Welcome to my Open Notebook
This is an Open Notebook with Selected Content - Delayed. All content is licenced with CC-BY. Find out more Here.
Summary
Biography
I am an Environmental Epidemiologist and I use my extensive experience across a wide range of environmental health issues to focus on Climate Change and Health. I am Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health Impact Assessment and Senior Lecturer in Climate Change and Health at the Faculty of Health Science School of Population Health at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. 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 Prof Tony McMichael from 2001 to 2013 on the Climate Change and Health programme.
In 2014 I moved to the Biodiversity and Conservation Ecology programme at the ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society where 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’.
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 forecasting in climate change risk assessments.
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 such 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.
Research Interests
- Environmental and social determinants of health
- Extreme weather events such as droughts, bushfires, woodsmoke, duststorms, and heat-waves
- Differential vulnerability across different subgroups of people, in different regions and stages of their lives.
Qualifications Obtained
- 2009-2016: (Part-time) PhD Disentangling Health Effects of Environmental Change from Social Factors, ANU/NCEPH.
- 1998-2005: Bachelor degree Human Ecology, First Class Honours, ANU/NCEPH.
