Health and education
Our team of academic experts seeks to identify key opportunities and use these to harness the potential of our society, both at a local and international level. Learn more about our team below.
Professor Colleen Fisher
Professor Colleen Fisher is Head of School and a teaching and research academic in the School of Population and Global Health. Her main research expertise is in family and domestic violence, where she has undertaken intervention and program evaluations as well as research across the lifespan and cross-culturally – including in refugee and international contexts. Prof Fisher has delivered invited presentations at national and international conferences, has been successful in obtaining nationally competitive research grants and is published widely. She has also been an invited member on a range of related government and non-government committees and advisory bodies.
Professor David Preen
Professor David Preen is the Chair in Public Health at the School of Population and Global Health, The University of Western Australia (UWA). He is the UWA node Director for the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Medicines and Ageing (CREMA) and was the Director of the UWA Centre for Health Services Research from 2006-2016. He also holds honorary appointments at the University of South Australia and the College of Medicine, Swansea University (UK).
Professor Preen has been involved with conducting public health and health services research using population-based linked data for almost 15 years to study areas including: i) cancer service delivery, ii) pharmaco-epidemiology, iii) chronic disease management, iv) morbidity of marginalised populations, and v) methodological advances using medical record linkage.
Professor Sandra Thompson
Professor Sandra Thompson is a public health physician with experience in science, health policy and management and research and evaluation expertise. She is Director of the Western Australian Centre for Rural Health (WACRH) and Professor of Rural Health at the University of Western Australia.
Sandra has a strong background in communicable disease control, has worked in a variety of settings and jurisdictions in Australia and has wide ranging interests, particularly related to addressing health disparities. Her research interests include rural and Indigenous health, prevention and management of chronic diseases, strengthening primary care through quality improvement, capacity building, developing and strengthening partnerships, attraction/retention of health professionals in rural areas and the research-policy interface. She has authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications and numerous reports.
Associate Professor Lisa Wood
Based in the School of Population and Global Health, and a Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for Social Impact, Associate Professor Lisa Wood is a tireless advocate for research that’s relevant to the real world. With nearly three decades of experience in public health and health promotion, she has worked with academic, government and non-government organisations, and engaged as a public health consultant. Professor Wood’s current research is focused on complex social challenges such as homelessness, domestic violence prevention and closing the gap in Aboriginal wellbeing.
Associate Professor Hayley Christian
Associate Professor Hayley Christian’s research focuses on improving children’s physical activity levels, health and wellbeing through multi-level interventions focused on the child, family, social and built environment. This includes identifying and testing strategies to create healthy early childhood education and care environments and investigating how the home and neighbourhood environment shapes children’s health and development.
Associate Professor Christian, who has 18 years professional experience, leads the PLAYCE program of research, a multidisciplinary team at UWA’s School of Population and Global Health. She holds a National Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellowship and is a Fellow at the Telethon Kids Institute.
Associate Professor Maria Harries
Associate Professor and Senior Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Population and Global Health at UWA, Maria Harries is also Adjunct Professor at the Curtin University School of Occupational Therapy, Social Work and Speech Pathology. While working as a researcher and research supervisor, she also holds governance roles with a number of state and national organisations involved with funding, service delivery, health, mental health, violence, adult survivors of abuse, and child, adult and family welfare.
Associate Professor Andrew R Timming
Andrew R Timming is Associate Professor of Human Resource Management at UWA Business School. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Having worked as a strategy and HR consultant, he has considerable experience in bringing academic insight into real-world problems. He is keen to work with organisations (private sector, public sector and not-for-profit) in the following areas:
- health in the workplace, especially mental health and its relationship to bullying
- employee selection systems, especially the design of recruitment methods that eliminate unfair and unconscious bias
- employee voice, especially the ways in which both organisations and societies can benefit from giving workers a greater “say” in organisational decision-making.
Dr Katie Attwell
Dr Katie Attwell is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science and International Relations at The University of Western Australia, and an Honorary Research Fellow with the Wesfarmers Centre of Vaccines and Infectious Diseases, Telethon Kids Institute. Katie is interested in the intersection of policy, identity and behaviour as they pertain to health consumers, healthcare providers and governance. In 2014 she researched, designed, delivered and evaluated the internationally recognised public health campaign, “I Immunise”.
