Sandra is an early career health care researcher with a track record in biochemistry and molecular biology research, and an emerging body of work in health care, aged care and hypertension research. She is a team member of the National Aged Care Research Network (NACReN), a national aged care stakeholder engagement and knowledge translation platform. Within NACReN, she has contributed to a research priority-setting study in aged care, and is leading a preliminary evaluation of NACReN. Outside of NACReN, she has led a qualitative research study that aims to understand barriers to the diagnosis of secondary hypertension in the Australian healthcare setting.

Professor Clive May founded the Preclinical Critical Care Unit at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health. He retired in 2022 but still provides support and mentorship to the laboratory. At the Florey, he developed clinically relevant large animal models of septic shock, cardiopulmonary bypass, heart failure, myocardial infarction/reperfusion and seizure, together with the development of techniques to continuously monitor cardiovascular, autonomic and vital organ function. These preclinical models and techniques provide a unique opportunity to investigate pathophysiology at a level of detail not possible in critically ill patients and not available in other laboratories worldwide Outcomes from these studies include the development of a new drug to treat catecholamine resistant hypertension, which has saved lives, the Stentrode, a novel brain machine interface, and the discovery that intravenous megadose sodium ascorbate can reverse the pathophysiological effects of sepsis. Professor May has over 270 publications and <15,400 citations

Dr Sarah Walton is an integrative physiologist specialising in sex differences in hypertension and kidney disease. She completed her PhD at the University of Queensland in 2016, and now conducts postdoctoral research under the mentorship of Prof Kate Denton at the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute. Dr Walton's work integrates advanced physiological techniques with molecular and morphological analyses to understand mechanisms driving cardiovascular disease.

I am a mid-career post-doctoral researcher based at the Florey Institute. I currently head the sepsis research and the biochemical platform in the Translational Cardiovascular and Renal Research Group. My research focus has been on determining the role of renal tissue dysoxia in kidney diseases and to investigate therapeutic opportunities in ameliorating tissue hypoxia-induced injuries to the kidney. My earlier work on the development and validating the techniques for chronic monitoring of renal tissue oxygenation in ischemia-induced acute kidney injury further highlighted the need for direct and long-term assessment of tissue oxygenation for determining opportunistic therapeutic window in order to prevent/slow the progression of chronic kidney disease following recovery from acute kidney injury. My current research focuses on therapies aimed at ameliorating renal medullary tissue hypoxia in sepsis-induced acute kidney injury.

Dr Lakshini Herat is a National Heart Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Translational and Discovery Science Laboratory at the Dobney Hypertension Centre, UWA. Her research focuses on identifying novel mechanistic pathways of anti-diabetic and anti-obesity treatments to optimise their use and improve cardio-kidney-metabolic outcomes in patients. A passionate advocate for science and education, she actively promotes women in STEM through teaching and community outreach.

Rachel Peiris recently completed her PhD at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, where she was supervised by Professor Yugeesh Lankadeva, Professor Clive May, Professor Robin McAllen, Doctor Lindsea Booth and Doctor Laura Cook (from the Doherty Institute). Rachel is an Early Career Researcher whose work has redefined how the body responds to infections. She has measured sympathetic nerve activity, bacterial clearance and immune cells’ function over the course of sepsis induced by live infection in small to large animal models. Her overarching research goal is to understand immunological changes in life-threatening conditions across animal models and in patients, to facilitate the development of therapeutics. She has received several Best Student Presentation awards at premier national cardiovascular and immunology conferences.