Keynote speakers

Masatoshi Hagiwara graduated from Mie University School of Medicine in 1984 and obtained his PhD in the Department of Pharmacology in 1988 by discovering the inhibitory mechanism of isoquinolinesulfonamide compounds on protein kinases. One of them, fasudil, was developed as a clinical drug to prevent vasoconstriction after subarachnoid haemorrhage. At the Salk Institute, he found that transcriptional attenuation follows PP-1-mediated dephosphorylation of CREB and succeeded in identifying CBP as the phosphorylated CREB binding protein. When he returned to Japan in 1993, he started his own laboratory at Nagoya University School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor. He moved to Tokyo in 1997 as a Professor at the Medical Research Institute of Tokyo Medical and Dental University, and decided to try to decipher the splicing code to cure genetic diseases. He moved from Tokyo to Kyoto University in 2010 as a Professor and Chairman of the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology, Graduate School of Medicine.

Guanhua Du is a tenured professor of Pharmacology at Peking Union Medical College; Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences; Former-President of the Chinese Pharmacological Society; Councillor of the Executive Committee of the International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (IUPHAR), Councillor of the Executive Committee of the Asia Pacific Federation of Pharmacologists (APFP); and Director of the National Centre for Pharmaceutical Screening.

Dr Du obtained his PhD degree from Peking Union Medical College in 1995, and conducted his postdoctoral research at the University of Liège, Belgium from 1995 to 1998. Dr Du is primarily engaged in drug discovery and development, screening methods and strategy, and research on drug effects and mechanisms in cerebrovascular and neurodegenerative diseases. He originated the national high-throughput drug screening system in China, and provided drug screening services for over 300 million samples for domestic pharmaceutical institutions or enterprises.

In the past 10 years, Dr Du has published more than 500 papers and more than 30 monographs, and applied for more than 90 patents. He has completed preclinical research on 9 new drugs, among which 3 have been brought to market, and 6 have entered clinical trials. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Pharmacology Research: Modern Chinese Medicine, Associate Editor of Pharmacology & Therapeutics and more than ten other scientific journals.

Professor Faye McMillan AM, a Wiradjuri yinaa from Trangie, NSW, is a pioneering community pharmacist, recognised as the first Indigenous Australian with a western pharmacy degree. She advocates passionately for Indigenous healthcare, co-founding Indigenous Allied Health Australia and serving as its past chair. Currently, Faye holds positions as Deputy National Rural Health Commissioner, Professor of Indigenous Health at UTS School of Public Health, and board member/chair of the APC Indigenous health strategy group. Her leadership has earned accolades including Member (AM) of the Order of Australia for services to Indigenous mental health and education, Fellow of the PSA, and recognition in prestigious lists like Who's Who of Australian Women and 100 Women of Influence.

Professor Rebekah Moles is a pharmacist academic from Sydney Pharmacy School, the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on medication safety, particularly for vulnerable populations and she is currently leading a large MRFF funded, trial in osteoporosis and falls reduction. Bek has had a long history in pharmacy practice research and education and attended her first APSA meeting in 1997 as a very young PhD student. She has been to so many APSA conferences since then, she has lost count. She has enjoyed sharing the APSA love with her own research students over many years and is a very proud supervisor of her past and current students. Bek is now an integral part of the APSA/PSA collaboration and helps with organising the APSA stream each year at the PSA conference. She is passionate about the pharmacy profession and building the next generation of pharmacists including pharmacist researchers and teachers.

Dr Amanda Cross is an NHMRC Emerging Leader research fellow at the Centre for Medicine Use and Safety, Monash University. She has secured over $4.8 million in research funding and published over 30 papers, including 16 as first author. She has an emerging national and international profile focused on medication safety in older adults and knowledge translation in aged care. Her current work evaluates new roles for healthcare professionals, particularly pharmacists, to act as system-level knowledge brokers supporting guideline implementation in residential aged care. Dr Cross is also a practising pharmacist, conducting home and residential medication management reviews.

Professor Reecha Sofat is the Breckenridge Chair in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of Liverpool and an NIHR Research Professor. She is Vice President, Clinical at the British Pharmacological Society and Associate Director at the British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre, which is led by Health Data Research UK. She has also recently taken up the Chair of the Board at the Professional Record Standards Body.

Her activities are linked to her research, with the golden thread being data sciences. Her research interests focus on making and using medicines better through a data science approach. In improving the use of medicines, she leverages electronic health record data linked to health outcome data to understand how and where medicines are used. This includes strategies to inform medicines policy decisions, cost-effectiveness, and methods such as causal inference to determine medicines repurposing opportunities. Making medicines better involves leveraging large-scale biological data, such as genomics and multi-omics, to understand the molecular underpinnings of complex diseases better. This approach helps to address unmet needs and use these methods to identify drug targets or therapeutic opportunities more effectively.

Arthur Christopoulos is the Professor of Analytical Pharmacology and Dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, Monash University. His research focuses on novel paradigms of drug action at G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and has been applied to studies encompassing neurological and psychiatric disorders, cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, chronic pain and addiction. He has received long-term support from international and national competitive, charitable and commercial sources, as well as being academic co-founder of two recent GPCR spinouts/startups. He has over 370 publications, including in leading international journals such as Nature, Science and Cell, and has been the recipient of major awards from ASCEPT, ASPET, the BPS and IUPHAR. Since 2014, Clarivate Analytics have annually named him a Highly Cited Researcher in Pharmacology & Toxicology. In 2021 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science for his seminal contributions to drug discovery.

Margaret Morris is Professor of Pharmacology at UNSW Sydney. She is known nationally and internationally in the research field of obesity, especially around the central control of appetite, the transmission of obesity across generations, and impacts of the modern diet on metabolic health and cognition. She has over 310 publications in leading obesity, neuroscience, pharmacology, endocrinology and physiology journals, reflecting the multidisciplinary nature of her research, which currently explores the mechanisms underlying obesity, and the role of the gut-microbiome-brain axis in behaviour and cognition. Her research work is extensively discussed in mainstream print, radio, television and social media, with over a million reads in The Conversation. Currently funded by NHMRC and ARC, Prof Morris has successfully supervised 35 PhD and 60 Honours students to completion. She is a strong advocate for Pharmacology, having played a key role in educating clinicians, scientists and young medical researchers in Pharmacology for more than 35 years across three Universities.