SYDNEY SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH
FEBRUARY NEWSLETTER
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Professor Alex Barratt retirement
Professor Alex Barratt retired this month after 30 years of dedicated work in the School of Public Health. The school hosted a farewell afternoon tea for Alex, who was joined by current colleagues, HDRs and many Emeritus Professors to celebrate her amazing career and achievements in public health. Alex was gifted a Les Irwig print from the School, Alex citing Les as an early and important mentor in her career.
We wish Alex the happiest retirement and congratulate her on becoming a Professor Emerita.
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SSPH Talks are back this March!
We’re kicking off a brand‑new season of bold ideas, inspiring research, and fresh perspectives designed to spark curiosity and ignite conversation. Whether you’re looking to learn, connect, or simply be inspired, these talks will bring the energy, insight, and momentum to power you through 2026.
Dates in March - Weds 4th, Tues 10th, Weds 18th and Tues 24th at 12pm.
Mark your calendar, hype your team, and stay tuned.
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PP&D
If you supervise a professional staff member such as a project officer, please complete their PP&D review promptly, as you would for AP&D. Please advise your team would appreciate a Faculty supported workshop (e.g leading change, having difficult conversations).
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SSPH Subcommittee Updates
Operations and People Subcommittee- contact A/Prof Erin Cvejic & A/Prof Claire Hooker
The mid-year AP&D review will occur 23 March-30 April.The Ops & People Subcommittee are discussing how to support career development for staff, partiicularly around how to support staff who want more teaching opportunities. Other areas of focus include mentoring, support for promotions and increased connection within the School.
Research Subcommittee- contact A/Prof Carissa Bonner and Prof Meru Sheel
The SSPH Research Subcommittee is seeking expressions of interest for one of two Co-Chair roles as we start planning to refresh the membership after 2 years. This would ideally suit a Level D-E research focused academic who has capacity to attend multiple meetings each month including the subcommittee, seminar series, SSPH Executive, and School Council. If you are interested and want to discuss further, please get in touch with Meru & Carissa via sph.research@sydney.edu.au . Please submit EOI by 20th March 2026.
We are also seeking expressions of interest to assist our 3 current working groups this year:
- Continuing the weekly SSPH Talks seminar series throughout the year.
- Faciliate necesarry changes to the SPH Research website to better reflect the current research groups/themes across the school.
- We are mapping large dataset access across the school to enable possible collaborative agreements.
Education Subcommittee - contact Dr James Kite and Dr Naomi Nogochi
The Education Subcommittee used its January meeting to set its priorities for 2026. The major focus for this year will be on development and implementation of secure assessments across all programs. This is a large undertaking but is vital given the challenges of assuring student learning in the age of AI. Importantly, this needs to be planned and implemented at the program-level to ensure that we are graduating students with the knowledge and skills that we want them to have. If you’re a unit coordinator and you’re thinking about implementing a secure assessment, please ensure that you talk to your program director or coordinator first. As tempting as it may be, we don’t need or want secure assessments in every unit!
We are also intending to expand our efforts in Indigenising curricula. Led by Candace and Kate Robinson, this work reflects a long-standing commitment from the School to prepare our students to be culturally competent professionals. Candace and Kate have so far been working with individual units to revise their curricula. This will continue this year, but with an additional effort on upskilling our educators so that they can support wider, and faster, implementation.
Engagement and Outreach Subcommittee- Contact A/Prof Diego Silva and A/Prof Fiona Stanaway
Last year, our committee spent time understanding its priorities and how it should function. This year, we’re gearing up to deliver some key projects that will hopefully highlight the amazing engagement work that our staff are already doing, while providing support for new opportunities. Shortly, then, we’ll be rolling out a call for some seed funding for projects related to community engagement to provide some further support and also get a sense of what’s currently being done by our amazing School members.
EMCR Sub-Committee- Contact Dr Brooke Nickel and Dr Giovanni Ferreira
Please stay tuned for some exciting future initiatives and upcoming opportunities/events in 2026.
The Terms of Reference and membership of all the School's Committees, including School Executive and School Council, are published on SSPH SharePoint Site.
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Dr Emily Saurman, Yuki Morikami, Prof Tim Driscoll
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Each semester, high-performing MPH students can apply to undertake a practical placement with an organisation that works in public health. Nearly all these placements are in Sydney or nearby major centres, but the unit coordinators have been keen to organise some rural placements. Rural placements can provide valuable experience for students, and the students can make a much-needed contribution to the work of the rural organisation. However, the placements raise significant financial and logistical challenges for students. The first rural placement finally took place in Semester Two last year when Yuki Morikami was placed with the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service team in Orange. Yuki’s placement was supported by a scholarship from the School to help cover travel, accommodation and living expenses during the placement. We hope to be able to offer many more rural placements in coming semesters.
