Team bios

Steve McDonald is Co-Director and Senior Research Fellow at Cochrane Australia where he is responsible for supporting Cochrane in Australia, particularly through training, external engagement and advocacy. Steve coordinates the learning and education program of Cochrane Australia and teaches on training courses in Australia and South East Asia. He has broad experience in conducting systematic reviews and managing evidence synthesis projects.

Steve’s background is in information science and he provides search support and advice on all Cochrane Australia’s evidence synthesis projects. For the last few years, Steve has worked on Project Transform, a three-year flagship health evidence project funded by NHMRC and Cochrane, developing machine classifiers to improve the efficiency of study identification. He is currently enrolled in a part-time PhD that is evaluating the application of these new technologies to support living systematic reviews and living guidelines. Steve’s other research interests include methods for overviews of reviews, and the use of text mining and automation in search strategy design.

As part of Cochrane Australia's international responsibilities, he has helped establish Cochrane networks in South East Asia and East Asia. He was an elected member of Cochrane's Board of Directors from 2008 to 2015, and previously managed Cochrane’s international training program. From 2005-2015 he was a member of the Advisory Board of the Joanna Briggs Institute.

Steve has an honours degree in Social and Political Science from the University of Cambridge, a Masters in Library and Information Studies from Loughborough University and a Graduate Diploma in International Health from Monash University. In 2015 he graduated from the Asialink Leaders Program. His Monash University Researcher Profile and list of publications can be found here.

Contact details: steve.mcdonald@monash.edu

Professor Sally Green is Director of Cochrane Australia and Deputy Head (Research) of the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University. Sally has qualifications in physiotherapy, with a PhD (Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine), and a research career spanning research synthesis and transfer into policy and practice in a range of contexts and settings.

Sally is a member of the Medical Benefits Schedule Review Advisory Committee, Cochrane International Governing Board, and was recently invited to join the World Health Organization’s External Group of Experts on Knowledge Translation and Evidence Informed Decision Making. Her research program led to international research furthering systematic review methods, e.g. the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions.

Under Sally's leadership, Cochrane Australia has grown from a team of three to 25 academics/research professionals, and includes the establishment of the Australian Living Evidence Collaboration (ALEC). Her work has considerable impact, leading implementation plans for the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care Clinical Care Standards; increasing relevance of clinical guidelines by authoring guidance on the implementability in clinical trials for the Australian Clinical Trial Alliance; and having authored guidance on implementing Australian guidelines via guidance for the NHMRC Handbook for Guideline Developers.

Sally also has over 195 peer-reviewed publications, including 84 as first/senior author. Her publications are cited >30K times (H-index=60). Her work attracts attention beyond academia, with 2,000+ mentions on social media and 193 mentions in news outlets. In the past five years, she has secured over $23 million in competitive research grants (including over $7 million from the Australian NHMRC).

Contact details:  sally.green@monash.edu

Sue is a Senior Research Fellow at Cochrane Australia, in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine where she leads the Melbourne GRADE centre and contributes to Cochrane’s program of work on the translation of research into policy. Her role includes producing and facilitating the use of systematic reviews for health policy decision-making. She has been lead investigator on six reviews commissioned to inform NHMRC national guidelines, and the methodological lead on reviews of public health and healthcare improvement interventions. She conducts research that aims to (i) advance methods for research synthesis and the uptake of these methods, and to (ii) develop practical, evidence-based approaches for enabling decision-makers to use research. Her collaborative research on methods for evidence synthesis has informed workshops and guidance for systematic review authors, including co-authoring four chapters in the 2019 edition of the Cochrane handbook. She is a lead investigator on a project to develop GRADE methods for overviews of systematic reviews, and a member of the NHMRC Health Evidence panel. Through her roles in Cochrane and the GRADE working group, she works with policy-makers and guideline developers to implement GRADE methods for assessing research and making evidence-based recommendations. 

As a postdoctoral fellow on the NHMRC funded Centre for Research Excellence in Informing Policy in Health with Evidence from Research (CIPHER), Sue contributed to the development of measures of research use in policy and the evaluation of a program to build capacity for using research in policy agencies.

Sue holds a Doctor of Philosophy in public health from Monash University (awarded 2013) for research on methods for evaluating quality improvement (QI) strategies, a Graduate Diploma of Education from the University of Melbourne, and a Bachelor of Science (Hons) from Monash University. Her doctoral research resulted in two highly accessed systematic reviews (>33K) reporting a framework and measures for evaluating QI in primary care. 

Max Murano is a Research Fellow at Cochrane Australia in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University. Max contributes to research that aims to (i) advance methods for research synthesis and the uptake of these methods, and (ii) develop and apply practical, evidence-based approaches for enabling decision-makers to use research evidence. They also contribute to various projects and commissions related to systematic reviews and other types of evidence syntheses, as well as translation of research into healthcare policy and practice.  Max also participates in the development and delivery of training programs for both Cochrane Australia and the Melbourne GRADE Centre.

Max has over a decade’s experience working with colleagues in low- and middle-income settings to optimize the use of research evidence in policymaking and practice in maternal and neonatal health. They have extremely strong project and research management skills developed as Project Manager for a number of competitively funded multi-centre international health evidence projects. Max has strong skills in financial, contract and research management developed during their appointment as Business Manager at Cochrane Australia.  They have Bachelor of Social Sciences and a Master of Health Administration, and a view of the mountains from their home office in northern NSW.

Contact details:  max.murano@monash.edu

Professor Tari Turner is Director of the Australian Living Evidence Consortium and Director of the National Clinical Evidence Taskforce, leading development of living guidelines, and a Professor (Research) at Cochrane Australia. Prof Turner leads research developing and evaluating methods for living evidence syntheses, including living systematic reviews and living guidelines; and translating synthesised evidence into improved healthcare practice and policy.

Tari’s passion is supporting evidence-based decision-making to ensure the best possible outcomes, particularly for women and children in low resource settings. She enjoys designing, finding, synthesising and communicating research, and she loves seeing research actually make a difference.

Tari is and Editor of the Cochrane Library and Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods, and was previously Co-Editor in Chief of Health Research Policy and Systems, a BMC journal published in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO). She is also a member of the Scientific and Technical Advisory Group to the WHO Department of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Research; an Honorary Principal Research Fellow at the Burnet Institute; a Senior Research Fellow at 3ir and a member of the Australian Red Cross Lifeblood Ethics Committee.