Our Speakers
Dr Karen Wynter
Karen is a Senior Research Fellow at Monash University’s Centre for Women’s and Children’s Mental Health. She approaches perinatal mental health research from a multidisciplinary perspective, incorporating her background and experience in Psychology, Education, Public Health and Health Service Research. She is one of Australia’s leading researchers in men’s transition to parenthood, including fathers’ mental health, relationships and experiences of engaging with health services. She is the current President of the Australasian Marcé Society for Perinatal Mental Health, and co-convenor of the annual Australian Fatherhood Research Symposium.
Ben Rogers
Ben is Director of Health Professional Education at Movember, a leading charity changing the face of men’s health around the world. Ben is currently leading the design and implementation of health professional training on gender responsive healthcare for men, in Australia and other Movember markets.
Ben has over a decade of clinical mental health experience, including a focus on supporting boys, men and fathers through life’s challenges. Alongside his clinical work, Ben has a track record in leading complex programs and professional development training initiatives in both Australia and the UK. This includes in his previous role at the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health (Emerging Minds), where he managed a team of clinicians, researchers, and content creators, to successfully implemented a portfolio of evidence-based workforce training and e-CPD programs across the country.
Ben’s approach to enriching the learning experience for health professionals, is through innovative curricula and e-learning, website content, animations, webinars, and podcasts, and by championing consumer voices and lived experience in its design.
A/Professor Richard Fletcher
A/Professor Richard Fletcher leads the Fathers and Families Research program, College of Health, Medicine and Wellbeing, in the University of Newcastle. Richard research focuses on fathers’ mental health, attachment, coparenting, rough and tumble play and use of services. He is Principal Investigator of the SMS4dads program for new and expecting fathers and SMS4DeadlyDads for Aboriginal fathers. His book “The Dad Factor: How the Father-Baby Bond Helps a Child for Life” has been translated into 5 languages.
Craig (Bourkie) Hammond
SMS4DeadlyDads Indigenous Leader
Craig Hammond is a Kamilaroi man from Moree North West NSW. He comes from a large family of eleven and is a proud father of two sons and grandfather to four granddaughters. He has been actively involved in the Indigenous community of Newcastle for over 30 years.
In his role with the University of Newcastle Craig has worked with Health Services, Education Departments and Correctional Services delivering programs such as Deadly Streaming (a cultural identity program for youth), Brothers Inside (a strengths-based fathering program, and SMS4DeadlyDads (a digital service for new and expecting fathers).
Craig is currently working in communities throughout Australia as the SMS4DeadlyDads Indigenous Leader building on this work to deliver strengths-based messages and support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander fathers in health and education settings. He is committed to embedding strong cultural ties, identity and family connectedness.
Izaak Lim
Izaak Lim is a child and adolescent psychiatrist working in a public perinatal and infant mental health service in Melbourne. He is currently undertaking PhD research investigating the influence of fathers on the development of child anxiety. His clinical interests include family-based approaches to care, and recovery from intergenerational trauma.
Alison Wallbank
Alison Wallbank is the Clinical Nurse Consultant in Child and Family Health at Tresillian. With 24 years of experience in the perinatal health space, she has worked as a midwife, child and family health nurse, and manager within child and family health services. These roles have provided her with valuable insight into the challenges families face within healthcare systems. She recognises that while current models of care focus on woman- and child-centred care, they often overlook the unique needs of men as they transition to fatherhood. Alison is passionate about addressing this gap, acknowledging both the joys and challenges that come with fatherhood.
Alison is excited to contribute to the integration of father-inclusive care at Tresillian and within the wider field of child and family health nursing. Her greatest hope is that her three sons will benefit from truly father-inclusive perinatal and parenting health support and education.
Rose Jackson is a Labor Member of the NSW Legislative Council and Minister for Mental Health, Housing, Homelessness, Youth, Water and the North Coast. Rose was elected to the Legislative Council in May 2019 and has been fighting for real action on climate change and tackling homelessness and housing affordability.
Rose has also held a variety of roles within the labour and union movement including Assistant Secretary of NSW Labor and as an official for United Voice (formerly LHMU.)
