Fellowship Scientific Review and Advisory Committee

Professor Stephen Simpson AC | Chair

Professor Stephen Simpson AC is a Professor in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney and Executive Director of Obesity Australia. He was inaugural Academic Director of Charles Perkins Centre from 2012-2025.

Stephen was born in Melbourne. After completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Queensland, he undertook his PhD at the University of London. He spent 22 years at the University of Oxford, first in Experimental Psychology, then in the Department of Zoology and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, before returning to Australia in 2005 as an ARC Federation Fellow.

In 2013 Stephen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London as “one of the world’s foremost entomologists and nutritional biologists”, and in 2015 he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia “for eminent service to biological and biomedical science.”

Tom Snow

Tom Snow is Chair of Snow Medical Research Foundation, which since 2019 has invested over $260 million into the Australian medical research sector and was Chair of Canberra Airport where he served on the board for over 15 years.

Tom Snow is also the Founder of Equality Australia and was a Co-Chair and Founder of the Equality Campaign, which led the successful Yes vote in the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey and saw in the successful legislative change for marriage equality.

Before the marriage equality campaign, Tom created Whitehelm Capital with his business partner. They built Whitehelm into an infrastructure fund manager with nearly $5 billion in funds under management across 44 infrastructure assets and $16 billion in funds under advice.

Tom has served as a director at Perth Airport, the Port of Adelaide, Bankstown Airport, Peninsula Link, Etihad Stadium and the Australian Science Festival. He was also Chair of the Canberra Convention Bureau. He is a Rhodes Scholar and is a proud father of three kids.

Ginette Snow

Ginette Snow is a driving force behind the establishment of Snow Medical, and is on the Scientific Review and Advisory Committee. A former pharmacist, Ginette worked at Canberra Hospital for 11 years during which time she completed a Bachelor of Science at the Australian National University. She is also director of The Snow Foundation and an accomplished photographer and author of three books which include many of her own photos: Where did we come from? A Family History: Condon, Snow and Byron; Canberra Airport: A Pictorial History; and Two Dads, written for her 14 grandchildren as a memento of how the babies of son Tom Snow and his husband Brooke ‘were made’. Ginette is a keen campaigner for gay and lesbian rights and marriage equality.

Ginette has had photographic exhibitions in Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane. As official photographer of Canberra Airport, Ginette has documented the transformation of the airport since 1998 when the Snow family acquired it from the Commonwealth. Ginette divides her time between Canberra, Sydney and their property at Willinga Park on the NSW South Coast. She and Terry have been married for more than 40 years.

Professor Christopher Goodnow FAA FRS
Head – Immunogenomics Lab

Professor Goodnow holds The Bill and Patricia Ritchie Foundation Chair as Head of the Immunogenomics laboratory, a NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow, and is Professor and Director of the Cellular Genomics Futures Institute at UNSW Sydney, and previously Executive Director of The Garvan Institute.

With an American father and Australian mother, Professor Goodnow grew up in Washington DC before moving to Sydney as a teenager. He trained in veterinary medicine and surgery, immunochemistry and immunology at the University of Sydney and in DNA technology at Stanford University. After doctoral studies begun at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne and performed at Sydney University, he joined the faculty of Stanford University Medical School and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1990. There he established the concept of multiple immune tolerance checkpoints, a framework now widely used in cancer treatment with “checkpoint inhibitors”, and revealed the function of key genes in these checkpoints including FAS, CD86, PTPN6/SHP1, and later AIRE.

Beyond his research endeavours, Professor Goodnow enjoys spending time with his family and surfing at Sydney’s Manly Beach and on the NSW South Coast. Surfing has been a passion since Professor Goodnow’s school days, and he is well known in surfing circles for leading a 1980 expedition discovering the now-famous breaks in Indonesia’s remote Mentawai Islands.

Professor Gordon Wallace AO FAA FTSE
Director of Intelligent Polymer Research Institute, University of Wollongong
Executive Research Director – ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials

Distinguished Professor Gordon Wallace, an esteemed innovator and educator is a scientist at the forefront of health technologies, where medical devices complement the body’s own systems to treat disease and repair injuries. An example of this is the ‘Biopen’, used by surgeons to directly print healing cells into a patient’s body during procedures, like knee surgery. With research interests in organic conductors, nanomaterials and electrochemical probe methods of analysis in intelligent polymer systems, his extensive scientific contributions have broken new ground in every aspect of electromaterials research; academic performance and outcomes, training the next generation of researchers, and facilities development.

These contributions to the enhancement of Australian materials research has led to a number of high accolades for Gordon including being awarded an ARC Laureate Fellowship (2011) and the Eureka prize for leadership in Innovation and Science (2016), being named NSW Scientist of the Year (2017), and appointed an Officer in the General Division of the Order of Australia (2017). Professor Wallace is Director of UOW’s Intelligent Polymer Research Institute; Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility – Materials Node and Director of the Translational Research Initiative for Cellular Engineering and Printing.

Professor Jane Visvader FRS FAA FAHMS
Division of Cancer Biology and Stem Cells
The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI), VIC

Prof Visvader is a molecular and cellular biologist who leads research on mammary stem cell biology and mechanisms resulting in breast cancer. She is the Joint Head of the Breast Cancer Laboratory and Division of Cancer Biology and Stem Cells at the WEHI and holds a Professorial position at the University of Melbourne. Jane carried out her undergraduate and PhD studies in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Adelaide and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute, San Diego and the Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Boston. 

In 1998, Jane was appointed as a Laboratory Head at WEHI to lead studies on breast development and cancer. Her primary research interests are directed towards understanding the breast epithelial hierarchy and elucidating cells susceptible to breast oncogenesis. Her team’s contributions to the breast cancer field include the discovery of mouse and human mammary stem cells and identification of ‘cells of origin’ of cancer in BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, the Royal Society (London) and the American Association for Cancer Research.