The Collective:
Academic & Research Leadership.
IHRI is directed by a collective of practitioner-scholars uniting senior health system architects, health systems specialists, and frontier molecular biologists dedicated to systemic resilience.
Staff & Engagement Disclosure
IHRI operates with a small permanent executive core. Our academic faculty, research leads, and regional partners engage with the institution as affiliated associates and independent contractors. This structure allows IHRI to assemble world-class practitioner expertise across disciplines and geographies while maintaining lean, efficient institutional operations.
Advisory Board
Providing strategic direction, governance, and industry-specific expertise to support IHRI's overarching mission.
Prof. Peter O'Meara
Advisory Board Member
Dr. Peter O'Meara serves on the IHRI Advisory Board, bringing unparalleled international expertise in paramedicine professionalization, rural health system design, and high-level policy development. As one of the first paramedics globally to earn a doctoral qualification in the field, he has been a foundational architect of modern paramedic education and extended scope-of-practice models across multiple continents.
Dr. O'Meara currently holds an Adjunct Professorship at Monash University and occupies pivotal strategic roles worldwide, including as a Board Member of the Paramedic Network (US), Chair of the Global Paramedic Higher Education Council, and an expert member of the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) Community Paramedicine Technical Committee.
With a prolific academic record comprising over 100 peer-reviewed publications, his research focuses on systemic resilience, community paramedicine, and workforce sustainability in remote and resource-constrained environments. Within IHRI, Dr. O'Meara leverages his decades of global leadership to provide strategic policy guidance, ensuring the institute's health systems research, operational frameworks, and academic programs remain at the vanguard of international standards and frontline realities.
Dr. Jane George
Advisory Board Member
Dr. Jane George is a leading independent researcher and expert in rural health workforce development in Aotearoa New Zealand, specialising in the recruitment and retention of allied health professionals. With a doctorate focused on rural healthcare workforce challenges, she brings extensive leadership experience from her former role as Director of Allied Health, Scientific & Technical for Te Tai o Poutini West Coast.
She now collaborates with multiple universities across New Zealand and Australia on research initiatives while providing strategic consulting to rural health systems on workforce recruitment, retention, and utilisation. As a sought-after keynote speaker, Dr. George shares evidence-based approaches to addressing rural health inequities through sustainable workforce solutions.
Core Directorate & Executive Leadership
The permanent executive responsible for the operational and academic integrity of the institution.
Dr. Andrew Hodgers
Academic: DHS Faculty & Supervisor
Strategic: President and Principal Investigator · IHRI Unit 03 — Complex Systems and Space
Dr. Andrew Hodgers is the founder and President of IHRI and Principal Investigator of Unit 03 — Complex Systems and Space. His career integrates three decades of senior academic leadership in work-based learning at doctoral level with four decades of operational and strategic leadership across defence technology, tier-one multinational advisory, and transnational systems integration.
His academic career was built through his role as co-founder and Director of the Irish Centre for Work Based Learning — the Centre for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS) — which he established alongside Nick Hodgers and Professor Noel Mulcahy as the Irish partner centre operating within Middlesex University's international Work-Based Learning network and its National Centre for Work Based Learning. The National Centre received the Queen's Anniversary Prize for excellence and innovation in 1996 — the most distinguished award in UK higher education — and was designated a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) by the Higher Education Funding Council for England in 2005, in recognition of its nationally leading work in work-based learning. As co-founder and Director, he co-developed and led the Global Executive Leadership postgraduate and doctoral programme, a flexible academic pathway designed for senior career professionals, and established CAPS as a substantive research and practice environment for executive doctoral candidates operating within the Middlesex academic framework.
He served as Ireland's Expert Partner in a two-year EU-funded transnational consortium — Work Based Learning: Learning from Europe — supported by the European Social Fund and the State of Brandenburg, working with partner institutions across Germany (Technische Hochschule Brandenburg), the United Kingdom (Middlesex University Institute for Work Based Learning), Finland (University of Jyväskylä), and Austria (Fachhochschule Joanneum) to design and implement work-based learning frameworks and capability programmes for industry in the Brandenburg region. He subsequently operated in an advisory capacity to a Malta-based higher education college, supporting its progression to Masters and Doctoral programme licence status and the design and introduction of three new programmes: two Masters degrees with associated Postgraduate Certificate and Postgraduate Diploma pathways, and a doctoral degree.
