School of Medicine

This year we were delighted to welcome Professor Francis L Delmonico, an international leader in organ donation and transplantation to deliver the 2017 School of Medicine Oration entitled: “When we choose to “go to the moon”: what organ donation and transplantation reveals about medicine, science, and humanity”.

Professor Delmonico is Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he is Emeritus Director of Renal Transplantation. He is also Medical Director of the New England Organ Bank, and Past President of the United Network for Organ Sharing, the federally designated Organ Procurement Transplant Network (OPTN) that oversees the practice of transplantation in the United States. He is also Past President of The Transplantation Society, an Advisor to the World Health Organization in matters of organ donation and transplantation, Senior Advisor to the Declaration of Istanbul Custodian Group, and a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Professor Delmonico is renowned for his work in combating organ trafficking and transplant “tourism”, and supporting the development of ethical practice in donation and transplantation throughout the world. He has authored or co-authored more than 300 publications, including in the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New York Times. He is a former Board member of the National Kidney Foundation (NKF) and a recipient of the NKF’s David M. Hume Lifetime Achievement Award. He was a co-recipient of the Prince of Asturias award on behalf of The Transplantation Society in 2010 for his efforts in the establishment of the Declaration of Istanbul. He has received the Shumakov Medal from the Moscow Institute of Transplantation and the Gold Medal of the Catalan Transplantation Society. He has received Honorary Doctorates from the Pan American University of Mexico City, Salem State University, and the Karolinska Institute.

2016 Deakin University School of Medicine Oration Delivered by Dr Jonathan Silverman.

Dr Jonathan Silverman is a world expert on teaching communication skills to medical students and doctors. He is honorary visiting Senior Fellow at Cambridge University. He was a General Practitioner for over 30 years in Linton, Cambridgeshire, UK. He has been actively involved in teaching medical communication skills since 1988, and in 1999 he became Director of Communication Studies for the medical degree at Cambridge University.

Jonathan is best known as one of the authors of the Calgary-Cambridge Guides to the Medical Interview, which has a global reputation and provides a framework for describing the medical interview. The guides are used in 70% of UK schools, and around the world, including here at Deakin University. He has conducted communication skills teaching seminars throughout the UK, in Europe, Australia and North America.

In 2005, he founded the UK Council for Communication Skills Teaching in Undergraduate Medical Education for all 33 UK medical schools. He is President of the European Association for Communication in Healthcare. In 2015, he was awarded the Lynn Payer award “for outstanding contributions to the literature on the theory, practice and teaching of effective health care communication and related skills” from the American Academy of Communication in Healthcare.

Deakin University School of Medicine Oration 2015 'The Hypocritic Oath: Medical Ethics in a Rapidly Changing World' presented by Professor Julian Savulescu (Thinker in Residence)

Julian holds degrees in medicine, neuroscience and bioethics. He is a world leader in medical and practical ethics, and is Editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics and founding editor of Journal of Practical Ethics. He is author of over 250 publications and has given over 120 invited international presentations. He is the Sir Louis Matheson Distinguished Visiting Professor at Monash University and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Florey Neuroscience Institute, one of the World's top 10 neuroscience institutes.

Julian was the Thinker in Residence at our School of Medicine at Deakin University. He holds the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford. He is the Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics within the Oxford Faculty of Philosophy. He is Director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, which is one of three strategic centres in biomedical ethics in the UK funded by the Wellcome Trust, and he was recently awarded their flagship Wellcome Senior Investigator Award. He is also Director of the Institute for Science and Ethics within the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford.

He was selected as the winner of the 'Thinkers' category of The Australian's Top 100 Emerging Leaders awards, presented by the Australian Prime Minister. He has presented at conferences across the world including the World Economic Forum at Davos (2009) and gave the keynote for the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (2013).

2013 Deakin University School of Medicine Oration Delivered by Nobel Laureate Professor Peter Doherty.



1997 Australian of the Year Professor Peter Doherty trained as a veterinarian, before spending a decade researching infectious diseases of domestic animals. For the past 40 years he has been involved in biomedical research. He and his Swiss colleague Rolf Zinkernagel shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for a discovery made at the John Curtin School of Medical Research and the ideas they developed concerning the nature of cell-mediated immunity and transplantation.