Our People

Neera Bhatia holds an LLB (Hons), Master of Laws from the UK, Doctorate in Law from Deakin University and a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education from Deakin University, Australia.  She is the Director of ‘Law, Health, and Society’ (LHS) research unit that critically evaluates health law, policy, regulation, and ethics to improve and advance well-being and health outcomes throughout society. Neera is an internationally recognised health law scholar, committed to public engagement and outreach. She has worked with international organisations such as the Nuffield Council on Bioethics (UK). She has an extensive track record of high-quality publications addressing research on end-of-life issues for children, emerging health and biotechnologies, and regulation of human reproduction focusing on assisted reproduction and reproductive tissues including human breast milk, human gametes as well as organ and tissue donation. Her research highlights concern about justice and equity in healthcare, and regulatory reform to improve socio-economic outcomes for individuals and vulnerable cohorts in society.  She actively engages with the wider community as an expert commentator in the media on topical issues in health law. 

Neera is currently the Deputy Chair, Deakin University Human Research Ethics Committee, and the former Faculty Chair, Human Ethics Committee. She has previously served as the health law stream leader for the Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law (AABHL). She has also previously been a member of several clinical ethics committees.

Professor Marilyn McMahon is Dean of Deakin Law School. She has taught and researched criminal law and procedure for many years, with a focus on legal responses to gendered violence. She also has a particular interest in the intersection of the criminal law and mental health systems. She has served as a consultant to the Victorian government and her work has been cited by law reform bodies in Australia and the United Kingdom. She is currently a member of the Sentencing Advisory Council, the Forensic Leave Panel and the Disciplinary Appeals Board. She was previously a member of the Mental Health Tribunal and the Intellectual Disability Review Panel.

Catherine has worked as an academic and infectious disease epidemiologist in health, university and government sectors for over 20 years, including Deakin University, University of Melbourne and NSW Health.  She is a Deakin Distinguished Professor and the inaugural Chair in Epidemiology and a specialist in research methods, antibiotic resistance and community transmission of infectious diseases, including COVID-19. Catherine has been a prominent public analyst during the COVID-19 response, keynote speaker, and advisor to industry, governments, and institutions globally, and an expert witness before parliamentary inquiries and the courts on COVID-19 matters. In 2023 she was invited by the Prime Minister to lead the health component of the Independent Inquiry into the Australian Government COVID-19 Response.

Professor Matthew Fuller-Tyszkiewicz is the Associate Dean for Research and Impact within the Faculty of Health (2024-present). Prior to this, he was the Associate Head of School (Research) in the School of Psychology. He also led the Data Science Unit in the Centre for Research into Social and Early Emotional Development across the human lifespan (SEED-Lifespan). With an impressive record of more than 300 academic publications and over $20 million in external research funding over the past decade, Professor Fuller-Tyszkiewicz’s work focuses on applications (and implications) of digital health use for mental health conditions.

Dr Marc Trabsky is an Associate Professor and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at La Trobe University. His DECRA examines the socio-legal implications of virtual autopsies in the twenty-first century. Marc has written Law and the Dead: Technology, Relations and Institutions (Routledge, 2019), which was awarded the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize in 2019, Death: New Trajectories in Law (Routledge, 2024) and he has co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Law and Death (Routledge, 2025).

Bruce Chen is a Senior Lecturer at the Deakin Law School. Bruce’s research interests are in bills of human rights and public law. He was an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University from 2021-2023. Bruce has provided expert media commentary and undertaken research on the rights implications of government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and related to this, the push for the enactment of an Australian Human Rights Act. He made a submission to the COVID-19 Response Inquiry Panel as part of the Commonwealth Government’s COVID-19 Response Inquiry in December 2023 (with Deakin Law School Associate Professor, Maria O’Sullivan). Prior to joining academia, Bruce worked in several senior legal and legal policy advisory positions within the Victorian public service, particularly in human rights and public law.

