Our team

Professor Belinda Goodenough is a behavioural scientist with 20 years of experience in the fields of psychology, education and health services research.

She has a specific interest in knowledge translation and implementation research, with a goal to improve our understanding of how the ‘real world’ can get best value from research investment. Belinda has applied these skills in areas as diverse as pain, cancer, childhood health, and over the past decade, ageing and dementia.

In addition to CHRISP, Belinda has other roles at UOW: Executive Director for Dementia Training Australia, and Editor for the Australian Journal of Dementia Care.

View Belinda Goodenough's UOW Scholar's profile

Professor Kate Curtis has been an Emergency Nurse since 1994, is Clinical Director of CHRISP, Director of Critical Care Research ISLHD, an RN at Wollongong ED, Professor of Emergency and Trauma Nursing at the University of Sydney and an honorary Professorial fellow at the George Institute for Global Health.

Kate’s translational research program focuses on improving the way we deliver care to patients and their families, and has attracted more than $6 million funding. Kate is the world’s most published author in the field of Trauma and Emergency nursing, has mentored more than 50 clinicians in research projects and was the 2019 Australian nurse of the year.​

Professor Judy Mullan is the Academic Director of the Centre for Health Research Illawarra Shoalhaven Population (CHRISP) and a registered pharmacist. She is also the Deputy Director of the Illawarra and Southern Practice Research Network (ISPRN), a collective of over 50 GP practices involved in practice-based research.

Since joining the university, Judy has been a chief investigator on successful grants which have secured in excess of $10.5 million in research and partnership funding. She has published her research findings in over 100 peer-reviewed publications (including five book chapters) and presented her findings at over 150 different national/international conferences. Her main areas of research interest include chronic conditions, older people, quality and safety-adverse events, health literacy and medical education.

View Judy Mullan's UOW Scholars profile

Dr Luise Lago is a Senior Research Fellow working for CHRISP. She is currently researching Frequent Attenders to Emergency Departments and supporting research projects in the areas of Secondary Prevention of Atherosclerosis, Identification of Dementia, Suicide Prevention, Rehabilitation, Allied Health and adverse drug events.

Luise has more than 15 years of research experience in government and academia, including the areas of classifications development, hospital funding, longitudinal data analysis, biostatistics and epidemiology. Her PhD was on the use of mixed models for imputation of missing data in household surveys.

View Luise Lago's UOW Scholars profile

Victoria Westley-Wise is a Clinical Epidemiologist working for CHRISP.  

As a member of the CHRISP team, she works closely with Illawarra clinicians, statisticians and other researchers to design and implement research using IHIP data and infrastructure. Victoria has 30 years’ experience in the health system, including 25 years in public/ population health, service planning and evaluation, and epidemiology roles. She has undertaken epidemiological evaluations and research in a range of areas, using both descriptive and analytic study designs. 

In March 2020 she returned full-time to ISLHD to assist with the local public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic - we look forward to welcoming her back in 2022. 

View Victoria Westley-Wise's UOW Scholars profile

Brendan has worked in the Information Technology field for the past 22 years. After completing his Bachelor of Information and Communication Technology degree at the University of Wollongong in 1996, Brendan worked for various multinational corporations before moving into health in 2003.

Brendan joined the Illawarra Shoalhaven Health District in 2003, where his most recent role has been that of Senior Enterprise Report Developer with the Information Management Unit. The Information Management Unit specialises in Business Intelligence, extracting and transforming health data into meaningful reports and dashboards.

Brendan's role for CHRISP is the Data Integration Coordinator.

Linda joined AHSRI in March 2009 and has extensive experience in aged and community care program management in both the Commonwealth Government and community sectors. Linda provided administrative and project support to the Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration at AHSRI for 11 years and joined the Centre for Health Research Illawarra Shoalhaven Population (CHRISP) in 2020. 

Stephen first joined the CHRISP team in 2019 as a Research Assistant. He provides Analysis/Statistics support to projects in Mental health and End of life.  Stephen has obtained a Master of Statistics and a Bachelor of Science (Physics) at the University of Wollongong.