Monday 28 to Wednesday 30 April 2025
Hyatt Hotel, Canberra ACT
Ngunnawal Country
#Prevention2025
Douglas Gordon Oration
About
The Douglas Gordon Oration commemorates the contribution made by the late Douglas Gordon to public health, and will now be held in association with the Preventive Health Conference. Douglas Gordon was born on April 19, 1911 and grew up near Maryborough, Queensland. He began studying medicine at the University of Melbourne in 1931 but the Depression and family hardship forced him to abandon his studies and become a farmer for seven years. In 1938, he entered the second year of the medical course at the newly established Faculty of Medicine at the University of Queensland. He graduated in June 1942 and served as a Medical Officer to RAAF airfield construction squadrons in the Dutch East Indies. After the war, he spent 10 years as head of Industrial Hygiene in the Queensland State Health Department, before becoming the first full-time professor of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Queensland in 1957. He was Dean of the Faculty of Medicine from 1962 to 1967. He published extensively, both in the areas of social and preventive medicine and in medical history. He retired in 1976 and died in October 1993.
2025 Orator
Professor Bruce Neal
Executive Director, The George Institute, Australia
Professor of Medicine, UNSW Sydney
Honorary Professor, Sydney Medical School, University of Sydney
Professor of Clinical Epidemiology, Imperial College London
Bruce Neal is Executive Director at The George Institute for Global Health Australia and Professor of Medicine, UNSW Sydney.
Prof Neal is a UK-trained physician who has 25 years’ experience in clinical, epidemiological, and public health research with a focus on heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Bruce has a longstanding interest in high blood pressure and diabetes and the potential for both clinical interventions and changes in the food supply to deliver health gains. His work has been characterised by its focus on collaboration, quantitation, translation and impact. He holds professorial appointments at UNSW Sydney, Imperial College London, and an honorary appointment at the University of Sydney. He has published some 450 scientific papers and since 2016 has been identified by Thomson Reuters as one of ‘The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds’, an acknowledgement provided to just a few thousand researchers across all disciplines, worldwide. He has particular expertise in the conduct of large-scale clinical trials addressing cardiovascular disease but has also done a significant body of work addressing food policy issues related to sugars, fats, portion size and food labelling.