he administered the malaria sequence database for the World Health Organization (WHO). He was a founder of the PlasmoDB consortium, a project to develop an organism-specific database that simplifies the analysis and exploitation of genomic sequence data by biologists. He is Director and a founding member of the Victorian Bioinformatics Consortium.

Associate Professor Sarah Kummerfeld is the Scientific Head of the Kinghorn Centre for Clinical Genomics at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. She uses genomics to understand human disease and translate findings into clinical diagnostics and treatments. Sarah completed her PhD in Computational Biology at the University of Cambridge, working on protein structure and function prediction. Her postdoctoral research at Stanford University studied the molecular basis of human ageing.

Sarah has worked both in academia and industry, including 10 years as a Scientist at Genentech, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. At Genentech, she used large-scale genomics approaches to understand why only some patients respond to treatment and to identify diagnostic biomarkers that predict response to particular drugs. Sarah is dedicated to bringing applying advances in genomics research to benefit patients.

Dr Sarah Gutman is a Cardiologist and PhD candidate at The Alfred and The Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute.