National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, The Australian National University

Gabriele Bammer is a Professor at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health in the Research School of Population Health at The Australian National University. She is also an ANU Public Policy Fellow, as well as a Research Fellow at the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She is interested in research implementation relating to complex real world problems, as well as synthesis of disciplinary and stakeholder knowledge and understanding and managing diverse unknowns. She argues that these form the basis for a new discipline of Integration and Implementation Sciences (I2S; see i2s.anu.edu.au) The discipline is described in Disciplining Interdisciplinarity: Integration and Implementation Sciences for Researching Complex Real-World Problems (ANU E Press, 2013).

Amanda is currently acting Executive Director, Policy Coordination and Governance in the Commonwealth Treasury.  Prior to that Amanda led Treasury’s Social Policy Division and came to Treasury having worked for many years in Commonwealth and State governments on major social policy agendas, such as problem gambling reform and housing in remote Indigenous communities.  Before discovering the unique joys and challenges of public policy, Amanda was a practising lawyer and worked as in-house counsel at the Department of Indigenous Affairs in Western Australia and the Northern Land Council, the peak Indigenous land body in the Northern Territory.  Despite not being a Melbourne resident for almost 20 years she continues a strange passion for the St Kilda football club.

Jacquie Brown is Head of International Development with Triple P International and a consultant with the National Implementation Research Network, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has extensive experience in using implementation frameworks to support effective implementation and scale up of evidence-informed programmes and practices in complex systems in the health, education and child and family services sector. Jacquie brings 30 years of experience from an organisational perspective having been a senior manager in a large, dispersed, decentralised not-for-profit organisation. She also brings international experience and her most recent work includes supporting implementation in low and middle income countries.

Aaron Lyon, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine. He is also Co-Director of the School Mental Health Assessment, Research, and Training (SMART) Center, an implementation research and technical assistance center dually housed in UW’s School of Medicine and College of Education. Dr. Lyon’s research focuses on increasing the accessibility and effectiveness of psychosocial interventions for children, adolescents, and families, delivered within contexts that routinely provide care to chronically underserved populations (e.g., low socioeconomic status and ethnic minority youth). Dr. Lyon’s recent projects have focused specifically on promoting mental health practitioner behavior change and the uptake of evidence-based practices by clinicians working in schools and community mental health settings. He is particularly interested in (1) the identification and implementation of low-cost, high-yield practices – such as the use of standardized assessment tools for outcome monitoring – to reduce the gap between typical and optimal practice in low-resource service contexts; (2) methods of promoting flexible and effective implementation of evidence-based psychosocial interventions for youth and families; and (3) development and adaptation of health-information technologies for use by community-based mental health practitioners. Dr. Lyon is currently Principal Investigator on a National Institute of Mental Health Career Development Award to study the adaptation and implementation of a computerized measurement feedback system for clinical progress monitoring among school-based clinicians. He is also a Co-Investigator on a grant funded by the Institute of Education Sciences to develop a brief, modular, contextually appropriate psychosocial intervention for youth experiencing a range of mental health problems in schools.

Allison Metz, Ph.D., is a developmental psychologist, Co-Director of the National Implementation Research Network (NIRN), and Scientist at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Allison specializes in the implementation, mainstreaming, and scaling of evidence to achieve social impact for children and families in a range of human service and education areas, with an emphasis on child welfare and early childhood service contexts.

Allison’s work focuses in several key areas including:  the development of evidence-informed practice models; the use of effective implementation and scaling strategies to improve the application of evidence in service delivery systems; and the development of coaching, continuous quality improvement, and sustainability strategies.

Allison currently directs several national initiatives to build the capacity of major philanthropies and intermediary organizations to support jurisdictions in using evidence to improve outcomes for children and families. These initiatives include the Partnership to Build Implementation Capacity for Child Welfare with Casey Family Programs; the Healthy Places North Carolina Initiative with the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust; and the Effective Implementation of Early Childhood Evidence-Based Home Visiting statewide.

Allison serves on several national advisory boards and is an invited speaker and trainer internationally. She is currently a Program Chair for the Global Implementation Conference, a part of the Global Implementation Initiative. She is co-editor of the recently published volume Application of Implementation Science to Early Childhood Program and Systems.

Tricia has been the Chief Executive Director of Wanslea Family Services since 2004.  Wanslea provides family support, out of home care, community capacity building and a range of children’s services in metropolitan, rural and regional areas of Western Australia.

Tricia has worked in the community not for profit sector in NSW and Western Australia for over thirty years, primarily in management positions, with a focus on child protection, homelessness, family violence and children’s services.

Tricia is also the Chair of the Children and Family Welfare Agencies Association; member of the boards of Community Employers of WA and Families Australia; member of the General Council of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of WA and the Ministerial Advisory Committee for Child Protection. She has a degree in Social Work, Master of Service Administration, graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors; is a Justice of the Peace and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management.