His commercial career spans three distinct domains. As Director of European Operations for a Kollmorgen Corporation subsidiary — a NATO-standard defence technology company — he directed cross-border design-in programmes with defence primes including Thales, Leonardo, Dassault Aviation, and DASA, and led the first sectoral BS5750 Part 1 / ISO 9001 certification of its kind in Europe in 1989, when quality management system adoption was still in its formative phase across European industry. As a senior hire at Accenture's UKI practice he was assigned to a Diamond-client engagement where he stabilised a high-value transnational banking relationship through the application of management cybernetics and structural diagnostic methods. A further fifteen years of independent advisory practice spanned health, MedTech, defence, and transnational manufacturing at executive and board level.
His doctoral research — a Doctor of Professional Studies completed at Middlesex University, applying Beer's Viable Systems Model to the design of a viable regulatory interface organisation between structurally incompatible systems — was examined and commended by an external examiner who was a direct associate of Stafford Beer. That research is the theoretical foundation for IHRI Unit 03's VAIAS-ORG™ framework for governance architecture in agentic AI deployment contexts, published as IHRI Working Paper IHRI-U03-WP-2026-001 and available at ihri.edu.eu/complex-systems-space. He also holds an MBA from Oxford Brookes University.
Selected Publications
- Hodgers, N. and Hodgers, A. (2009). Transnational Corporations: The Irish Centre Experience. In J. Garnett, C. Costley and B. Workman (eds.), Work Based Learning: Journeys to the Core of Higher Education. Middlesex University Press, London. ISBN: 9781904750192.
- Hodgers, A. (2026). One Architecture, Three Descriptions: A Unified Mapping of Beer's Viable Systems Model, the EU AI Act Essential Requirements, the Nannini Agentic Compliance Sequence, and VAIAS-ORG Across a Single Coherent Architecture. IHRI Unit 03 Working Paper IHRI-U03-WP-2026-001. Available at: ihri.edu.eu/complex-systems-space
Nicole Foster
Chief Operating Officer
Nicole Foster is an operational, clinical, and academic executive with extensive experience in managing complex, regulated, and remote operations across four continents. She holds a Master of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and is a Fellow of the Academy of Wilderness Medicine (FAWM) — one of the most demanding clinical credentials in extreme environment medicine, requiring demonstrated competency in the management of medical emergencies in environments far from definitive care.
Her clinical background is unusually broad for an operational executive. She is dual-registered as a paramedic and nurse, with a specialism in remote and austere prehospital care. Her operational experience spans military, mining, and NGO sectors, where she has led and managed clinical teams in environments ranging from active conflict zones to remote industrial sites and humanitarian emergencies. She has designed benchmarking and competency frameworks for medical and allied health professionals operating under international standards, and has developed and deployed remote learning programmes for clinical education in environments where conventional face-to-face delivery is not viable.
As Chief Operating Officer of IHRI, Nicole is responsible for the operational and administrative integrity of the institution across both pillars. In Pillar I, she provides operational oversight of the infrastructure supporting the MFHEA-accredited Doctor of Health Science programme — encompassing quality systems, compliance processes, and the operational conditions required for academic delivery — with academic governance of the DHS residing with the institution's academic leadership. In Pillar II, her clinical governance background informs the quality assurance frameworks applied to Unit 03's applied research programme. Her remote and austere healthcare experience gives her direct operational understanding of the extreme environment contexts that Vector A's research addresses, and her Fellowship of the Academy of Wilderness Medicine positions her as a practitioner contributor to the allostatic load and analogue environment dimensions of IHRI-U03-WP-2026-004. She is a member of the Australian College of Paramedicine.
Affiliated Academic Faculty & Research Leadership
Practitioner-scholars delivering the accredited Doctor of Health Science curriculum and leading IHRI's distributed independent Research Nodes, engaged in a fractional or contracted capacity.
Dr. Ciaran Culligan
Academic: DHS Faculty & Supervisor
Strategic: Director Quality
Dr. Ciaran Culligan holds a Doctor of Professional Studies in Systems Development from Middlesex University London, a Master of Engineering from the University of Limerick — where his research focused on the repair of advanced composite materials on aircraft structures — and a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical), also from the University of Limerick. His doctoral research, completed in 2009, produced a quality system model specifically designed for higher education institutes, examining the structural and procedural conditions under which quality assurance frameworks can function effectively at the interface between academic institutions and their external operating environments.