Ian Freckelton AO KC is a senior barrister and mediator in full-time practice throughout Australia. He holds undergraduate degrees in Arts and Law from the University of Sydney, a PhD from Griffith University and a higher doctorate, an LLD, from the University of Melbourne. Ian was called to the Bar in 1988 and took silk in 2007. He is currently listed in Best Lawyers for Public Law, Personal Injury Litigation and Commercial Law and Doyle’s Guide for Administrative Law, Public Law and Judicial Review. He has recently also been listed by Doyle’s Guide for Criminal Law. He has appeared in many high profile cases in relation to health law and associated areas throughout Australia and has an appellate, trial and advisory practice. He has won awards for pro bono advocacy. Ian has been also a judge of the Supreme Court in Nauru and a member of nine administrative tribunals. He is a member of the Coronial Council of Victoria and was a long-time examiner for specialisation in criminal law for the Law Institute of Victoria. He is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law, the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, and the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, as well as the Australasian College of Legal Medicine. Ian is a Professor of Law and a Professorial Fellow in Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne and an Honorary Professor of Forensic Medicine at Monash University. He is the Editor of the Journal of Law and Medicine and the Founding Editor of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law. He is the author of approximately 50 books on health law, evidence law, criminal law, coronial law, research misconduct, and administrative law and is widely internationally published – he is the author of over 750 articles and chapters of books and has given more than 800 talks at scholarly gatherings in over 40 countries. Recent books by Ian include Expert Evidence: Law, Practice Procedure and Advocacy (7th edn, Thomson Reuters, 2024); COVID-19: Law and Regulation (with Bennett and Wolf, OUP, 2023); and Public Health Law in Australia (with Bennett, Federation Press, 2023).  He is currently completing the second edition of his book on Coronial Law, Medicine and Practice (with Ranson) and an international book on Automatism (with Brookbanks, Mackay, Gröning and Morse). In 2021 Ian was appointed an Officer (AO) of the Order of Australia for “distinguished service to the law, and to the legal profession, across fields including health, medicine and technology” and in 2024 was awarded the highest honour bestowed by the International Academy of Law and Psychiatry, the Prix Philippe Pinel.

As Chief Executive Officer, Louisa provides strategic leadership for the Federation of Community Legal Centres Victoria. Louisa has worked as a Principal Solicitor in the community legal sector and in private practice, and spent 13 years living and working in low-income countries. In the Pacific, she was a Justice Adviser to the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands and partnered with community groups to advocate for the introduction of family violence legislation. In Africa, Louisa was named Anti-Corruption Lawyer of the Year in the Lawyer’s Weekly Women in Law Awards for her work with Senegalese Law Firms. Louisa is an elected member director of the Law Institute of Victoria Board. She loves helping kids to ‘grow inside outside’ through volunteering with Camp Cooinda and her local Scout troop, and has written two childrens’ books, one of which was presented as an official gift to the Duchess of Cambridge on her 60th Jubilee visit to the Pacific.

Dr Penny Gleeson is a Lecturer at Deakin Law School. Penny’s expertise is in public health law, regulation, public law, new health technologies and ethics. She has published in law, policy and medical journals on the regulation of drugs and new medical technologies. Her PhD thesis examined the political legitimacy of the regulation of therapeutic goods, with a particular focus on medicinal cannabis, medical abortion and mesh devices. Penny has spoken on these topics at domestic and international conferences. She was a senior executive in the Victorian public service and continues to contribute to policy and legislative reform in Australia and internationally, including as a consultant. Penny holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and an LLM from the University of Cambridge. She is a member of the European Consortium for Political Research’s Standing Group on Regulatory Governance, the Science and Democracy Network and the Australian Genetic Non-Discrimination Working Group.

Dr Piers Gooding is an Associate Professor at La Trobe Law School. His work focuses on the law and politics of disability and health. He is the author of A New Era for Mental Health Law and Policy: Supported Decision-Making and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2017) with Cambridge University Press, among other publications, and he is on the editorial board of the International Journal for Mental Health and Capacity Law and the International Journal of Disability and Social Justice. Piers has advised a range of international organisations and agencies, including the UN Special Rapporteurs for the rights of people with disabilities and the right to the highest attainable health, and the World Psychiatric Association.

Michael Gorton AM is a consultant at Russell Kennedy Lawyers, having been a Partner at the firm for nearly 40 years. He has more than 30 years’ experience advising the health and medical sector, assisting boards of health organisations to understand their legal obligations for effective governance, governance policies and implementing risk management strategies. He is the Chair of Peninsula Health, Chair of Wellways Australia and Chair of Holmesglen Institute (TAFE) and Board member of Latrobe Regional Hospital. He is the former Chair of Alfred Health, a past Board member of Ambulance Victoria and is the former Chair of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA). He is also a former Board member of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, and a former Chair of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission.

Dr Molly Johnston is an ARC Industry Fellow (commencing in 2025) at the Monash Bioethics Centre, Monash University. Molly has a background in reproductive science but her current research falls within the intersection between social science, bioethics, and regulation. Her research addresses ethical, social, and regulatory issues raised by human reproductive technologies, in particular assisted reproduction. She has previously worked on projects addressing advanced prenatal screening; egg freezing, disposition and donation; artificial intelligence for embryo assessment; and mitoHOPE, the clinical trial for mitochondrial donation in Australia.

