It is a pleasure to introduce you to our incoming Alfred Deakin/Executive Dean Health fellows for 2023. Congratulations to Jaithri Anathapavan, Erica Reeve, Marufa Sultana, and Ayele Bali. It is great to see our partnership work supported through these fellowships and we look forward to your contributions over the coming years. Welcome also to Alfred Deakin Professor Tracey Bucknall who has commenced as Co-Director of the Centre for Quality and Patient Safety (QPS). Tracey is a long-term member of the leadership team at QPS and the Director of Nursing Research at Alfred Health. Tracey’s wealth of experience and insight into the health system at the coalface will be a fantastic asset for QPS and IHT.
It is also a pleasure to recognise the work of our members to ensure Australian public health policy is informed by the best possible evidence. Samantha Thomas, Simone McCarthy, and Hannah Pitt were recently invited to testify to Federal parliament for the Inquiry into online gambling and its impacts on those experiencing gambling harm. And Kathryn Backholer was invited by Dr Sophie Scamps MP to attend a health policy round table to support her in the process of developing a Private Members Bill which will aim to regulate junk food advertising. It was also great to see that in 2022, The Conversation pieces written by IHT researchers were amongst the most-read Deakin articles, with over 1.3 million reads!
Closer to home, the Institute’s Executive Committee is in the process of developing a new model of distributed leadership, with our Domain Director’s taking on joint responsibility for the strategic direction of one of our Strategic Pillars in concert with the Operational Team. I would like to welcome them to these roles. We also look forward to engaging with you to progress our 2023 actions under our Strategic Plan.
It was a great honour to be awarded an Alfred Deakin Professor in the recent graduation, and to share the stage with our graduates. The day was a wonderful celebration of our student’s achievements.
Welcome
A warm welcome to our new IHT members, Melanie Lum, Associate Research Fellow, GLOBE, Renee Fiolet, Research Fellow, QPS, Dani Hitch, Senior Research Fellow, DoH, and Julia Zinga, PhD Student, DoH.