That doctorate was one of three programmes specifically sponsored by the Irish Centre for Work Based Learning — the Centre for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS), Middlesex University's Irish partner centre — to develop and interrogate the quality interface between higher education institutions and transnational industrial partners. The programme addressed a recognised gap: the absence of robust, transferable quality frameworks capable of operating across the structurally different accountability systems of higher education and industry. Dr. Culligan's research produced a practical and theoretically grounded model to bridge that gap.
Alongside his doctoral work, Dr. Culligan served as Postgraduate and Doctoral Tutor at CAPS from 2005 to 2018, supervising candidates on the transdisciplinary Masters and Doctorate in Professional Studies within the Middlesex University Institute for Work Based Learning framework. His supervision practice was shaped by three decades of senior operations and quality leadership in high-specification advanced manufacturing environments spanning aviation, automotive, and defence sectors — industries where quality system rigour is not aspirational but operationally critical.
As Director Quality at IHRI, Dr. Culligan is responsible for the quality assurance architecture of the institution's MFHEA-accredited academic programmes. His dual grounding — a doctorate specifically in quality system design for higher education, and decades of applied quality leadership in safety-critical industry — makes him the natural authority for building and sustaining the quality framework that IHRI's regulatory licence requires.
Dr. Angela Martin
Academic: DHS Faculty & Supervisor
Strategic: Director · Unit 02 — Rural Systems & Frontline Resilience
Dr. Angela Martin is an internationally recognised practitioner-scholar in community paramedicine and health systems design, with twenty-five years of front-line health industry experience spanning nursing, paramedicine, education, and clinical leadership in rural and remote South Australia. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy specifically in community paramedicine, a Master Paramedic Practitioner qualification, a Graduate Diploma in Emergency Nursing, and a Bachelor of Nursing. Her career has been built at the intersection of clinical practice and research — the model that IHRI's doctoral programme explicitly embodies.
Her research and advocacy focus on bridging health service inequalities in remote and underserved communities, with particular depth in First Nations health systems and primary healthcare access. She has served as a consultant to the Australasian College of Paramedicine and to national bodies responsible for rural health policy in Australia. Her academic awards include the SA Emergency Services Medal (2018), awarded for distinguished service of the highest order, and the SA Ambulance Service Clinical Excellence Commendation (2016) for exceptional leadership in professional development in regional communities.
Within IHRI, Dr. Martin supervises doctoral candidates through the Doctor of Health Science programme, contributing the methodological rigour of her own PhD research and her practitioner depth to the supervision of health systems research at doctoral level. Her specific expertise in community paramedicine and integrated care models is directly applicable to the health system design challenges facing isolated and extreme-environment populations — the same populations whose physiological and operational resilience sits at the heart of IHRI's research mission.
Dr. Manavi Jadhav
Academic: DHS Faculty & Supervisor
Strategic: Co-Founder and Principal Scientist · Unit 03 — Complex Systems and Space
Dr. Manavi Jadhav is a cosmochemist and laboratory astrophysicist and co-founder of IHRI, where she serves as Principal Scientist and Director of Space Systems within Unit 03 — Complex Systems and Space. She holds a PhD in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Washington University in St. Louis and has held postdoctoral research positions at the Laboratory for Space Sciences (Washington University), the W. M. Keck Cosmochemistry Laboratory at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, the Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies at The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. She joined the University of Louisiana at Lafayette as Assistant Professor of Physics in 2018, where she secured a National Science Foundation research fellowship and built a laboratory and research programme in isotope cosmochemistry from the ground up.
Her scientific specialisation is the laboratory analysis of presolar grains — stardust found preserved in meteorites — using secondary ion mass spectrometry, resonant ionization mass spectrometry, synchrotron X-ray fluorescence and tomography, and electron microscopy. This work requires characterising physical signals across radically different and discontinuous environmental contexts — stellar, interstellar, protosolar, and meteoritic — using complementary analytical instruments whose outputs must be reconciled into a coherent cross-domain framework. That methodological approach is the direct intellectual foundation for Vector A's cross-domain allostatic load programme.
