EXPERTS SEARCH

Senior Lecturer in Public Health, Deputy Co-Chair HSD Academic Progress and Integrity Committee, and Course Director for Honours in Bachelor of Health Science and Honours in Bachelor of Public Health and Health Promotion. 

As an econometrician specialising in agricultural and development economics, I was drawn to health economics due to its intersection with economic development in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). I apply my statistical and modelling expertise to understand factors impacting health service utilisation in resource-poor settings and disadvantaged populations, and to develop burden of disease models in chronic disease. 

Over the last ten years, my research has included modelling chronic disease burden in osteoporosis, Parkinson’s Disease and HIV/AIDS within both the Australian and LMIC contexts. Currently, I am providing economic input to evaluations of prevention interventions in youth alcohol consumption using community initiatives in Australia, endometriosis in young women and multiple sclerosis. Additionally, I am contributing economic input to interventions in maternal and child health focussing on disadvantaged populations, including people living with HIV/AIDS, people with disabilities, and women, including teenagers, to improve their health and wellbeing and reduce health inequalities. My research utilises data sets such as Demographic Health Surveys (DHS), Household Income and Labour Dynamics Australia (HILDA), Australian arm of the International Cost and Utility Related to Osteoporotic Fractures (AusICUROS) for statistical and modelling analysis.

Dr Steven Allender is Distinguished Professor of Public Health and founding Director of the Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition (GLOBE), a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre.

Steve has held leadership roles in multiple NHMRC funded partnership grants,  NHMRC Australian Centres for Research Excellence and has received lead investigator funding from bodies including the US National Institutes of Health, National Health and Medical Research Council,
the Australian Heart Foundation, VicHealth, the Western Alliance and the European Union.

Steve has previously held a jointly funded National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)/ Australian Heart Foundation Career
Development Fellowship. Steve holds a number of honorary appointments including:

Steve holds a number of honorary appointments including:

·       Research Associate, World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention, University of Oxford

·       Foundation Member World Heart Federation’s Global Working Group (WG) on Policy/Advocacy

·       Consultant, Prevention, Health Policy and Epidemiology Section, European Association for Cardiac Prevention and Care

·       Honorary Membership Faculty of Public Health. Royal College of Physicians, United Kingdom

Jaithri Ananthapavan is and experienced health economist leading the Economics of Obesity team within Deakin Health Economics (DHE) and the Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition (GLOBE). With over 18 years of experience in health economics consulting and academia, she specialises in the economic evaluation of preventive health interventions and policies, economic modelling, incorporating environmental impacts into health economic evaluations and priority setting methods to enhance the use of economic evidence in resource allocation decisions. Jaithri is a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Sustainable Healthcare. 

Jaithri led the landmark ACE-Obesity Policy program, a comprehensive priority-setting study that assessed the cost-effectiveness of various obesity prevention interventions across multiple sectors and levels of government.

Jaithri collaborates with numerous national and international organizations, including the World Health Organization, Cancer Councils across Australia, and the Federal and State Governments. 

Jaithri was the Unit Chair of the Resource Allocation and Priority Setting unit within the Masters of Health Economics in 2022-2023.

Jaithri has a PhD in health economics from Deakin University and has a Bachelor of Physiotherapy and a Master of Public Health degree both from The University of Melbourne.

Mary Rose Angeles is an Associate Research Fellow and PhD Candidate with Deakin Health Economics, where she contributes to research on health system financing, sustainability, and healthcare services.

She has experience conducting health economic analyses across a range of health areas, including Long COVID, digital health (e.g., health apps), telehealth interventions, and prevention programs. Her methodological expertise includes systematic reviews, quantitative data analysis, economic evaluations, and economic modelling.

Mary Rose’s PhD examines hospital-at-home models for older adults living in rural and regional Australia. Using health economic methods such as economic evaluation, modelling, and discrete choice experiments (DCE), her research generates evidence to inform resource allocation, health service planning, and policy decision-making.

Bernard holds a joint PhD in Public Health from Curtin University, Australia, and the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Ghana. Bernard has previously worked as a Research Associate with Curtin School of Population Health, Curtin University (Perth, Australia) and Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute (Melbourne). Bernard has been involved as a Research Associate on internationally funded projects, including one funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme. Bernard has previously taught and supervised students in undergraduate public health courses units as an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Education, Winneba (Ghana) and has worked as a research assistant in cardiovascular diseases at the National Cardiothoracic Centre, Accra (Ghana).  Bernard is a senior collaborator at the prestigious Global Burden of Disease (GBD) collaborator network at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, USA. Bernard has authored several peer-reviewed publications on a wide portfolio of research areas, including breastfeeding practices, adolescent sexual and reproductive health, health-related behaviours, IPV, cardiovascular diseases, digital health interventions, occupational health and work productivity loss cost. Bernard has developed strong national and international networks, connections with industry and collaborations with researchers of top-ranked Universities/Institutions, with over 78% of published research with international collaborators. Bernard’s research findings have been presented as part of scientific communications, informed policies of a company in the mining industry, supported the WA Health Department to monitor the health and well-being of the mining industry during the COVID-19 pandemic, and supported Diabetes WA in their engagements and media releases. 