Katie's current projects include analysing governance strategies for addressing vaccine refusal, conceptualising the role of group identity in vaccination decision-making, and designing and piloting strategies for conversational interventions with pregnant women regarding vaccination of themselves and their babies.
Dr Judith Katzenellenbogen
Dr Judith Katzenellenbogen is a cardiovascular epidemiologist at the University of Western Australia (UWA). Her PhD thesis pioneered data-linkage methods for stroke in Australia, and she has been the winner of an NHMRC Early Career Fellowship to undertake research into heart disease in Aboriginal Western Australians. Dr Katzenellenbogen has also been awarded a Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellowship, and currently concentrates on the study of Aboriginal heart disease and stroke while advocating for improved Aboriginal health.
Dr Huong Le
Dr Huong Le completed her PhD in Economics from the Australian National University and possesses strong analytical and advance econometric modelling skills.
Her research interests include applied econometrics and economics, with particular focus on health economics, development economics and policy evaluations. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed high ranking journals such as Health Economics, American Journal of Health Economics, Review of Income and Wealth, IZA Journal of Labour Economics, Journal of Asian Economics and Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice. Her current research focus is using large longitudinal linked data sets to analyse socio-economics issues with focus on impact evaluations, child health and development and intergenerational transmission of health and human capital.
Dr Ian Li
Dr Ian Li has taught across the disciplines of economics, law and health science at Murdoch University and The University of Western Australia. He currently lectures on health economics at UWA’s School of Population and Global Health at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.
Ian’s research interests include the applied areas of labour, education and health economics. He has published in high-quality peer-reviewed journals such as the Australian Economic Review and Education Economics. Ian has also been a principal or chief investigator on numerous successful grant applications, and he received a UWA Vice-Chancellor's Research Award in 2015.
Dr Karen Martin
Dr Karen Martin is a teaching and research academic in the School of Population and Global Health. Her passion is to improve the mental and physical health of vulnerable and disadvantaged people, undertaking research within fields such as psychological and post-traumatic distress, domestic violence, mental health, loneliness, and health in homeless and refugee populations.
Dr Martin recently founded the Western Australia Trauma-informed and Restorative Schools Collaboration (TARSC WA), dedicated to increasing awareness about the impact of trauma on children and adolescents.
Dr Glenn Savage
Dr Glenn Savage is a senior lecturer with expertise in education policy and sociology. His research focuses on education policy, politics and governance at national and global levels, with a specific interest in federalism, intergovernmental relations, and policies relating to curriculum, equity, school funding and standards-based reform.
Dr Savage has published widely in leading journals and maintains a strong media profile and links with senior policy makers. He currently holds an Australian Research Council ‘Discovery Early Career Researcher Award’ (DECRA) titled ‘National schooling reform and the reshaping of Australian federalism’, which examines how national schooling reforms in curriculum, pedagogy and assessment are reshaping the role of Australian governments in education policy.
Craig Cumming
Mr Craig Cumming is a Research Fellow and PhD candidate at the Centre for Health Services Research in the School of Population and Global Health at the University of Western Australia.
Craig has a background in Law and Criminology, and has worked extensively in field research and as an analyst in forensic health research since 2011. Craig’s research interests include the health of vulnerable populations such as people who experience homelessness, and those who go to prison. His work is aimed at informing health policy for vulnerable people with multiple and complex health needs. His current work includes investigating the impact of the use of substances such as methamphetamine and opioids on the health and justice outcomes of people who go to prison, as well as the impact that “housing first” programs have on the health of people who have experienced homelessness.
Dr Marco Rizzi
Marco researches the law as a tool for the protection of individual and collective health and safety. He has two overarching interests. First, the public private/divide and the public functions of private law, with a specific focus on the interplay between torts and regulation in its modern hybrid and transnational form. Secondly, the evolving relationship between risk, uncertainty and law, exploring both the extent to which legal tools can effectively address emerging risks, but also how complex multi-layered systems of rules can be liable themselves to create uncertainty.
Coherently with his research interests, his two main areas of specialisation are, first, the law of torts – in particular, negligence and the liability of manufacturers of technologically complex products. Secondly, risk regulation and the challenges associated with the national and transnational governance of products and scenarios involving structural uncertainty.
As a firm believer in the non-neutrality of the law, in his research he also actively engages with the uneasy relationship between the legal and the political.
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Shamit Saggar, Director