8th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference

Dr Tarani Chandola is a Professor of Medical Sociology. He is the director of the Methods Hub in the Faculty of the Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. He joined the Department of Sociology in August 2021 and was formerly the Head of Department of Social Statistics at the University of Manchester. He is a co-director of the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies in Society and Health http://www.ucl.ac.uk/icls/, a member of the ESRC Strategic Advisory Network Strategic Advisory Network - Economic and Social Research Council (ukri.org), a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences https://www.acss.org.uk/ and the Royal Statistical Society https://rss.org.uk/ . He obtained his DPhil in Sociology from Nuffield College, University of Oxford in 1998. His research is primarily on the social determinants of health, focusing on health inequalities and psychosocial factors, and the analysis of longitudinal cohort studies.

Dr Jourdyn Lawrence is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She joined the Dornsife School of Public Health at part of the Drexel FIRST (Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation) program. Her work primarily addresses racism as a cause of racial health inequities in the United States, with an explicit focus on the processes of the embodiment of discrimination to affect chronic health and aging-related outcomes. Jourdyn’s doctoral research examined measurement and methodological approaches in assessing how discrimination "gets under the skin" to affect blood pressure and biomarker outcomes. Her current work explores the implications of interpersonal and structural racism on aging and cognitive-related outcomes. Jourdyn also examines how monetary reparations for the enslavement of Africans in the U.S. would alter the premature and overall mortality outcomes of Black adults as part of the FXB Center’s Making the Public Health Case for Reparations project. Dr. Lawrence received her PhD in Population Health Sciences from Harvard University and a Master of Science in Public Health (MSPH) in Epidemiology from the University of South Carolina.

Dr David H. Chae is Associate Professor in the Department of Social, Behavioural, and Population Sciences and Associate Dean for Research at Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He is also Director of the Society, Health, and Racial Equity (SHARE) Lab. His research focuses on the social determinants of health inequities and embodiment of racism. As part of this work, he examines physiologic outcomes and biomarkers that signal dysregulation, including telomere length, a novel indicator of aging at the cell level. He examines the interplay between context, developmental period, behaviour, and biology, and links to disease susceptibility and progression.

Dr Richard Saffery is a Professor and molecular and cellular biologist and Principle Research Fellow at MCRI. He is also Deputy Director (Biosciences) for the Generation Victoria (GenV) initiative. His 'Early Origins of Chronic Disease' agenda spans pregnancy to adolescence and includes conditions such as childhood allergy, obesity and predictors of adult cardiovascular health and diabetes. Dr Saffery has over 250 publications in the field of early life programming and epigenetics. This includes novel discoveries on the factors that regulate the early life human epigenome and the role epigenetics in childhood allergy and immune development. His team have an overarching goal to understand how the modern environment interacts with underlying genetic variation to impact health, particularly in early life. Having led numerous longitudinal pregnancy cohorts in Australia, the EU and more recently China, Dr Saffery has a strong interest in understanding why young Aboriginal populations appear overrepresented in diabetes and chronic kidney disease, particularly via parental transmission of risk across generations.

Dr Naomi Priest is a Professor and Group Leader of Social-Biological Research at the Centre for Social Research and Methods, Australian National University, co-located at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. She is a lifecourse and social epidemiologist and has extensive experience in qualitative, mixed methods, and large-scale quantitative analysis, as well as in the conduct of collaborative research and policy and practice implementation related to child and adolescent health and health inequalities. Her research program is focused on examining how social forces and social exposures become biologically embedded and embodied, and on understanding and addressing inequalities in health and development, throughout the life course. Much of this work focuses on social determinants of health and health inequalities in mental health and cardiovascular disease for Aboriginal and ethnic minoritised children and adolescents.

Dr Meredith O'Connor is an educational and developmental psychologist. Her research investigates the development of optimal mental health over the life course. This includes both mental health challenges, and the mental health strengths and assets that allow people to thrive. She has a particular focus on how adversity undermines the development of optimal mental health, and what schools can do to promote it. To investigate how mental health unfolds, she uses powerful data from longitudinal cohort studies, including the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children and Australian Temperament Project.

Dr David Burgner is a Professor and paediatric infectious diseases clinician scientist. He completed his PhD on susceptibility to severe malaria at Oxford University in the UK and subsequently trained at Great Ormond Street Hospital and St Mary's Hospital/Imperial College, London. He was the first and only infectious diseases paediatrician in Western Australia from 2002 until 2010, when he relocated to Melbourne to join the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute. He is currently a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Senior Research Fellow, an honorary (NHFA) Future Leader Fellow, a Professorial Fellow at Melbourne University, and a paediatric infectious diseases consultant at Monash Children's Hospital.

Dr Celia Roberts is a Professor in the School of Sociology, ANU. She works in Feminist Technoscience Studies and the social studies of reproduction. Her books include Messengers of Sex: Hormones, biomedicine and feminism (Cambridge UP, 2007). Puberty in Crisis: The sociology of early sexual development (Cambridge UP, 2015), and, with Adrian Mackenzie and Maggie Mort, Living Data: Making sense of health biosensing (Bristol UP, 2018). She has recently completed a co-authored book on reproduction and climate crisis, focusing on the 2019-20 Australian bushfires, and is currently working on a new ARC-funded, interdisciplinary and collaborative project, led by bioethicist, Professor Catherine Mills, (Monash) on the translation of epigenetic into antenatal care in Australia. Celia did her PhD in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Sydney, and worked in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University for 18 years before returning to Australia. She has long-standing interests in feminist and social studies of the biology of sex, pre- and post-natal development and the enduring effects of early life trauma.

Dr Melissa Wake is a paediatrician, community child health researcher, and Scientific Director of the Generation Victoria (GenV) initiative. Her "population paediatrics" agenda spans common childhood conditions and antecedents of diseases of ageing. Her goals are to speed up children's research and to test interventions that change children's care. Having led numerous community-based randomised trials, her major focus for this triennium is building the Generation Victoria (GenV) and Child Health CheckPoint platforms for generations of researchers. She has success in research translation including securing the Victorian Infant Hearing Screening Program, which now screens 80,000 babies annually and is springboarding a continuing program of population-based hearing research. She holds honorary Professorial positions with the Universities of Melbourne and Auckland.

Ms Diane Herz is a seasoned practitioner and leader in survey and policy research with more than 3 decades of experience in government and consulting roles in the USA. In her most recent role at Mathematica Policy Research she had the dual responsibilities of Vice President and Director of Mathematica's Human Services Division and as the company's Chief Diversity Officer. Prior to Mathematica, Diane was an economist with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). During her 21-year tenure at the BLS she served first as an economic analyst and later as director of the American Time Use Survey and the Current Population Survey (similar to the Monthly Labour Force Survey in Australia). She is a graduate of the Federal Executive Institute’s Leadership for a Democratic Society program and of the Tuck School at Dartmouth’s Leadership for Strategic Impact program. Diane has also held leadership positions in the survey industry, including as president of the Washington Statistical Society and as chair of the American Statistical Association’s Committee on LGBT concerns.