Speakers
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.
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.
Associate Professor Alka Kothari FRANZCOG PhD
Associate Professor Alka Kothari is a Senior Specialist in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Redcliffe Hospital in Brisbane and an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, The University of Queensland. Her unique PhD work on ‘Forgotten Fathers in Pregnancy and Childbirth’ has been a catalyst for driving positive change at a national and international level. She has received multiple research excellence awards, including the best oral presentation at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, World Congress in London 2019. As a post-doctoral Clinician Research Fellow at Metro North Hospital Health, Queensland, she is leading consumer co-design to improve care for fathers and families experiencing adverse obstetric events.
Associate Professor Kothari’s vision is to provide holistic care to all families by championing a much-needed paradigm shift in perinatal care. She is extremely passionate about supporting fathers during pre-conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood periods, recognising the interlinkages and intergenerational consequences of poor mental health, domestic violence, and child abuse. She passionately advocates for fathers and partners, providing expert guidance and support to several not-for-profit organisations nationally.