Introducing you to the current Executive Committee for the Sexual Health Society of Victoria.
The following committee was voted in at the SHSOV AGM in May, 2021.
Associate Professor Eric Chow, President
Associate Professor Eric Chow is a sexual health epidemiologist at the Central Clinical School, Monash University, the Head of Health Data Management and Biostatistics Unit at the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre, Alfred Health, and an honorary principal fellow at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne. His research focuses on male HPV vaccination programs and novel interventions for STI prevention and control. He has received several national and international research awards including the Levinia Crooks Emerging Leader Award in Blood Borne Viruses and Sexually Transmissible Infections (2020) and Commonwealth Health Minister’s Award for Excellence in Health and Medical Research (2020).
Dr Lenka Vodstrcil, Vice President
Dr Lenka Vodstrcil is a Senior Research Fellow and epidemiologist in sexual and reproductive health at the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre-Central Clinical School, Monash University. Her translational
research program focuses on improving treatment strategies for bacterial vaginosis and other STIs that are refractory or resistant to current therapies.
Professor Jane Tomnay, Treasurer
Professor Jane Tomnay has worked in sexual health for almost 30 years, most of her working life has been in partner notification and rural sexual health where she has provided direct clinical care to clients, advice informing public policy, published in peer reviewed academic journals and overseen the strategic development of rural programs.
Jane took up the position of the Director, Centre for Excellence in Rural Sexual Health at the University of Melbourne in 2009. Jane was trained at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne as a Registered Nurse and has a Master of Health Science and a PhD in Public Health. Jane was a member of the WHO HIV Testing Services Guideline Development Group in 2018 and 2019 and has worked in the WHO Southeast Asia and Pacific region as a consultant for HIV Partner Notification Services and HIV Testing Services. She was the President of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Nurses in AIDS Care between 2008 – 2011 and is the immediate past President of the Sexual Health Society of Victoria, a position she held between 2017 and 2020.
She is also a committed Sydney Swans football supporter and holds a 3rd dan black belt in Taekwondo.
Dr Amie Bingham, Secretary, Website Administrator
With a background in sociological research, Amie has been a mixed methods academic in the public health arena for over a decade. Her sexual health work has focused on marginalised and hard-to-reach populations, including out-of-school youth, sex workers, and rural populations, strongly informed by a social determinants of health and social ecological lens.
More broadly, her work has focussed on health systems and workforce, particularly on primary care and the provision of care to marginalised or under-served populations. Current research interests include the sexual and reproductive health of rural young people, rural health workforce, particularly the impact of rural clinical training for medical students in developing a rural health workforce, and also understanding the role of ‘place’ in determining health outcomes. Amie is currently the lead researcher for the Monash Medical Student Tracking Study, Rural Clinical School, Monash University.
Associate Professor Christopher Fisher, Memberships Coordinator
Associate Professor Christopher M. Fisher works in the areas of Sexual and Public Health. Christopher takes a leading role in research on young peoples’ sexual health and wellbeing. A major focus of the work is on adolescent sexual health knowledge, behaviours and educational experiences (both formal and informal). His current work centres on the National Survey of Secondary Students and Sexual Health in Australia, using predominately quantitative population survey methods but also including qualitative work. Previous work has looked at the role of youth development professionals in Non-Govermental Organisations (e.g., youth groups) in providing sexual health information (qualitative and quantitative) as well as adolescent perspectives on promoting sexual health (qualitative). He has also conducted population-based research in LGBTIQ health (quantitative) and HIV prevention and care (mixed methods evaluation).
Dr. Fisher currently serves as the Graduate Research Coordinator at ARCSHS and is the Course Coordinator for the new Graduate Certificate in Sex, Health and Society. He also maintains a Director Emeritus role at the Midlands Sexual Health Research Collaborative and Adjunct position in Health Promotion at the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Public Health in the USA.
Dr Lydia Di Stefano, Medical Representative & Social Media Co-ordinator
Lydia is a junior doctor currently completing her internship. She is passionate about maternal, newborn, reproductive and sexual health, and is forever balancing clinical medicine with research in this field. Lydia’s degrees include a MSc from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where she studied stillbirth in low-income settings, and a BMedSc(Hons) undertaken at the University of Oxford and focusing on the ethics of artificial wombs.
Associate Professor Jason Ong, ASHA Representative
Jason is a sexual health physician and health economist based at Melbourne Sexual Health Centre and an academic with joint appointments at Monash University, University of Melbourne and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His passion is to ensure access to comprehensive sexual health services to all who need it, particularly marginalized populations in Australia and beyond.
He is also actively involved in committees of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians Chapter of Sexual Health Medicine, the Australasian Sexual Health Alliance, and the Australasian Society of HIV, viral hepatitis and Sexual Health Medicine.
He is the Special Issues Editor for Sexual Health; Associate Editor for BMJ’s Sexually Transmitted Infections and BMC Infectious Diseases; and Editorial Board Member for Sexually Transmitted Diseases.
Dr Jacqueline Coombe, General Representative
Dr Jacqueline Coombe is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, working on a NHMRC funded Partnership Grant which aims to develop a model for strengthening chlamydia case management in general practice. Jacqueline’s research interests broadly lie in sexual and reproductive health, particularly (non-)use of long-acting reversible contraception, and pregnancy intention. More recently, she has been leading a project exploring the sexual and reproductive health impact of COVID-19 on people living in Australia. Jacqueline is a qualitative researcher, with a particular interest in the use of free-text comments collected in health surveys as qualitative data.
Mr Michael Traeger, Grants Coordinator
Michael completed a Master of Science in Epidemiology in 2017, and is currently undertaking a PhD at the Burnet Institute with a focus on STI epidemiology and prevention among gay and bisexual men using HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis. Michael’s research involves using large sentinel surveillance datasets to monitor epidemiological trends in blood-borne viruses and STIs among priority populations and to evaluate large-scale public health interventions.
Dr Erica Plummer, Executive Assistant
Dr Erica Plummer is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Bioinformatician with the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre, Central Clinical School, Monash University. Erica’s broad research interests include women’s health, sexual heath and the genital microbiome. Erica’s research uses next generation sequencing data to understand the contribution of the genital microbiome to common genital infections, and she is particularly interested in determining how interventions, behavioural practices and sexual practices influence the composition of the genital microbiome.
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