ProfessorCatherine Bennett

An early fascination with human variability and health – spurred and sustains my work as quantitative infectious diseases’ epidemiologist, and my career encompasses what I believe are three equally important academic domains of research, teaching, and leadership.

Epidemiology, and public health more generally, have been brought into sharp focus since the onset of the COVID pandemic. My long-term research and expertise in community transmission led to me become one of the more prominent public analysts of Australia’s COVID-19 response and to serve as a pandemic-response adviser to government, industry, and institutions globally. My ongoing COVID-related research focuses on investigating and analysing global excess deaths, public health risk communication, pathology service disruptions, and long COVID treatment pathways. This is just one strand of a rich and varied research agenda that I’m excited to be able to devote more time to in this stage of my career. For example, I lead an ongoing international collaboration with Denmark’s Staten Serum Institute (SSI) that combines our globally unique biorepository from a community-based study of Staphylococcus colonisation and infection, including antibiotic-resistant ‘superbugs’ cultures and epidemiological data, with the SSI’s advanced genomic techniques to investigate community transmission and risk factors. You can read more about this and some of my other research – from young people’s pelvic pain to a collaboration with Deakin’s AI specialists to understand the spread of mis- and disinformation – in the My Research Tab.

As a teacher, my focus when it comes to both coursework and the supervision of postgraduate research candidates is firmly grounded in an applied teaching and learning philosophy. I develop and teach core research methods subjects – quantitative and analytical epidemiology and biostatistics, for example – at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level, across Medicine and the Health Sciences. As a supervisor, I take my role as a mentor to the next generation of researchers very seriously and approach supervision in ways that that supports each candidate to develop into the independent researcher they most want to be, and to build their research networks, to achieve the maximum real-world impact over their career. You can read more about my Teaching and Supervision interests and activities in the dedicated tab.

As a leader I follow a distributed leadership model, centred around mentoring and building leadership capacity, expanding collaboration networks and in particular working with graduate and early career researchers to develop the right career strategy for them to focus on, develop and pursue their professional interests. After nine years as Head of the School of Health and Social Development the school had doubled in size, external research income had increased by 120%, and it had become one of the top 100 public health schools in the world, achieving the highest ERA ranking of 5 (well-above world standard). Beyond Deakin, I led the establishment of and was the founding Chair and President (2010-2015) of the Council of Academic Public Health Institution Australasia (CAPHIA), the peak body representing public health in universities across the region.