I’m having trouble explaining my current research interests.
I’m currently working on suicide and drought, heart disease and woodsmoke, violent deaths and heatwaves and a theoretical text on methods for rates, standardisation or adjustment in regression models.
Why? It’s complicated, but…
I have been working on a range of interrelated projects for the last few years that have revolved around the influence of climate on human health and wellbeing.
That might sound clear enough on first glance, but when we got stuck in to it we found we struggled to find very many health outcomes with really potent causal influences of climatic variables from the literature.
HUMAN HEALTH AND CLIMATE CHANGE IN OCEANIA: A RISK ASSESSMENT 2002
This all started with my involvement with the report 1 by Tony McMichael and Rosalie Woodruff. I was a research assistant and got my first taste of integrating data across population, health and environmental domains.
We did a great job, but after we’d completed that work, Colin and I reflected on how difficult it was to find those ‘low haning fruit’ that might be most easily analysted in this new direction of environmental epidemioligy. We then met Neville Nicholls from the BoM and found out that there was a strong suspicion of the increased risk of suicide during droughts amongst the meteorologists (to the point they were anxious about reporting unfavourable forecasting seasonal rainfall estimates based on the SOI and El Nino weather patterns). We ended up publishing a simple paper about that topic 2
Other health outcomes suggested themselves over the course of the following few years:
- will be bullet points
- includes Ross River Virus in WA
- heart disease and woodsmoke
- violent deaths and heatwaves
- a theoretical text on methods for rates, standardisation or adjustment in regression models
So I am struggling to get a succint statement that reflects the current focus of my research interests. Luckily my core reasearch interest is simpler: better understanding the dynamics of the many systems involved in human ecology.
