Associate Professor Tomoko Sugiura

Associate Professor Tomoko Sugiura is the Director of the National Centre for Health Workforce Studies (NCHWS) at the Australian National University. Tomoko graduated with a PhD in Psychology from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in 2004. Her PhD thesis examined adaptation to new cultural environments and productivity among international students and expatriate managers. Tomoko's honours thesis in psychology, also obtained from UNSW (1996), examined historical changes in psychiatric diagnosis and analysed interrater reliability of diagnosis based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders-3rd edition revised.

Tomoko brings to the ANU over 25 years of experience in working with health data in Australia and internationally as well as cross-sector leadership experience. Tomoko was one of the first cohort of full-fee paying international students. She began her career in the mid-1990s as a mental health researcher in the National Institute of Mental Health in Japan. Since then she has taught post-graduate level subjects in research methods and intercultural communication at the University of Technology, Sydney, presented at a number of academic conferences, authored articles in peer-reviewed journals, and worked as an international management consultant in the area of salesforce resource planning across Asia-Pacific countries.

In the most recent 12 years, Tomoko led strong teams in the Australian Public Service supporting evidence-based health policy. From 2010 to 2016, Tomoko managed teams reporting on chronic disease and national data development at the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. From 2017 to 2022, she led teams shaping strategic direction in Indigenous health data, contributing to the National Agreement on the Closing the Gap and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan 2021-2031.

Tomoko's leadership and team building capabilities developed through her work in the private sector, academic research environment, and the public service.

Professor Mark Cormack

Mark Cormack was appointed Professor at the Australian National University (ANU) College of Health and Medicine in 2020. The appointment acknowledges Mark as a national leader in health system and health workforce policy and strategy and his dedication to his long career in the public service, including serving as CEO of Health Workforce Australia, Chief Executive of ACT Health and Deputy Secretary for the Commonwealth Departments of Health, Veterans’ Affairs and Home Affairs.

Mark, along with Associate Professor Ian Crettenden, established the ANU College of Health and Medicine’s National Centre for Health Workforce Studies (NCHWS) in 2022.

Mark has recently been appointed by the Hon. Mark Butler MP to lead the independent Unleashing the Power of Health Professionals (Scope of Practice) review addressing how health practitioners can better work to the full extent of their skills and training. The review will focus on supporting higher quality service delivery and greater accessibility to primary care, for the benefit all Australians.

In the field of national health workforce, he led policy, planning, clinical training and workforce reform as the CEO of Health Workforce Australia, a Commonwealth statutory body reporting through the (then) Council of Australian Governments (COAG) structure. In international health, Mark was Australia’s delegate to the OECD Health Committee and WHO Western Pacific Region.

In other roles, as Deputy Secretary Australian Department of Health Mark managed intergovernmental relations at the Commonwealth, State, and Territory levels, working on National Health Reform Agreements and numerous National Partnership Agreements. In the area of national program delivery, his work spanned Medicare, Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, National Blood Supply, Primary Health Networks, Public Hospitals, Private Health Insurance, and the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF).

He worked as Deputy Secretary in the area of border security, detention and offshore programs to manage irregular maritime arrivals and visa compliance at the (then) Department of Immigration and Border Protection (now Home Affairs). He was also responsible for Australian Defence Force worker’s compensation, veterans’ policy and program delivery through the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Mark’s areas of interest include public policy and administration; health system governance; health services programs, financing and delivery; health workforce and interfaces with higher education and regulation; and Commonwealth, State and Territory government relations and agreements. Mark is currently undertaking a PhD at the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy which is researching intergovernmental health financing agreements in Australia.

Mark has a Master of Health Management from the University of Wollongong, Bachelor of Applied Sciences from the University of Sydney, and is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

Current appointments include:

• Professor, National Centre for Health Workforce Studies, ANU
• Non-Executive Director, Leukaemia Foundation of Australia
• Associate Editor, Australian Health Review
• Principal at MCA Consulting

Associate Professor Megan Cahill

Megan Cahill has joined the National Centre for Health Workforce Studies, specialising in Primary Health Care Workforce Policy and Planning. With extensive experience as a health service executive in both Australia and the UK, Megan previously held CEO positions at the ACT Primary Health Network, Rural Workforce Agency Victoria, and General Practice Education and Training. Her responsibilities in these leadership roles included workforce planning, education and distribution; commissioning; regulatory compliance and quality improvement.

