KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Associate Professor Mandy Downing
Dean, Indigenous Futures | Faculty of Humanities, Deakin University
Associate Professor Mandy Downing has maternal lineage through the Lockyer family to the Ngarluma and Yindjibarndi people. Mandy is an applied scientist in Indigenous Australian Research, one of the co-editors of The Routledge Handbook of Human Research Ethics and Integrity in Australia and the first Aboriginal person to be appointed as a Dean in the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University where she is the Dean of Indigenous Futures. Additionally, Mandy is the Co-Chair of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies National Research Ethics Committee and the Senior Indigenous Facilitator for the National Environmental Science Program’s Sustainable Communities and Waste Research Hub. Mandy in 2023 was inducted into the WA Women’s Hall of Fame for her contributions of over 20 years to education
Keynote Session:
Thursday, 6 November 2025
Associate Professor Brian D. Earp, Ph.D.
Centre for Biomedical Ethics | Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore
Brian D. Earp, PhD is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Associate Professor of Philosophy and of Psychology at NUS by courtesy. Brian directs the Oxford-NUS Centre for Neuroethics and Society at NUS and the University of Oxford, and is Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy at Yale University and The Hastings Center. In 2022, Brian was elected to the UK Young Academy under the auspices of the British Academy and the Royal Society. Brian’s work is cross-disciplinary, following training in philosophy, cognitive science, experimental psychology, history and sociology of science and medicine, and ethics. Click here to learn more about Brian D. Earp, Ph.D.
Keynote Session:
Friday, 7 November 2025
INVITED SPEAKERS
Professor Jennifer A. Byrne PhD
Director of Biobanking- NSW Health | NSW Health Pathology
Jennifer Byrne is Director of Biobanking- NSW Health, and Professor of Molecular Oncology, University of Sydney, where she leads the PRIMeR group (Publication and Research Integrity in Medical Research). Jennifer was one of Nature’s 10 people in 2017 for highlighting repetitive human gene research papers with critical reagent errors, and she was one of 3 experts who testified before US Congress at their 2022 congressional hearing into paper mills and research misconduct. Jennifer’s research team has continued to identify features of flawed human gene and cancer research, including descriptions of human cell line models that may not exist.
Plenary Session: A Primer on Research Paper Mills in Biomedicine
Thursday, 6 November 2025
TBC
Paper mills represent unethical organisations that provide or sell low value and possibly fabricated research content to clients. It is believed that many individuals turn to paper mills in response to unreasonable pressures to publish that they cannot legitimately meet. The scope of the paper mill problem is unknown, but a growing number of researchers estimate that hundreds of thousands of paper mill supported publications may have been published over the last 10 years. Developments in generative AI could further scale paper mill outputs and render these more challenging to detect.
Jennifer Byrne will provide an overview of paper mills from her perspective as a researcher who has studied errors in preclinical research publications since 2015. She will describe what is known of paper mill operations, how paper mills differ from other actors such as predatory journals and publishers, and how a basic awareness of paper mills can assist researchers and ethics committee members in their daily work.Professor Cameron Stewart
Professor of Health, Law and Ethics | The University of Sydney
Professor Cameron Stewart is a member of Sydney Health Law and an associate member of Sydney Health Ethics, Sydney Medical School. He has worked in the Supreme Court of New South Wales and has practiced commercial law at Phillips Fox Lawyers. He was the Acting President of the Australian and New Zealand Institute of Health Law and Ethics in 2008-2010 and was the Vice-President of the Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law from 2010-2013. Cameron is also an Honorary Fellow of the Australian College of Legal Medicine and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. He has over 200 publications and is a co-author of the classic Australian text, Ethics and law for the health professions.
Plenary Session:
Friday, 7 November 2025
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