Dr. Jadhav is a field expedition member of the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET), the US programme that recovers meteorites from the Antarctic ice sheet under the auspices of the National Science Foundation, and holds the NSF Antarctic Service Medal. Her direct fieldwork experience in one of the primary analogue environments studied in the Vector A scoping review — combined with her laboratory expertise in resolving signals from complex, multi-environment datasets — positions her uniquely as the scientific lead for IHRI's first cross-domain endocrine load framework spanning orbital missions, Antarctic expeditions, and deep-space mission architectures.
Dr. Ari Meerson
Academic: DHS Faculty & Supervisor
Strategic: Head of Genomics · Unit 01 Bio-Risk & Genomics
Dr. Meerson is a molecular and genomics biologist with 25+ years of experience in basic and applied research.
Dr. Meerson's PhD research at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and his postdoctorate work at NIH/NIDDK (Phoenix, AZ, USA) both focused on the function of microRNAs, short RNA molecules that regulate gene expression and are involved in a variety of biological pathways. MicroRNAs may act as a functional link between different chronic diseases, and hold promise as potential biomarkers and therapeutic targets.
As a Senior Researcher (since 2013) and head of the Genomics Unit (since 2020) at the Galilee Research Institute (MIGAL), Israel, Dr. Meerson has continued working on microRNAs as biomarkers and functional players in human diseases, but also expanded into broader genomics/transcriptomics, focusing on novel applications of Oxford Nanopore sequencing.
In the framework of an industry collaboration, Dr. Meerson has developed a qPCR-based genetic assay for establishing the sex of Russian sturgeon fish, for caviar aquaculture. The method is in commercial use by Caviar Galilee ltd. since 2021.
Dr. Meerson is a Teaching Fellow with the rank of Senior Lecturer at Tel Hai College (from 2026 - the University of Kiryat Shmona in the Galilee, Israel), teaching courses in developmental and molecular biology, RNA biology, genomics and evolution. He has established international collaborations, supervised >15 graduate and undergraduate students, presented at >50 national and international symposia, and is an active participant in EU COST Actions. Google Scholar link: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=E1iQurcAAAAJ
Dr. Kanan Puntambekar
Academic: DHS Faculty & Supervisor
Strategic: Director: AgriFood & Environmental Systems
Dr. David N. Long
Academic: DHS Faculty & Supervisor
Strategic: Research Lead · Community Paramedicine & Models of Care
Dr. David N. Long is an accomplished academic and Australian registered paramedic with a career defined by over two decades of clinical expertise and a commitment to advancing paramedicine as a unique health discipline. He holds a diverse range of qualifications, including a PhD, a Master of Education in Leadership and Management, and degrees in health science and education. A former Intensive Care and Extended Care Paramedic, he served within an Australian jurisdictional ambulance service for 21 years before transitioning into the higher education sector.
Throughout his academic career, Dr. Long has held significant leadership positions, including Discipline Lead for the Paramedicine Program and First Year Experience Lead for the School of Health and Medical Sciences at the University of Southern Queensland. His doctoral research focused on the transition of qualified paramedics into specialist roles within community paramedicine, a topic that remains a core pillar of his research interests alongside models of care, public safety, and higher education pedagogy. Dr. Long has supervised higher degree research students to completion and continues to be a thesis examiner.
Dr. Long is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and was honoured with a Fellowship of the Australasian College of Paramedicine in 2024. He remains actively engaged in the paramedicine sector through his appointment to the Paramedics Panel of Assessors for the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (QCAT) and other engagements across higher education institutions.
Dr. Sabrina Poradosú
Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer · Head of Space Health and Human Factors, Unit 03
Dr. Sabrina Poradosú is a medical doctor with over a decade of clinical experience and dual board specialisations in internal medicine and endocrinology, diabetes, and metabolism. She holds a Master of Science in Space Studies from KU Leuven, one of Europe's foremost space medicine research institutions, and her research focuses specifically on the interplay between cortisol, immune function, and metabolic changes — including insulin resistance — in astronauts operating under sustained physiological stress.
