Professor Mark Ferson is a public health physician and paediatrician with additional qualifications in epidemiology and art history. In 1990, he became the first NSW public health unit director, a position from which he stepped down in 2021. He is currently Senior Medical Adviser, Public Health Unit, South Eastern Sydney Local Health District. He has an honorary appointment as public health medicine subspecialty editor for the Internal Medicine Journal, and is on the Editorial Advisory Board of Public Health Research & Practice. Mark holds appointments as Adjunct Professor at the University of New South Wales School of Public Health & Community Medicine and the Notre Dame University School of Medicine Sydney. His research interests are in the epidemiology and control of infectious diseases, with a particular focus on childcare settings, childhood vaccination, gastroenteritis viruses and the exanthemata, and on public health law and history. He has been author or co-author on over 160 scientific papers in the field of public health.