Chief Investigators
Professor Rebecca Bentley
Director
Rebecca Bentley is a Professorial Research Fellow in Social Epidemiology and the leader of the Healthy Housing Research Group in the Centre for Health Equity, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. Over the past ten years, Rebecca has developed a research program exploring the role of housing and residential location in shaping health and wellbeing in Australia. This research has a particular focus on housing affordability, tenure and their measurable effects on individual health and wellbeing. Professor Bentley leads the Life Course research stream.
Professor Sandra Eades
Sandra Eades is Deputy Dean, Indigenous, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, University of Melbourne. Prior to this, she held positions as Dean and Head of Curtin Medical School at Curtin University and Head, Indigenous Maternal and Child Health and Associate Head, Preventative Health Research, at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute.
Professor Eades’ health research career began with a focus on the epidemiology of Indigenous child health in Australia and she is acknowledged as a leader and role model in Indigenous health research and is Australia’s first Aboriginal medical doctor to be awarded a Doctor of Philosophy.
Professor Eades also leads CRE REACH - a centre for research excellence leading the evidence to improve Aboriginal child and adolescent health.
Professor Tony Blakely
Professor David Jacobs
Tony Blakely is an epidemiologist and public health medicine specialist at The University of Melbourne. He is committed to answering questions about which public health interventions will achieve the greatest improvements in health and social outcomes, reduce inequalities in health, and do so cost-effectively.
His research covers a range of topic areas, intersected with methodological advancements. Whilst principally an epidemiologist, he uses and combines methods from multiple disciplines: biostatistics, economics, econometrics, and computer and data science.
Tony is Director of the Population Interventions (PI) Unit within the Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. PI aims to:
"provide robust evidence on the health and cost impacts of population interventions, through causal inference and simulation approaches from epidemiology, economics and data science."
Professor Blakely leads the Health Gains research stream.
David Jacobs is the Chief Scientist at the U.S. National Center for Healthy Housing. He also serves as Director of the U.S. Collaborating Center for Research and Training on Housing Related Disease and Injury for the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO WHO), an adjunct associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, and as a faculty associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on childhood lead poisoning prevention and was principal author of both the President’s Task Force Report on the subject in 2000 and the Healthy Homes Report to Congress in 1999. Dr. Jacobs is the former director of the Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he was responsible for program evaluations, grants, contracts, public education, enforcement, regulation, and policy related to lead and healthy homes.
His current work includes research on asthma, international healthy housing guidelines, lead poisoning prevention, and green sustainable building design.
Professor Philippa Howden-Chapman
Associate Professor Natasha Howard
Philippa Howden-Chapman, Sesquicentennial Distinguished Professor of Public Health at the University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand, is co-director of He Kāinga Oranga/ Housing and Health Research Programme and director of the New Zealand Centre for Sustainable Cities. She has conducted a number of randomised community housing trials in partnership with local communities, which have had a major influence on housing, health and energy policy. She was chair of the WHO Housing and Health Guideline Development Group and currently chair of the ISC Scientific Committee for Health & Wellbeing in the Changing Urban Environment: a systems approach. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Dr Natasha Howard is the Wardliparingga Platform Lead: Implementation Science at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute. The Platform incorporates a systems view and privileges Indigenous knowledges to deliver mixed-method inter-disciplinary perspectives which aim to generate policy and practice-based evidence on the social determinants of health. Her experience spans both the health and social sciences, applying population approaches to investigate how the social and built environment enables and promotes cardiometabolic health and well-being, notably for priority populations. She has been active in advocacy and mentoring of the local population health community in both research and practice. Dr Howard leads the Capacity Building objective.
Professor Alex Brown
Professor Alex Brown is an Aboriginal medical doctor and researcher. He is Professor of Indigenous Genomics at the Telethon Kids Institute and The Australian National University and previously led Aboriginal research at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Insititute.
In 2007 he was appointed to set up a research program in Central Australia with Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, with a focus on heart disease and diabetes in Aboriginal people. During this time, Alex commenced and completed his PhD on depression and heart disease in Aboriginal men.
Over the last 20 years, Alex has established an extensive and unique research program focused on chronic disease in vulnerable communities, with a particular focus on outlining and overcoming health disparities. He leads projects encompassing epidemiology, psychosocial determinants of chronic disease, mixed methods health services research in Aboriginal primary care and hospital settings, and randomised controlled trials of pharmacological and non-pharmacological chronic disease interventions.
Past Investigators
Professor Emma Baker
Deputy Director
Professor Andrew Beer