Professor Redman is CEO of the Sax Institute. The Sax Institute is funded by NSW Health to increase the impact of public health and health services research on policy and practice.  It is responsible for the 45 and Up Study, Australia’s largest study on health and ageing, and has developed innovative approaches to increasing the use of research by policy agencies. Professor Redman is a public health researcher with an interest in evaluating programs designed to improve health and health care. She has over 170 publications in peer reviewed journals and currently leads an NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence in increasing the use of research evidence in policy.  Professor Redman was previously the inaugural Director of the National Breast Cancer Centre, funded by Australia’s federal government to improve evidence-based care and outcomes for women with breast cancer.

Maree commenced as the Chief Executive of Family and Community Services in January 2012. Since starting, Maree has focused closely on service delivery and the role of caseworkers, as well as partnerships with government and non government organisations in key areas, such as the transition of out of home care. With a background in social work and the performing arts and a passion for innovation, Maree has more than 25 years of experience working in human services across both government and non government sectors, and is leading Family and Community Services' Social Investment Strategy.

Prior to joining Family and Community Services Maree spent 11 years as a senior executive with The Benevolent Society, Australia's oldest charity. As General Manager, Operations Maree was responsible for all ageing, disability, community development, mental health, carer respite and child and family programs.

Maree was Chair of Association of Children's Welfare Agencies (ACWA), NSWs peak body for child and family services, for five years.

Clare is the Chief Executive of the Families Commission within which the new Social Policy Evaluation and Research Unit (SuPERU) is located.  SuPERU is working to increase the use of evidence by social sector decision-makers to improve the lives of individuals, children, families and whānau, and communities in New Zealand.  Clare has been the Chief Executive of the Families Commission and SuPERU since June 2013. Prior to this, Clare was a Deputy Government Statistician at Statistics New Zealand leading the Industry and Labour Statistics Group and before this the Organisation Direction Group. Clare joined Statistics New Zealand after roles at the Tertiary Education Commission, the Ministry of Housing, and Housing New Zealand. Originally from England, Clare has a background in strategy, policy, research, programme development, monitoring, and investment management in the public sector, both in New Zealand and in the UK. Clare lives in Wellington with her partner Graham and her children, Meg and Seth.

Daniel Whitaker is a Professor, and Director of the Division of Health Promotion and Behavior in the School of Public Health, and the Director of the National SafeCare Training and Research Center (NSTRC), which is housed in the Center for Healthy Development in the School of Public Health at Georgia State University. Whitaker received  his PhD in 1996 from the University of Georgia and worked as a scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 10 years before coming to Georgia State in 2008.  His work focuses on family violence, namely child maltreatment prevention and intimate partner violence prevention, with an interest in intervention research and implementation science.

Whitaker has published over 50 manuscripts and book chapters, including papers in the American Journal of Public Health, Child Maltreatment, and Aggression and Violent Behavior.  His work has been funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Justice, and the Administration on Children and Families.

Dr. Whitaker teaches courses in Health Promotion and Behavior.

Fred Wulczyn is a Senior Research Fellow at Chapin Hall. He is the 2011 recipient of the James E. Flynn Prize for Research and has been recipient of the National Association of Public Child Welfare Administrators' (NAPCWA) Peter Forsythe Award for leadership in public child welfare. He is lead author of Beyond Common Sense: Child Welfare, Child Well-Being, and the Evidence for Policy Reform (Aldine, 2005) and coeditor of Child Protection: Using Research to Improve Policy and Practice (Brookings 2007).

Dr. Wulczyn is director of the Center for State Foster Care and Adoption Data, a collaboration of Chapin Hall, the American Public Human Services Association, and other research partners. An expert in the analysis of administrative data, he was an architect of Chapin Hall's Multistate Foster Care Data Archive and constructed the original integrated longitudinal database on children's services in Illinois, now in use for more than 25 years. The databases he has developed give state administrators capacity to analyze key child welfare outcomes, compare outcomes across agencies and jurisdictions, project future service patterns, test the impact of policy and service innovations, and monitor progress.

Dr. Wulczyn also designed two major social experiments: the Child Assistance Program and the HomeRebuilders project. The Child Assistance Program was awarded the Innovations in Government Award from Harvard University and the Ford Foundation. Also in the realm of public policy, he developed the nation's first proposal to change the federal law limiting the ability of states to design innovative child welfare programs, which then led to the development of the Title IV-E waiver programs used by states to undertake system reform in child welfare programs. He continues to lead the field in developing alternative approaches to financing child welfare programs.

Dr. Wulczyn received a Ph.D. from the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. A graduate of Juniata College, he was awarded the distinguished Alumni Award for his contributions on behalf of children and families. He earned a M.S.W. from Marywood University, which honored him with its distinguished Alumni Award.