Distinguished Professor Emma Kowal is Professor of Anthropology and Deputy Director of the Alfred Deakin Institute. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist who previously worked as a medical doctor and public health researcher in Indigenous health. Her research interests lie at the intersection of anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), and Indigenous studies. She is an award-winning researcher and educator and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. She sits on the Australian Health Ethics Committee and the Health Research Impact Committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council and is Past President of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). She has authored 150 publications including the monograph Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia and the collection Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World. Her latest book is Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity in Australia (Duke UP 2023).

Maria is an Associate Professor at the Deakin Law School and is the author of a number of international and national publications on the subject of human rights, public law and refugee law. During the Covid pandemic, she provided expert commentary on various human rights issue, including the legality of vaccine mandates, vaccine passports and amendments to the Victorian Public Health and Wellbeing Act. She continues to examine the interplay between health and human rights in her current work examining the use of ‘pseudolaw’ arguments in courts relating to vaccine mandates and the interaction between the anti-vaccination movement and extremist organisations. She also made a submission to the COVID-19 Response Inquiry Panel as part of the Commonwealth Government’s COVID-19 Response Inquiry in December 2023 (with Deakin Law School Senior lecturer, Bruce Chen).

In addition to Covid-related work, Maria has just commenced an analysis of the human rights implications of neurotechnology (such as Brain Computer Interface devices).

Tamsin Phillipa Paige is a Senior Lecturer with Deakin Law School. Her work is interdisciplinary in nature, using qualitative sociological methods to analyse (international) law. She also does law and literature research using popular fiction to understand social perceptions of the law. Her work has examined (among other things) Somali piracy, UN Security Council decision making, mental health in legal practice, the impact of the law of queer lives and wellbeing, and conflict based sexual violence. In a former life, she was a French trained, fine dining pâtissier.

Dr Hannah Pitt is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Health Transformation at Deakin University. She is a qualitative public health researcher and her research focuses on exploring the Commercial Determinants of Health and children and young people. She completed her PhD in 2018, which explored the influence and impact of sports betting advertising on children’s attitudes and consumption intentions. Her research interests have predominately explored the normalisation of gambling and the impact of gambling industry tactics on at risk population groups, such as children and young people, women, older adults, young men, people with intellectual disability, and those with a lived experience of gambling harm. More recently she has used her knowledge and expertise in gambling to explore the tactics used by other health harming industries such as alcohol and fossil fuels. Dr Pitt is also interested in understanding mechanisms that can help support the meaningful engagement of young people in public health responses to health harming industries.

Natalie is the principal lawyer and founder of Natalie Plumstead Legal Consulting. A practice dedicated to mental health law, advocacy and legislative drafting. Natalie is an experienced solicitor advocate and appears at mental health tribunals in Victoria and NSW. She has extensive experience in law reform as an instructor and legislative drafter in many areas of health law.

Natalie’s practice is focused on the human rights of her clients in mental health decision making. She is also a member of the Disability Committee of the Law Institute of Victoria.

MBBS(Adel.), MGPPsych(Monash), PhD(Adel.), FANZAHPE, FAMEE, PFHEA

Professor Gary D. Rogers is a health professions educational leader, learning and teaching scholar, public health researcher and general medical practitioner whose practice focused on HIV medicine and LGBTQIA+ health. He is Professor of Medical Education and Dean of the School of Medicine at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. Gary is a former President of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators (ANZAHPE). His current research focuses on the affective learning associated with the acquisition of professional and interprofessional values among health professional students, as well as widening access to health professional education as a health workforce strategy

Alexandra holds a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Laws (Hons), and is the current Manager, Regulation and Compliance at the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority, a Victorian statutory authority which regulates IVF clinics. Alexandra has also worked in policy and as the Legal Officer at the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, which included managing appeals and membership conduct matters. She is also currently a Teaching Associate at Monash University Law Faculty.

Alexandra’s research interests include the regulation of assisted reproductive treatment and donor conception, the regulation of medical practitioners, health complaint schemes and the intersection of medical ethics and law.

Professor Julian Savulescu is the Chen Su Lan Centennial Professor in Medical Ethics and Director for the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS). He is an award-winning ethicist and moral philosopher trained in neuroscience, medicine, and philosophy who has held the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford since 2002.  He is a Visiting Professorial Fellow in Biomedical Ethics at Murdoch Children’s Research institute and Distinguished International Visiting Professor in Law at the University of Melbourne where he leads the Biomedical Ethics Research Group. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bucharest. As of March 2024, Prof Savulescu has a h-index of 89, over 420 publications cited at least 10 times and 31,255 citations to his work. He was ranked the top 0.04% of all scholars globally in 2022 by Stanford University-Elsevier. Scholar GPS also ranked him No.1 in the world in bioethics for all time and No.1 in the world in medical ethics for all time for 2022.

