26th-27th July 2014
University of Auckland
Grafton Campus
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Dr Renee Liang
Medicine and the Arts
Dr Renee Liang is a consultant paediatrician with a specialist qualification as a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. She also holds a Master of Creative Writing from the University of Auckland and a Postgraduate Diploma in Drama Studies. Her plays, such as Lantern and The Bone Feeder, as well as many of her poetry and short stories, have been widely recognised and performed in front of various sold-out audiences nationwide.
Renee uses her talents in the field of both medicine and art to commit to linking communities and strengthening the Australasian society. She leads the Asian Advisory Group for Growing up in New Zealand – an internationally recognised longitudinal study that aims to improve New Zealand children’s health, social and educational needs. She also contributed to the Emerging Pacific Leaders’ Dialogue; an initiative set to strengthen the capacity of the Pacific region’s future leaders. As an Asian New Zealander, Renee readily incorporates her culture into her service. She has collaborated with the Auckland Council to create New Kiwi Women Their Stories, which is a writing programme for migrant women.
Renee’s work has been further recognised when she was named a Sir Peter Blake Emerging Leader in 2010 and was the recipient of a New Zealand Chinese Society Senior Achievement award in 2012. Renee is currently in the University of Auckland Society executive committee and is a member of Westpac’s External Stakeholder Sustainability Panel.
Dr William Tan
Singaporian Neurologist and Paralympian
Dr William Tan inspires many with his incredible perseverance and willingness to make a change to global health. At two years old, William contracted Polio, and was paralysed from the waist down. Despite this, he fought back against his hardships to study internationally and gain a medical degree at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, after achieving First class honours in Physiology at Harvard University.
At a young age, William Tan was introduced to wheelchair sports, which he had a natural talent for. Within years, he went on to represent Singapore in some of the world’s biggest sporting events, such as the 1988 The Seoul Paralympics, as well as other Commonwealth and Asia-Pacific games. He now uses his skills to combat world health issues. Skydiving, water-skiing and being the fastest person in the world to complete seven marathons across all seven continents are just some of his ambitious fundraising ideas. To date, he has raised over 20 million dollars for various local and international charities. He also made a significant contribution to Global Flying Hospitals, an organisation with a vision to provide free training and resources to developing countries around the world.
William Tan’s resilience was further exhibited when he won the fight against his stage four leukemia, diagnosed in 2009. Despite having described this as his longest and most painful race, he now fundraises for health causes through further marathons and playing table tennis at a national level. He is an inspirational figure to all and we are honoured to have him with us at AUMSA Mobilise 2014.
Dr Dinesh Deonarain
Wilderness Medicine and Expeditions
Dr Dinesh Deonarain is an urgent care doctor and locum senior emergency medical officer who holds fellowship with the Royal New Zealand College of Urgent Care and the United States Academy of Wilderness Medicine.
Having travelled extensively around the world (and having stepped foot on all 7 continents), Dr. Deonarain has had a wide range of interesting experiences. Before obtaining his medical degree, he trained and worked as a wildlife biologist and has conducted research in remote areas of his homeland of Canada. As a resident physician and practicing urgent care doctor, he completed desert and jungle expedition training in the USA and Costa Rica along with mountain expedition training in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and in the Himalayas of Nepal. He has obtained polar medicine training aboard National Geographic’s research vessel “The Explorer” on her 2013 voyage to Antarctica. He has also served several times as an expedition doctor on trips in northern Canada and the Canadian Rockies.
Professionally, Dr. Deonarain has worked for three years as the Clinical Director of the Mt. Ruapehu Accident and Medical Clinics in New Zealand. He is an Advanced Wilderness Life Support instructor for WildMed, a Southland Wilderness Medicine Organisation where he helps to train other health professionals in the area of wilderness medicine. Outside of medicine, his interests include alpine and backcountry skiing and snowboarding, trekking, multisport, surfing, free diving, music and writing.
Dr David Hopcroft
Medicine in the Outback/Emergency GP
Dr David Hopcroft is a Fellow of both the Royal New Zealand and Australian Colleges of GPs, and has a PhD in Medicine from the University of Otago. His clinical interests are in diabetes, paediatrics, and clinical research. He is currently a respected General Practitioner at the MedPlus Clinic and a Principal Investigator for a Clinical Trials unit on the North Shore of Auckland City.
Previous urban GP work has included four years at the People’s Centre in Auckland, treating homeless and other interesting people in the inner city, and numerous refugees and other immigrants. He also worked at the Orakei Marae Health Clinic for four years.
Upskilling in GP emergency medicine, Dr Hopcroft has, for the past five years, worked in remote areas of Australia, in particular far north Queensland. With limited resources, David would often see patients who have suffered vicious attacks from crocodiles, snakes, spiders and sharks to name a few. The challenges he faced in these situations, together with the lack of sophisticated clinical support, provided him with a deep insight of health issues in rural areas and indigenous medicine.
Dr Susan Jack
Global Health Activist
Dr Susan Jack will give the opening address at AUMSA Mobilise 2014. She is the leader of Global Health Link Otago: a service organisation for International Health that aims to improve the health and wellbeing of under-resourced populations.
A medical graduate of the University of Otago, Susan went on to complete a Postgraduate Diploma in Paediatrics (University of Auckland) and a Master of Public Health and Tropical Medicine (James Cook University, Australia). She lived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia from 1994 to 2010. Her work in community health and development among urban communities led to the ignition of Global Health Link Otago. Alongside this, Susan worked for the World Health Organisation, specifically at the Cambodia office as a medical officer for Child Survival. She then served as acting team leader for the Maternal, Child Health and Nutrition team, where she pursued her research interests to successfully tackle problems like anaemia and micronutrient deficiencies. She was also extensively involved with the US Agency for International Development and Tearfund UK in various Asian countries.
Susan returned to New Zealand to undertake a PhD in Epidemiology at the University of Otago and complete Public Health Physician training. With a growing passion toward policy and public health programmes in under-resourced settings, she continues to do consultancy work for WHO in the Solomon Islands in the area of maternal and child health.
Dr Jeph Mathias
Developing the Himalayan Community
Global health, development and equity are deep passions for Jeph Mathias, as well as a source of complex challenge and adventure which provide an intense life.
After a Masters degree in Ecology from the University of Cambridge he taught in apartheid South Africa and volunteered at Mother Teresa’s Home for Dying in Kolkata. He returned to Auckland Medical School, graduated in 1994 and began specialising in Emergency Medicine. However unable to resist the constant pull of developing world inequities he traded his Waikato Hospital registrar position for a slum house in Phnom Penh. Adventures, medical and non-medical, continued with community malaria microscopy with indigenous people, trying (unsuccessfully) to avoid FARC guerillas on a médecins sans frontières mission in Colombian jungles, life in a Dehi slum and work in remote Himalayan valleys.
Armed with a Mphil in Development (Massey, 2004). Jeph, Kaaren (a public health physician) and their kids returned to the Indian Himalayas. Their vision that communities should understand and be empowered around their own health led to Papamiya and Jibhi CHAI projects which helped train and support village women health and nutrition workers in resource-scarce valleys beyond Manali. Currently with Emmanuel Health Association Jeph’s focus is community based adaptation to climate change in villages of North and North East India. He will be at Mobilise 2014 via a video-connection from Manali, India.
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