As a researcher I focus on Environmental Epidemiology, Climate Change and Health, and Human Ecology. I focus on the intersection of Eco-social determinants of health and wellbeing, Sustainability and Data systems for Decision Support Systems. I currently serve as Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Climate Change and Health Impact Assessment and Senior Lecturer at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. I am dedicated to driving impactful contributions, enhancing public health knowledge, and fostering evidence-based decision-making.
I trained at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH) at Australian National University (ANU) and completed my PhD there in 2016. At NCEPH I worked closely with Professor Tony McMichael, one of the first epidemiologists to recognise the threat to global health and wellbeing from climate change. I worked at ANU from 2001 to 2013 on the Climate Change and Health program.
In 2014 I moved to the Biodiversity and Conservation Ecology program at the ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society where I studied climate change impacts on the Mountain Ash forest ecosystems of Southeastern Australia. To support that work I led the development of the data portal for the Australian Long Term Ecological Research Network and the Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network Supersites data platform.
On completion of my PhD I undertook a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Centre for Air pollution, energy and health Research (CAR) where I created their data platform for integrating environmental and health data ‘CARDAT’ and conducted several quantitative Health Impact Assessments.
My contributions have spanned the range from designing study protocols, creating datasets, conducting analyses and communicating results. The integration of gridded, point-source and area-based administrative data has become a specialty. In particular I have experience in the integration of health, social and environmental data which involves reconciling health and socio-economic or population data based on incompatible spatial units. I also am adept at the creation of linked environmental exposure maps and computer programming. Alongside my experience in analysis of empirical data I have experience in scenario-based projections in climate change risk assessments.
In summary, I work on data analysis that disentangles health effects of environmental changes from social factors. I give special attention to issues of data management, security, privacy and ethics for my research. I have primarily worked in environmental epidemiology, building on the approaches from human ecology and geography at ANU. My PhD research focused on reproducible research pipelines, heterogeneous datasets and statistical modelling of exposure-response associations in the context of complex multifactorial causality. My studies include phenomena as diverse as the effects of air pollution from bushfires on heart disease, and droughts on mental health. I explored the areas of differential vulnerability across sub-populations, precision of spatiotemporal exposure estimates and general issues of geospatial data analysis methods.