Research Team

David Guest is the Professor of Plant Pathology in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, and Executive Board member of the Sydney Institute of Agriculture and Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, at The University of Sydney. He teaches undergraduate courses at all levels and has supervised over 40 PhD and Research Masters students.

His current research interests focus on understanding socioeconomic and health constraints to adoption of knowledge and technologies aimed at improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in tropical horticulture. His extensive fieldwork activities involve partnerships with research institutes and farming communities around the Asia-Pacific region. He is Past-President and a Fellow of the Australasian Plant Pathology Society, and Past President of the Asian Association of Societies of Plant Pathology.

Grant Vinning works in cocoa in the Pacific and Indonesia. In the Pacific, he has worked in different parts of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Samoa, and Vanuatu. Grant’s work is to find new markets and work with local people to develop their skills to exploit these new market opportunities. Grant’s interest in cocoa has resulted in his publishing Cocoa in the Pacific: the first fifty years. The book explores the origins of cocoa in five Pacific countries with the objective of identifying where the initial germplasm originated as a means of helping breeders address current issues such as pests and disease resistance, yield increases, and climate change. He is currently working on the most recent fifty years of cocoa in the Pacific.

Grant also writes a bi-monthly cocoa market newsletter that goes to cocoa growers, chocolate makers, researchers, and policy makers in 10 countries. He is the Judges’ Coordinator at the highly successful Bougainville Chocolate Festival and the adjudicator of the Festival’s Big Bean Competition. Grant relishes eating chocolate both as a professional and a consumer.

James Butubu works with Autonomous Bougainville Government’s(ABG) Department of Primary Industries (DPI) after leaving the Cocoa Coconut Institute of Papua New Guinea in 2017 as a Cocoa Breeder. He advises the ABG on cocoa industry Research & Development matters as well as Extension services delivery. He currently manages and implements special research projects such as the ACIAR Bougainville Cocoa project (HORT 2014/094) and others on Food security.

Mr James Butubu obtained a Masters Degree in AgriScience majoring in Horticulture and Plant Breeding from the Massey University, New Zealand. His current research interest is on Genetic improvement and development of new crop varieties through Resistance Breeding, Cocoa based farming systems and Crop germplasm collection and enhancement program. He has been regularly supervising and training agriculture students and farmers while on their Industrial training attachment with the DPI and previously in the PNG Cocoa Coconut Institute

Jessica Hall is a PhD student at the School of Public Health, University of Sydney. Her research applies a One Health approach to examine the links between health, nutrition and productivity of Cocoa Farmers in Bougainville. She holds a Masters degree in International Public Health and has over 8 years’ experience working on research for development projects across Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

Jessica has extensive experience in designing and implementing quantitative household surveys, most recently a large-scale livelihood survey in Bougainville. Jessica has also worked with several research projects to transition from paper-based to mobile data collection systems in low resource settings.

Josephine Saul Maora use to be the Head of the Plant Pathology Section at the Cocoa and Coconut Institute Ltd Papua New Guinea, where she manages pests and disease in cocoa, coconut and other crops in PNG. Dr Saul Maora graduated in 1993 with a Master of Science degree from La Trobe University for her study on “Resistance of cocoa genotypes to Phytophthora palmivora in Papua New Guinea”, and was awarded her PhD from the University of Sydney in 2009 for her investigation of “The spatial and temporal diversity of the blackpod pathogen, Phytophthora palmivora, on cocoa across PNG”. Her discoveries made an important contribution to the knowledge upon which IPDM is based, and she continues to promote the adoption of the technology by farmers.

She is currently a Master Trainer in Family Farm Team program training lead males and females from families to appreciate each other and work as a team in setting goals and planning to achieve goals through their agricultural activities. Dr Saul Maora comes from the cocoa-growing Province of Madang and is married with two children.

Professor Kirsten Black is an academic gynaecologist at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPAH) and Joint Head of the Discipline of Obstetrics, Gynaecology, and Neonatology at the University of Sydney. She has a PhD (2008) from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London. A/Prof Black is a fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RANZCOG) and a Member of the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive (UK) who works clinically in the fields of early pregnancy care, ultrasound, general gynaecology, menopause and contraception.

She chairs a committee on sexual and reproductive health for RANZCOG and is a member of their women’s health committee and their global health committee. She is an associate editor on the college’s journal. A/Prof Black’s research focuses on sexual and reproductive health in low resource settings and she is committed to clinical and research capacity building in the Asia Pacific region.

Merrilyn Walton is Professor of Medical Education in the School of Public Health, University of Sydney. As a leading patient-safety academic she works nationally and internationally undertaking research to improve the experience of patients and minimise the potential for errors in health care. She has written 3 books and is currently editing a book One Planet-One Health. She has been a lead expert for WHO in patient safety education- particularly in low resource countries. She has been an active participant in health professional regulation for over 30 years.

Professor Walton has published 14 book chapters, over 70 peer reviewed articles in leading journals. She is also an honorary Professor at the Hanoi Medical University, Viet Nam. She is currently working on health system improvement in Viet Nam and two One health projects in Sulawesi and Bougainville. In 2015- awarded Member of the Order of Australia for significant contributions to health policy and reform and standards in medical practice.

Phil Simmons is an Australian development economist. He obtained his Doctorate from Duke University in 1986 and publishes within the development literature, with more than 1000 citations of his work. He is an academic at the University of New England, tenured from 1990 until 2014 and now holding an honorary position. He has worked in Pakistan on major World Bank projects, with the Food and Agricultural Organisation in Thailand and Indonesia during the avian flu crisis, and other projects.

Other work includes many years leading projects on contract farming and, later, avian flu in Indonesia, funded by the Australian Centre for International Economics and, also, various consultancies. Currently, he reviews research papers for the International Food Policy Research Institute for their Discussion Paper series and is employed as an economist on a cocoa rehabilitation project managed by the University of Sydney for the Australian Government.