Professor Samantha Thomas is Professor of Public Health at the Institute for Health Transformation, Deakin University. Samantha is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Health Promotion International, a Q1 Oxford University Press journal. She is a Board Member of ICARA – the International Confederation of Alcohol, Tobacco and other Drug Research Associations.

Her current research focuses on the social, commercial and political determinants of health, with particular interest in the impact of harmful and predatory industries on the health and equity of women and children. Her projects have investigated the corporate and political tactics of the gambling industry, the fossil fuel industry, and the alcohol industry. Her most recent research investigates the commercial capture of women’s health, with a particular focus on menopause, as well as the presentation of health and social equity for women and children in industry CSR documents. She had completed a number of studies investigating how messages about health and wellbeing are framed by powerful stakeholders, and the role of the public health and health promotion communities in reframing unhelpful narratives from those with vested interests. She has a strong commitment to the engagement of lived experience perspectives in advocating for government reforms of industries that are harmful for health and wellbeing.

Samantha has an extensive track record in competitive grant funding. She has received funding from the ARC Discovery and Linkage Grant Schemes, the NHMRC, VicHealth, the Victorian Department of Justice, the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation, BUPA, Gambling with Lives (UK) and the NSW Office of Gambling. Her research has led to over 150 peer reviewed publications mostly in Q1 journals including the BMJ, Social Science and Medicine, BMC Public Health, Health Promotion International, Qualitative Health Research, the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, and Critical Public Health.

James Tibballs was an intensive care physician at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne Australia from 1979-2022. He obtained a broad education in science, medicine, education, law, business administration and arts (language) at several Australian universities including the University of Melbourne, Monash University and Deakin University and has specialist medical qualifications in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine.  His university degrees and diplomas and fellowships in professional bodies include: 

B Med Sci (Hons), 1970, Monash University, Melbourne. 

MB BS, 1973, Monash University, Melbourne. 

FFARACS*, 1979, (Fellow of Faculty of Anaesthetists, Royal Australasian College of Surgeons).(replaced by  FANZCA) 

FANZCA, 1992, (Fellow of the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists) 

MEd, 1992, (Master of Education) The University of Melbourne 

FFICANZCA*, 1993, (Fellow of Faculty of Intensive Care, Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists) (replaced by FJFICM) 

MBA, 1998, (Master of Business Administration) Deakin University 

MD, 1999, (Doctor of Medicine) The University of Melbourne (Australian Venom Research Unit, Department of Pharmacology) 

FACTM, 2001-2005 (Fellow of the Australasian College of Tropical Medicine) 

FJFICM* 2002, (Fellow of the Joint Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine) (replaced by FCICM) 

MHlth&MedLaw, 2006, (Master of Health and Medical Law), The University of Melbourne. 

GDipArts (Fr), 2007, (Graduate Diploma of Arts – French) The University of Melbourne. 

FACLM, 2007-2020 (Fellow of Australian College of Legal Medicine)  

PGDipArts (Fr) 2009, (Postgraduate Diploma of Arts – French) The University of Melbourne. 

FCICM, 2010-2022 (Fellow of the College of Intensive Care Medicine) 

DALF, 2011 (Diplôme Approfondi de Langue Française) 

PhD, 2019, (Adoption d’un remède antiscorbutique en France), The University of Melbourne 

     (* superseded by later qualification) 

His curriculum vitae includes 250 publications of scientific, medical and legal articles in journals and as book chapters. His research and teaching interests included resuscitation, poisoning, envenomation, paediatrics and the law and ethics related to medical negligence, organ donation and procurement and the “shaken baby syndrome”. Original scientific contributions include the determination of the effects of diverse Australian venomous animals including those of several snake species, Box-jelly fish, Irukandji jellyfish and Funnel-web spiders, and the development of an antivenom for the latter. Clinical contributions include formulation of World resuscitation guidelines and the development of in-hospital emergency medical systems to prevent cardiac arrest in children, subsequently adopted world-wide.  He is a Francophile, spends 3 months in France each year and teaches intermediate-advanced French as a hobby. He holds the honorary academic position of Associate Professor in the departments of Paediatrics and of Pharmacology, The University of Melbourne.