As Chief Medical Officer of IHRI and Head of Space Health and Human Factors in Unit 03, she provides clinical governance for all health-related programmes and leads the endocrinological dimension of the Vector A research programme. Her dual background — the breadth of internal medicine practice and the precision of endocrine specialisation, combined with formal space medicine training — makes her the clinical authority for IHRI's work on HPA-axis stress signalling and allostatic load measurement across orbital and analogue environments. Her research into cortisol dynamics in astronauts addresses precisely the cross-domain measurement challenge that the Vector A scoping review programme is designed to resolve.
Dr. Sophie Fontaine
Strategic: Specialist Advisor
Extreme Environment Health
Dr. Sophie Fontaine is an Australian doctor completing her internship through the Victorian Rural Generalist Program. Her clinical experience spans emergency medicine, general practice, surgery, and internal medicine across regional health services, as well as a summer placement on a floating clinic on Cambodia's Tonle Sap Lake.
In 2025, Dr. Fontaine was appointed Visiting Adjunct Faculty Member of IHRI, serving as a liaison between IHRI and the Academy of Extreme Environment Medicine (AEEM). Her work centres on collaborative research, knowledge translation, and programme development in extreme environment and expedition health, with ongoing contributions to AEEM's ExMedicine journal.
Dr. Fontaine has contributed to research projects spanning neurodegeneration at the Florey Institute, pharmacogenomics at Illumina Australia, genetic speech disorders at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, and health systems mapping of dementia services with Gippsland Primary Health Network. Of Danish heritage and with a deep passion for language learning, multiculturalism, and global travel, she brings a distinctly international, interdisciplinary lens to extreme environment and remote healthcare.
Nicholas Dillon
Strategic: Research Lead
AI & Diagnostics
Nicholas Dillon is a healthcare executive and advanced clinical practitioner with over twenty years' experience delivering and leading medical services across diverse, remote, and resource-constrained environments. His career spans deployed healthcare, senior operational leadership in the Middle East and Africa, and the design of training and development programmes for multidisciplinary teams.
With an academic foundation that includes an MBA in Risk and Resilience, an MSc in Advanced Clinical Practice, and a PGDip in Emergency Medicine, he focuses on integrating high-technology solutions—particularly AI and advanced diagnostics—into low-resource and frontier settings. His work is defined by a pragmatic, real-world approach shaped by extensive field experience and a sustained commitment to evidence-based, system-level improvement.
Aaron Zak
Strategic: Healthcare Innovator & Researcher
AI System Design & Pre-hospital Care
Aaron Zak is a paramedic, researcher, and healthcare innovator with over a decade of interdisciplinary experience ranging from emergency medical services (EMS), public health, hospital-at-home care delivery, AI system design and human-system technology integration.
Having worked across several healthcare systems spanning the United States, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, he has gained broad insight into global health challenges and models of care delivery. Driven by boots-on-the-ground experience and recognizing a critical gap between healthcare innovation and adoption, Aaron co-founded RRSP Industries. RRSP Industries creates technologies to improve access to high-quality care, provide infrastructure to support home-based care delivery, strengthen crisis response, enhance supply chain efficiency, and promote economic resilience.
Aaron is currently engaged in several research topic areas including pre-hospital care delivery, public health, biochemistry, and therapeutics.
Neil Coleman
Role: Clinical & Ed. Dev
Domain: Prehospital Systems
Neil Coleman has been involved in pre-hospital medical and trauma care for twenty-seven years, during which he has developed an extensive record in pre-hospital education — spanning small-group sessions on the fundamentals of patient care, lecturing to final-year medical students, presenting CPD courses to GPs, and holding an Assistant Professor's chair in a medical school.
His commitment to pre-hospital education has led him to complete a Master's degree and two further postgraduate qualifications while simultaneously working in a high-volume urban EMS system. He has presented courses in the United States, the United Kingdom, and throughout Europe, and advocates strongly for cross-disciplinary training with nursing and medical colleagues.
Neil's belief that paramedic research needs to be undertaken by paramedics has seen him published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and he continues his own education to this day. In his current role he manages a special-purpose response team covering a large geographical area.
Africa Regional Partners
IHRI works with a select network of independent regional advisors and consultants who support our international partnership development and field operations in an external capacity.
Patrice Honvou
Regional Advisor: Africa Government & Institutional Partnerships
Corinne Faber
Regional Consultant: Africa Programme Development & Field Standards