2026 Presenters
Keynote Speakers
Professor Sharon Goldfeld, AM, Director, Centre for Community Child Health. Theme Director Population Health, Murdoch Children's Research Institute
Title of Talk
Slow System Change Fast: How Data Could be the Disruptor to Accelerate Equitable Systems Change for Children
Biography
Professor Sharon Goldfeld is a paediatrician and Director, Centre for Community Child Health (CCCH) the Royal Children’s Hospital, and Theme Director, Population Health at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. She has a decade of experience in state government as a senior policymaker in Health and Education departments. Her research program is made up of complementary, synergistic and cross-disciplinary streams of work focused on investigating, testing and translating sustainable policy relevant solutions that eliminate inequities for children. She has secured over $125 million in research funding with 239 research publications. In 2024 she received an Order of Australia (AM) and was elected a Fellow to the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences (AAHMS).
Bridget M. Haas, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Case Western Reserve University
Title of Talk
Thriving in Uncertain Contexts: Immigration Policy, Institutions, and the Everyday Conditions of Family and Child Wellbeing
Biography
Bridget M. Haas, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University. Her research examines immigration, health, and the lived experience of asylum, with a particular focus on how immigration policies and institutions shape everyday life, mental health, and family wellbeing. She is the author of Suspended Lives: Navigating Everyday Violence in the U.S. Asylum System (University of California Press, 2023) and has published widely on asylum, temporality, and therapeutic interventions. Her broader research includes collaborative, interdisciplinary work on child and family wellbeing, including studies of neighborhood contexts and child maltreatment and research on healing after childhood sexual abuse. Across her scholarship, Haas uses ethnographic and interdisciplinary approaches to understand how structural conditions shape wellbeing and how individuals and families endure, navigate, and make meaning within contexts of uncertainty.
Ramesh Raghavan, MBBS, MD, PhD, Professor, New York University Silver School of Social Work
Title of Talk
Capacities and Contexts: Approaches to Enhancing Child Well-Being
Biography
Ramesh Raghavan is a Professor at the Silver School of Social Work at New York University in New York, NY.
Much of Dr. Raghavan’s current work is focused on child well-being. He leads the Group for Research on Well-Being (GROW), an inter-university research consortium. Faculty and student scholars associated with GROW conduct research on theory, measurement, and intervention development related to child and family flourishing in local and international contexts. Dr Raghavan’s work has been funded by national and international funding agencies. He is the co-editor of Implementing Public Health Interventions in Developing Countries (IKP Centre for Technologies in Public Health, 2012), and co-author of Investing in Children’s Mental Health (Oxford University Press, 2023). He is currently at work on a book titled Understanding Child Well-Being, which is under contract to be published by Edward Elgar Publishing.
Dr Raghavan is the former chair of NIMH’s Mental Health Services Research review committee and serves on the editorial board of Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research. In early 2015, he served in the Obama Administration as Senior Advisor in the Office of the Commissioner, Administration on Children, Youth and Families in the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Dr Raghavan completed medical school at Stanley Medical College, Madras, India, and a psychiatric residency at Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, India. He completed a fellowship in pediatric pain management in the Department of Pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also earned a PhD in health services.