Douglas Gordon Oration
| Thursday, May 7, 2026 |
| 11:00 AM - 11:45 AM |
| Grand Ballroom |
Details
ABOUT:
The Douglas Gordon Oration commemorates the contribution made by the late Douglas Gordon to public health and is now 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.
Session Chair: Professor Sarah Durkin - Director of the Centre for Behavioural Research in Cancer, Cancer Council Victoria
Speaker
Adjunct Associate Professor Mark West
Executive Director
Queensland Health
Oration Title TBC
Abstract
TBC
Biography
Adjunct Associate Professor Mark West is Executive Director of Prevention Strategy Branch, Population Health Division, Queensland Health. He has more than 30 years’ experience of working in public health. For 29 years he has led the Queensland Government’s response to tobacco smoking and now vaping. This has included the provision of expert advice for the development and implementation of National Tobacco Strategies and Queensland Tobacco Strategic Frameworks; extensive law reforms for banning tobacco sales to children, restricting tobacco retail display and advertising, smoke-free public places, smoking product licensing scheme and strengthening enforcement; the statewide tobacco and vape enforcement network; Queensland Quitline service including a nation-leading intensive support program that has provided free nicotine replacement therapy to priority groups for more than 20 years; cutting edge public health campaigns; and research and evaluation. His current responsibilities include strategic oversight of chronic disease prevention, tobacco and vape control, skin cancer prevention, healthy built environments, health promotion services for the bowel and cervical cancer screening programs, food regulation advice, women and girls’ health promotion, and healthy pregnancy, kids and family’s strategic policy and initiatives.