Dr. Hira Aslam is a public health specialist with extensive experience in tuberculosis (TB), other infectious diseases, infection prevention and control (IPC), maternal and child health (MNCH), and primary health care strengthening. With a Doctor of Pharmacy and a Master’s in Public Health, she is currently a fully funded Higher Degree by Research (HDR) PhD candidate at Deakin University, Australia, where she also serves as Sessional academic & an International Student Representative.

Over more than a decade, Dr. Aslam has worked with international and national organizations, including the Global Fund, WHO, and provincial health departments, leading large-scale donor-funded initiatives. She has played a key role in developing innovative healthcare models—such as Pakistan’s first decentralized DR-TB care approach—and supporting the implementation of all-oral regimens (BPaL/M). Her expertise covers operational research, project piloting and implementation, health systems strengthening, digital health integration, and program evaluation.

She has been a major contributor in the development and revision of DR-TB recording and reporting tools, active drug-safety monitoring (aDSM) systems, and site-level training programs. Her technical support has strengthened surveillance, data quality, and monitoring systems across multiple TB sites and public health programs.

A certified master trainer in TB, Family Planning, and IPC, Dr. Aslam has trained and mentored over 100 healthcare professionals, including primary healthcare staff, pharmacists, physicians, and program implementers. She is an active member of multiple professional associations and TB working groups, including the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease and the Institute for Health Transformation at Deakin University.

As a visiting faculty member, she continues to contribute to academia and humanitarian program implementation, advocating for equitable, evidence-based, and digitally enabled public health solutions for underserved communities.

Kathryn Backholer is Professor of Public Health Policy and Co-Director of the Institute for Health Transformation (IHT) at Deakin University. Within IHT, she previously co-led the Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition (GLOBE), which includes a World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention. She holds a National Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellowship and serves as Vice President (Policy) of the Public Health Association of Australia.

Kathryn leads a multidisciplinary program of research focused on strengthening policy and practice to improve health and wellbeing through prevention. Her work examines how economic, regulatory and digital environments shape exposure to risk factors for non-communicable diseases, with a strong focus on equity. She led the development of an AI-enabled monitoring system that captures real-world exposure to digital marketing for alcohol, gambling, vaping products and unhealthy foods, generating independent evidence to inform effective regulatory responses.

Kathryn regularly advises United Nations agencies, including WHO and UNICEF, and collaborates with governments across the East Asia and Pacific and South Asia regions. She maintains ongoing partnerships with UNICEF regional offices to support evidence-informed action to improve the nutritional health of children and adolescents.

I am a full-time PhD Candidate and part-time Associate Research Fellow at the Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition (GLOBE) at Deakin University. With a master’s degree in Health Promotion, a bachelor's degree in Agroecology, and extensive experience in food retail settings, I aim to incorporate a comprehensive food system perspective (from production to retail and consumption) into my research in public health nutrition.

My research interests include public health nutrition, food retail environments, and health equity, with a particular focus on transforming food retail environments to promote population health in an equitable way. I enjoy using qualitative and mixed-method approaches to explore these complex issues. My PhD project aims to identify strategies that help food retailers sustain healthy in-store food environment changes.

Lisa is a Professor in Physical Activity and Health at the Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition at Deakin University. Her passion is enhancing population physical activity. To be active we need physical skills (e.g. motor skills), but also psychological (e.g. motivation), social (e.g. collaboration) and cognitve skills (e.g. understanding game rules). These skills are collectively termed 'physical literacy'. Her internationally leading work focuses on developing ways to measure and improve physical literacy via partnerships with industry and researchers from multiple countries. She is the number one researcher in the world in motor skills (Expertscape). Lisa has spent much of her career developing novel measurement instruments for children. She developed the pictorial scale for Perceived Movement Skill Competence in 2016, for children to report on their own motor skill level - used in 35 countries. In 2019, she co-led the development of the Australian Physical Literacy Definition and Framework for the Australian Sports Commission. Then in 2021, she led development of an innovative pictorial tool to measure children’s physical literacy for the Australian Sports Commission, now requested by researchers from 23 countries across 18 language groups.   

Research Groups
Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition

Dr Sanna Barrand is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University. She has a PhD in Epigenetics from University of Oslo, Norway. Her PhD aimed to define the epigenetic landscape of pluripotency genes in cells with varying differentiation capacity to increase our understanding of cell plasticity. Sanna has worked in various research projects nationally and internationally. Her previous post-doctoral study at Deakin University focused on understanding the impact of maternal suboptimal diet on the health of the next generation.

Recently she worked as a Lived Experience Research Officer at HARMON-E clinical trial at Food and Mood Centre, Deakin University. During this role Sanna developed a passion for co-design and co-production practises in research. She believes that involving people with living and  lived experience in research  will increase  research relevance, quality, and outcomes.

Dr Barrand works with Prof Genevieve Pepin and Shannon Calvert in the Lived Experience and Co-Production stream of the Australian Eating Disorder Research and Translation Centre, where she has co-produced guidelines and resources to support co-production in Eating Disorder Research. Her current research aims to understand how we can better involve people with carer and personal living and lived experience in eating disorder research.