Board of Directors – Australia Myanmar Institute

President

Honorary Associate Prof Christopher Lamb, University of Melbourne; former Ambassador to Burma/Myanmar

Christopher Lamb is the president of the Australia Myanmar Institute. He is a retired Australian diplomat, having worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade from 1968-2000. In that time he served as Ambassador to Myanmar (Burma) from 1986-89 and to Yugoslavia, Romania, and Macedonia from 1997-2000. After that, he worked as a chief diplomat with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Geneva (2000-2010). Earlier in his DFAT career, he served in the Burma Embassy from 1972-74.

In Geneva, he helped develop IFRC’s policy on Humanitarian Diplomacy. This policy describes the role of humanitarian diplomats as persuading decision-makers and opinion leaders to act, at all times, in the interests of vulnerable people, and with full respect for fundamental humanitarian principles.

He is now an adviser to IFRC and to the Australian Red Cross as well as several other National Societies (including the Myanmar Red Cross), concentrating on the resolution of political questions and the skills required for humanitarian diplomacy. He is also an associate professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

As president of the Australia Myanmar Institute (AMI), he works actively with a wide variety of counterparts in Myanmar from government, business, civil society, and academia. AMI conducts major conferences in Myanmar about every 2 ½ years, concentrating on Myanmar’s progress towards its development objectives. This includes examining the importance of achieving human rights and peace as platforms from which development can proceed.

He is a graduate of the Australian National University, with degrees in Law and Arts (Political Science), and lives in Melbourne.

Vice-President

Dr. Raymond Tint Way, FRANZCP, Burmese Medical Association Australia

Raymond Tint Way, a graduate of the Rangoon Institute of Medicine (I), is a senior consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist in private practice in Sydney, Australia. He is a VMO psychiatrist in the Mood Disorders Unit at Northside Clinic, a private psychiatric inpatient facility, affiliated with the University of Sydney. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists and holds the degree of MM (Psychotherapy) from the University of Sydney. He is the immediate past president of the Sydney-based Burmese Medical Association Australia, which has received AusAID sponsored Australian Award Fellowships for Myanmar medical professionals in three consecutive years (2012-2014) in collaboration with the University of Sydney, Macquarie, and Monash Universities. He is an Honorary Professor of Psychiatry at the Medical University (I), Yangon, Myanmar.

He has published in the areas of psychopharmacology, cross-cultural psychiatry, and psychotherapy in the Australian medical, psychiatry, and psychotherapy journals. In the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis in 2008, he trained several general practitioners in Sydney, who carried out “psychological first aid” and a pilot psychosocial project in Myanmar, in collaboration with Myanmar psychiatrists.

Secretary

Prof Joseph Lo Bianco, University of Melbourne

Joseph Lo Bianco is Professor of Language and Literacy Education, in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. He is a Past President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

His current academic research and policy activities include UNICEF Research Director, Language, Education, and Social Cohesion, Malaysia, Myanmar/Burma, and Thailand; and preparation of Peace Building National Language Policy in Myanmar. He is also a Research adviser for LUCIDE, a European Community project on Languages in Urban Communities, and is Immediate Past and Inaugural President of the Tsinghua, Asia Pacific Forum on Translation and Intercultural Studies.

He has 130 publications on language, policy, and planning, language education, literacy, culture and identity. In press are Aldo and the Meridian Line, a novel in the Mountain of Su Dongpo series, (with T. Hay and Y. Wang) and a volume on Language and Identity in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia (with Fethi Hilal).

Treasurer

Philip J Watts, Private Sector

Philip Watts has an extensive business and marketing background and is presently a business consultant. He has conducted business in a number of industries in a wide range of Asian countries over the past 35 years. He resides in Melbourne and has a deep interest in Myanmar and the country’s future. He attended the Australian Myanmar Institute Conference in Yangon in 2015 and is in close touch with businesses, education institutions, NGOs, local government agencies and the Myanmar diaspora in Australia.

He is involved in a number of not-for-profit organisations including The Melbourne Sinfonia (Committee member), Carlton Residents Association (Treasurer), and Bicycle Training Australia (Chairman).

Director

Prof Monique Skidmore, Deakin University

Monique Skidmore is the Director of the Australia Myanmar Institute and a Professor in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation.

She is an internationally renowned medical and political anthropologist of Myanmar and a former Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the Universities of Queensland and Tasmania.

Monique has worked in Myanmar since 1994 including Skidmore has worked in peri-urban slums in Yangon and Mandalay, in the Yangon Psychiatric Hospital, Yangon Drug Rehabilitation Center, Yangon and Mandalay Traditional Medicine Hospitals, and Clinics, with a large variety of medical, religious, and magical practitioners, in dry zone villages, in Mongla, and with the KNLA and DKBA.

She is the author of over 100 publications on Myanmar including Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.