Alex is a graduate of the Australian Field Epidemiology Training program, the MAE at ANU, and completed his PhD on "Strengthening Disease Surveillance in Papua New Guinea" at UNSW, while working in the Emerging Diseases Surveillance and Response Team in WHO. He has extensive experience in infectious diseases outbreak control including cholera, ebola, shigellosis, measles, influenza, meningococcal disease, hepatitis E, pertussis and turtle meat poisoning. He has substantial field experience with WHO/PAHO in Papua New Guinea, Haiti, Nicaragua, India, Sierra Leone, Jordan, Philippines etc.
He is passionate about health equity and believes Austraila should play a more prominent and coordinated role in providing public health technical support during international health crises. He is currently the administrator of the ARM network for Australian outbreak response www.arm.org.au and the UNSW focal person for the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN),and is actively involved in outbreak response and risk assessment through GOARN http://www.who.int/csr/outbreaknetwork/en/
He reviews articles for journals such as Epidemiology and Infection, BMC Infectious Diseases and the Wesern Pacific Surveillance and Response Journal.
Alex's research interests include: operational research for improving control of outbreak prone diseases, particularly vaccine preventable diseases, as well as information and communication technology for improving health information systems.