Gwendolyn (Lyn) Gilbert is an infectious diseases physician and clinical microbiologist, with a particular interest in diagnosis, surveillance, prevention and ethics of infections of public health importance, including emerging, vaccine preventable and healthcare-associated infections. She was Director of the Centre for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology (CIDM) Laboratory Services for 20 years and Director of CIDM-Public Health for 10 years, at Westmead Hospital, Sydney, New South Wales, and Clinical Professor at the University of Sydney until her retirement in 2016. She is a Past President and Honorary Member of the Australian Society for Microbiology and of the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases.
Since 2016 she has been an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Health, senior researcher in the Sydney Institute for Infectious Diseases (formerly Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity), affiliate of Sydney Health Ethics and Consultant Emeritus, Westmead Hospital.
Professor Gilbert has had continuous competitive grant funding (mainly from NHMRC) from 1987 to the present as Chief Investigator on numerous project grants and several Centres of Research Excellence. She has published more than 350 original articles in peer-reviewed journals, numerous invited commentaries, book chapters and several books (as contributing editor and sole author of one).
She has been a member of the Communicable Diseases Network Australia (CDNA 1995-2009), member and inaugural chair of the Public Health Laboratory Network (PHLN 1997-2010) and Chair of the national Infection Control Expert Group (ICEG 2014-2021) which she represented on the Australian Health Protection Principle Committee (AHPPC 2014-2021).
In 2020-21 she was commissioned (with Adj Professor Alan Lilly) by the Commonwealth Department of Health to review and report on lessons learnt from outbreaks of COVID-19 in four individual residential aged care facilities and in residential aged care generally, in Australia, during 2020. The findings of these reviews have been published online.
AO