Megan has held senior executive positions in state and territory health departments with responsibility for workforce planning, clinical service planning, and infrastructure planning. In these roles Megan managed intergovernmental relations including National Health Reform Agreements, cross border agreements and performance agreements; workforce reform; health technology assessment; and development of the national registration and accreditation scheme for registered health practitioners.

Megan’s areas of interest include health workforce planning, primary health care, health system integration and commissioning.

Megan has a Master of Health Administration from UNSW, a Bachelor of Science from Deakin University and a Graduate Certificate in Health Economics from Monash University;  and she is a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and a Fellow of the Australasian College of Health Service Management.

Dr Jinhu Li

Dr Jinhu Li is a Senior Fellow in the National Centre for Health Workforce Studies and Department of Health Economics Wellbeing and Society at the Australian National University. Previously she worked as a Senior Lecturer at Deakin University and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. From 2017 to 2022 she was an Australian Research Council awarded Discovery Early Career Researcher Award fellow. Jinhu is a health economist with expertise in using advanced econometrics, innovative causal identification methods, and program evaluation methods to produce empirical evidence for improving public health policy design in Australia and internationally.

Jinhu’s main research field is health economics, and is generally interested in applied economics topics in health, education, and development. She has conducted research projects on various topics in health economics and health policy, including health workforce labour supply and retention, incentives in the health care markets and physician behaviours, the social economic determinants of health and human capital, and modelling patient and physician preferences using Discrete Choice Experiments (DCE).

She has published many articles in leading health economics journals including the Journal of Health Economics, Health Economics, and Social Science and Medicine. During her seven years working at the Melbourne Institute, she engaged extensively with government and industry partners and produced several commissioned reports for government departments, private health insurance companies, and large consulting companies.

In the area of health workforce, her research has made contributions to workforce policy in Australia. One of her papers employs a DCE to assess rural doctors’ preferences on different workforce incentives in Australia, which provides important and timely policy implications for the retention of rural doctors in Australia. Her publication in Health Economics examines doctors’ supply of after-hours care and how it is affected by personal and family circumstances and financial incentives, providing important policy implications for incentivising GP’s provision of after-hours care. Her recent publication in the American Journal of Health Economics investigates the effects of competition among GPs on their provision of low-value health care in Australia, addressing a very topical issue in health economics.

Jinhu has a Bachelor of Economics, an MA in Economics, and a PhD in Economics. She obtained her PhD from McMaster University in Canada.

Dr My Tran

Dr My Tran is a Research Fellow at ANU’s National Centre for Health Workforce Studies. Before joining NCHWS, she worked as a Research Fellow at the ANU Department of Health Economics, Wellbeing, and Society, working with medical researchers and epidemiologists to evaluate the impacts of Whole Genome Sequencing on public health surveillance in Australia. She also worked with health economists in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK to develop an empirical model to examine the temporal stability of preferences for COVID-19 vaccines.

In 2021, her research proposal examining the sustainability of telehealth funding in Australia was one of the two projects selected to receive the prestigious Jeff Cheverton Memorial scholarship. The policy paper has been featured in the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care’s On the Radar, Issue 517.

She has been a guest lecturer in various Health Economics courses at the University of Queensland and the Australian National University. She was a guest speaker for the Speaking of Changes podcast series by the Pymble’s Ladies College.

My has a Bachelor of Economics with honours, majoring in Quantitative Methods, and a PhD in Economics from the University of Queensland (UQ). Her PhD research explored the socioeconomic determinants of health outcomes and healthcare utilisation in the ageing population using large-scale longitudinal surveys and novel causal inference methods. My has published three articles in high-ranking journals in Health Economics and Health Policy; she has one forthcoming article in the Lancet Microbe. Her research has won numerous awards, including the UQ Faculty of Business, Laws, and Economics (BEL) 3MT competition and the UQ BEL Excellence in Research – HDR Research. 

My has a Bachelor of Economics with first-class honours, majoring in Quantitative Methods. She obtained her PhD in Economics from the University of Queensland in 2023, on the topic of “Economics of Ageing, Health Outcomes and Workforce Planning”.