Susan is a Director in KPMG’s Governance, Risk and Controls practice, providing advice to c-suite executives and boards across all sectors in strategic risk framework development and implementation, board and director duties and internal controls review. Her work focuses on supporting and strengthening corporate and board governance for both public and private sector clients, in a dynamic and constantly changing environment. Susan is a lead author of KPMG;s Directors’ Toolkit and led the development of the Victorian Health Services Directors’ Toolkit. Susan’s has a deep connection with the not-for-profit, with direct experience working in the disability sector and large portfolio of human services clients.

Victoria is the Housing Research Manager at ECH, one of SA’s largest independent living and aged care services providers; and a research active Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide.

As a social gerontologist, Victoria is undertaking research including in-home care provision, community connectedness, the built environment and housing - especially alternative models of housing, and housing for vulnerable older people.Victoria convenes AAG’s Housing and the Built Environment special interest group.

In 2019 Victoria was awarded the AV Jennings Churchill Fellowship to investigate alternative, affordable models of housing that could help older Australians to age-in-place. For the Fellowship, Victoria will be visiting the USA, Germany, Denmark, Singapore and Japan.

Dr Chris Hatherly GAICD
Dr Chris Hatherly has been a member of the AAG since 2007, serving as ACT Division Treasurer (2010-12) and President (2012-15), as National Student Representative (2009), and as a Founding Director of the AAG Board on a one-year term in 2012. He was made an AAG Fellow in 2013.

Chris has a PHD in psychology from the ANU specialising in cognitive ageing, and currently works as Executive Director of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. He was previously Director of Science Policy at the Academy of Science and National Research Manager at Alzheimer’s Australia. These roles have involved effective advocacy to Federal Government Ministers and significant interaction with senior stakeholders in government, academia and industry.

Dr Gill Lewin
Gill has recently retired following a nearly thirty year career in ageing research during which time she headed up research in Silver Chain, a large community-based health and aged care organisation, and later combined this with a Professorship at Curtin University. While Gill and her colleagues completed projects and wrote and published papers and reports on a diverse range of topics about health and care services for older people, Gill’s especial research interest was on the development and testing of service models that enabled and empowered older people to optimise their health and ageing experience.

Gill has been a member of the Australian Association of Gerontology (AAG) since 1994 and has held a number of roles including Chair of the WA Committee and National President. Gill is currently a director of the corporate trustee, a member of the Research Trust Steering Committee and a member of the Reconciliation Action Group. Gill was appointed to the Commonwealth’s Council of Elders in January 2022.

Ben Poona
Ben has been employed with Tangentyere Council Aboriginal Corporation in Alice Springs, Northern Territories for almost 10 years, where he currently co-manages the Family Safety & Social Services Division – 17 programs from various sectors that deliver services to local community members. Some of these programs include Aged & Community Services, Disability, Chronic Disease Care Coordination, Family Violence Prevention, Family & Kin Care, Harm Minimisation, Tenancy Sustainability, Emergency Relief and Creative Arts. With over 20 years of operational experience working in the Health, Business & Arts sectors, Ben is excited to share experiences of working with an extremely diverse and vulnerable cohort of people living in rural and regional areas of Central Australia.

Anita Westera
Anita’s passion is improving the care and support of older people through strengthening the nexus between research, policy and practice. She is an academic, registered nurse and former policy adviser to the Commonwealth, NSW Governments and NSW Parliament. As a Research Fellow at the Australian Health Services Research Institute, University of Wollongong, she undertakes applied research and evaluation projects regarding older people, aged care, dementia and mental health services, including supporting the work of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. Her 2020 election to the AAG Board of Directors and Trustees of the AAG Research Trust builds on over two decades involvement within the NSW and Illawarra AAG Commitees.

Dr Katrina Radford (BPsych (hons), MHRM, PhD, GradCertHighEdu)

Katrina is a lecturer at Griffith University. My research program focuses on managing an ageing population in three key areas: 1) How can we better support an ageing workforce? 2) How can we better retain and support employees within the aged care sector?, and 3) How can we build better systems or programs that provide quality care for the ageing population?