Rose lives with her family in Rockdale and is passionate about making our society fairer for everyone.
Speakers
Libba is an experienced trauma informed psychotherapist in private practice in Sydney as well as being a long term mindfulness practitioner. She is a co-founding Director of the charity Openground – Australian Centre for Mindfulness and Compassion, and been teaching MBSR through Openground since 2007.
Libba was the Director of Organisational programs and in this capacity has led many successful mindfulness and leadership programs in the corporate, educational, health and community sectors. She also pioneered the Mindfulness for Veterans, Family Members and Carers Program which was independently researched and found strong, clinically meaningful and lasting reductions in PTSD symptoms, anger reactivity and psychological distress.
Libba also recently led the first 8 week mindfulness programs to Federal Parliamentarians and their staffers and is on the Australian Expert Panel to the Global Mindfulness Initiative which supports the cultivation of mindfulness and compassion amongst legislators worldwide to shift political culture and elicit wiser policy making.
Prior to that Libba worked as a litigation lawyer for 14 years, including at partnership level, and because of this background, has been passionate about sharing the possibilities for self discovery and freedom that mindfulness can offer. She brings enormous energy and enthusiasm to her work with individuals and organisations, opening people to the best in themselves and their lives.
A/Prof Loyola McLean is a Consultation-Liaison Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist in public, private and academic practice with interests in the attachment, trauma and bodymind interface; stress system disorders; psychotherapy and delivering trauma-informed care (TIC) within a whole of system approach. She works in settings of acute, chronic and complex trauma across the continuum of care, working with varying levels of disorder and disability and seeks to promote recovery, resilience and flourishing, including in the crucial perinatal period. Her Adult Attachment Interview Coder and Trainer experience influences her clinical, teaching and research work, as does her lived experience as a carer for those with neuropsychiatric conditions and disability, a child of parents with mental illness and her experience as an Aboriginal Australian, whose family has been affected by the Stolen Laws and practices. She is a co-designer and co-coordinator of the online University of Sydney Masters of Trauma-Informed Psychotherapy and the Psychiatry Teaching at the Brain and Mind Centre. Her approach is a collaborative and relational one to service, research, education and supervision, increasingly incorporating co-participation and co-design.
Professor Catherine Chamberlain
Professor Catherine Chamberlain is a Palawa Trawlwoolway woman (Tasmania), Director of Onemda Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health and Wellbeing and Head of the Indigenous Health Equity Unit at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne.
A Registered Midwife and Public Health researcher, her research aims to identify perinatal opportunities to improve health equity across the life course. She is the inaugural Editor-In-Chief of First Nations Health and Wellbeing Lowitja Journal and Principal Investigator for two large multi-disciplinary projects – Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future – which aims to co-design support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents experiencing complex trauma; and Replanting the Birthing Trees, which aims to transform intergenerational cycles of trauma to cycles of nurturing and recovery.
Dr Kim Jones
Kim is a Senior Research Fellow in Indigenous Health Equity. She has a background in neuroscience, guideline development and trauma research. Kim leads a large 4-year MRFF-funded research program, Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future (HPNF), a co-design implementation project aiming to improve support for Aboriginal parents with complex trauma in the perinatal period. Kim works collaboratively across academic, government, Aboriginal community controlled and not-for-profit sectors, applying participatory action research methods framed by public health frameworks to co-design and deliver a community-based and translational program of work. Her diverse expertise in research project design, coordination, implementation, and evidence synthesis demonstrated by a strong and diverse track record of translating research findings into evidence-based practices, interventions and resources that help improve the quality and effectiveness of healthcare and reduce disparities in health and well-being outcomes.
Liv Mauerhofer
Liv is a non-Indigenous woman living on Bunurong/Boon Wurrung Country in South East Victoria.
Liv completed a Bachelor of Arts and Honours in Psychology. She is a Research Assistant with the Indigenous Health Equity Unit at the University of Melbourne working on projects aimed at intervening in cycles of intergenerational trauma.
Liv has experience using trauma-informed and positive psychology models of care within the Department of Education and is interested in how these approaches, combined with Indigenous models of health and wellbeing can generate positive health outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
Dr Zoe Cloud (formerly Guest) is a registered psychologist and Research Fellow at The Bouverie Centre, La Trobe University.
As the manager of family therapy research at The Bouverie Centre, Dr Cloud’s research focuses on family relationships, family safety issues, and the evaluation of intervention programs.
Beatrice Beebe PhD
Beatrice Beebe is an internationally recognized developmental and clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. She is an infant researcher known for both video microanalysis of mother-infant interaction and its implications for infant and adult treatment. She has published 6 books, 75 peer-reviewed articles, 20 chapters; she has given over 90 peer-reviewed research conference contributions, and 200 national/ international lectures. Her frame-by-frame video microanalyses provide a “social microscope” that reveals subtle details of interactions too rapid to grasp in real time with the naked eye. Her microscope has illuminated a dyadic systems view of communication; the origins of attachment; and the effects of risk conditions on mother-infant communication, such as maternal self-criticism, depression and anxiety, infant prematurity, and being pregnant and widowed on September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center bombing. More than 100 students have been trained in her research laboratory at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, Columbia University Medical Center over the last three decades. Her YouTube account provides several documentaries that illustrate video microanalysis, accessible to the general public.
Dr Liz Coventry
Liz is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychotherapist. They are a specialist in infant mental health and working with parent-child dyads caught in cycles of intergenerational trauma and abuse. They have previously worked in government perinatal and infant mental health services, providing care to women with severe mental illness and their infants. They are currently working with Dr. Jackie Amos to implement her doctoral thesis into a comprehensive therapeutic framework and training package for Centacare. They also provide support to teams in Centacare that work with traumatised families. Liz has a small private psychotherapeutic practice.
Dr Jessica Opie
Dr. Opie is a Research Fellow at The Bouverie Centre, which is an integrated practice-research center of La Trobe University. She holds a PhD in early child developmental psychology. Dr. Opie’s primary research interests pertain to infant mental health and attachment theory. Her research focuses on the benefits of child, parent, and systemic interventions in altering child developmental outcomes and relational trajectories.
Dr Jackie Amos
Dr Jackie Amos, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Specialist Therapist, Centacare, Adelaide. Jackie is a clinician and researcher, with over twenty years’ experience in New Zealand and South Australia. She has worked as a senior child and adolescent psychiatrist in CAMHS (Child Adolescent Mental Health Service) and more recently in the non-government sector. Her psychotherapeutic practice has focused on working with children and families to disrupt intergenerational cycles of trauma and disadvantage.
In her doctoral research Jackie developed a clinically informative model, outlining how childhood experiences of abuse and neglect, beginning in infancy, are transmitted across generations. The place of shame in attachment disorganisation, the controlling adaptations to early disorganisation in middle childhood and the states of mind of adults struggling with parenting is central to the model. This model has been used to predict the fundamental objectives of effective interventions for families caught in these distressing intergenerational cycles.
This body of work now informs service delivery in the Children’s Service Unit, Centacare (a large non-government agency) where psychotherapy and social casework have been integrated, to offer trauma responsive therapeutic casework. This integrated model has been used successfully to address families interfacing with the child protection system, including in family reunification. Training materials are being developed, based on Jackie’s PhD, to support the integration of trauma responsive interventions across programmes at Centacare.
Professor Jenn McIntosh AM
Jennifer – better known as Jenn – is Director of The Bouverie Centre, La Trobe University. She is a leading figure in perinatal science, a clinical psychologist and a clinical family therapist. Her extensive body of work on infants and young children’s development in the face of family trauma focuses on practical translation into practice.
Her Young Children in Divorce and Separation (YCIDS) program and MERTIL and MERTIL for Parents programs are now implemented nation-wide. In 2019, she became a Member of the Order of Australia, for contributions to developmental psychology.
Acknowledgement to Country
Tresillian acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People as the First Peoples of Australia, the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land in the countries on which we live and work in NSW, the ACT and Victoria. We pay our respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders past and present and acknowledge all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in the communities we serve.
Venue Address -Tresillian
Tresillian Education Centre
Level 3, 25 Shirley Rd Wollstonecraft, Sydney, NSW.