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Spotlight News- Congratulations to Dr Nicole De La Mata, A/Prof Melanie Wyld, and Prof Angela Webster who were all named investigators (CIs), along with 4 NZ colleagues, on an NZ HRC health delivery project grant called “Access to and Equity of best Treatment for people with kidney disease (ASSET)”, which was awarded the maximum amount of $1.4 million over 4 years.This grant will be delivered via the University of Auckland, but has approximately $NZ 300k coming to us at USyd. It will pursue 3 streams of research:
ASSET VOICES consumer engagement work to understand barriers to best kidney care; ASSET DATA which will interrogate our established linked health data platform to evaluate care delivery and outcomes; and
ASSET SOLUTIONS which will use geospatial mapping and health economic evaluation to support more equitable service redesign. See here
- Prof Angela Webster been awarded a Don and Lorraine Jacquot career development fellowship by the RACP. This is valued at $100k and is for a project further developing and then rolling out a clinical support tool to help clinicians and patients with kidney failure understand their likely waiting time for a kidney transplant (“WaitList Navigator: enhancing clinician and patient shared understanding of the kidney transplant waitlist journey (WAIT-NAVI Pilot)”. You can find the tool here.This was developed by the CODE team, specifically Dr Nicole De La Mata and James Hedley’s work.
- Congratulations to A/Prof Carissa Bonner and Prof Adam Dunn have been awarded a 2026 Diabetes Australia Research Grant for their project, “Clear Words, Better Care: Evaluating AI‑Generated, Patient‑Friendly Summaries for People with Diabetes"- see here
- Congratulations to Dr Nicole De Le Mata for being selected as one of ten international candidates to be part of The Transplantation Society Editorial Fellowship.This two‑year fellowship pairs participants with experienced editors from Transplantation and Transplantation Direct. Fellows join journal calls, gain hands‑on experience with the full editorial process, and, upon successful completion, are invited to join the journal’s editorial board- see here
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Best PresentationCongratulations to Dr Johanna Birrell who won "BEST PRESENTATION" in Stream 8: Health Workforce & Systems at Digital Health Week 2026 for her presentation titled "Geospatial modelling of dialysis unit locations in Aotearoa New Zealand".
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Sydney Health Literacy Lab2025 was a remarkable year for the Sydney Health Literacy Lab. Explore the one-page impact report to see highlights and achievements.
Media Activities:
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FellowshipA/Prof Danielle Muscat was awarded a highly competitve Research and Education Network Career Development Fellowship from Western Sydney Local Health District. This Fellowship provides her with $450,000 in funding for three years (2026-2029) which can be used for salary or project related costs. With this funding, Dani will pursue a program of research focused on enhancing equity in clinical trials.
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Award WinnerCongratulations Alice Graham, Research Assistant in the Sydney Health Literacy Lab, awarded Best Presentation in the Digital Health Interventions for Person-Centred Care and Support stream at the 2026 Digital Health Week event. Her presentation was on the promotion of popular period tracking apps
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NHMRC postgraduate scholarshipPippy Walker - Research Fellow at the Leeder Centre and EPOCH CRE has been awarded a NHMRC postgraduate scholarship for 3 years and will be commencing her PhD candidature in March 2026. The title of her PhD is “Investigating the inclusion of spillover effects in economic evaluation of childhood obesity prevention” and her supervisors are Prof Alison Hayes, Vicky Brown, Dr Anagha Killedar and Prof Kirsten Howard. These are very competitive scholarships and this year NHMRC received 190 applications of which 67 were successful.
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Publications
Taba, M., Ayre, J., McCaffery, K., Blanch, C., Leask, J., Wilson, A., & Bonner, C. (2026). Using Social Media for Public Health Communication to Young People: A Qualitative Study to Inform Emergency Preparedness. Journal of Health Communication, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2026.2613851
Taba M, Fajardo M, Ferguson E, Keast R, Basseal J, McCaffery K, Bonner C. Science translation strategies to the public during health emergencies: A systematic review of RCTs. Patient Education and Counseling. 2026.
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Upcoming Events
2 March | The 2026 Iain McCalman Lecture, led by Dr Rebecca McNaught, Register Here
March 12 | Launch of the CPC Systems-Centered Research Hub led by Prof Melody Ding and Dr Susan Luo and Dr Binh Nguyen, Register Here
March 13 | 2026 Sydney Clinical Imaging Summit - Join leaders and emerging researchers to discover leading clinical imaging research across the University of Sydney and partners. Featuring international speakers and the latest advances in MRI, CT, PET and ultrasound, the 2026 Sydney Clinical Imaging Summit brings together clinicians, imaging scientists, engineers, and data scientists to share ideas, foster collaborations and discover what’s next, Register Here
April 10-11 | Australian Hub HSIL Harvard Global Hackathon,this is a unique opportunity to tackle real-world health systems challenges and share your innovative ideas with the world- Apply Here
SSPH Shut Up and Write sessions
These sessions provide a dedicated time and space to focus on your writing alongside colleagues who share the same goal. It’s a great way to stay accountable and make writing less solitary. The sessions are held on Monday and Thursday mornings, 9.30 – 11am via Zoom. The general format is the same for each session: 5-10 minutes of chit-chat goal setting, 75-80 minutes of writing in silence, 5-10 minutes of chit-chat and progress reporting. If you would like to be added to the invitation for the Shut Up and Write sessions (or our writing retreats throughout the year) simply email ( alison.pearce@sydney.edu.au) for the Zoom link(s).
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Information at a glance- Better to be looked over than overlooked: 50 years of public health research and advocacy- Simon Chapman AO, Emeritus Professor in our School, is internationally recognised for his leadership in tobacco control, public health advocacy and risk communication. A member of the team that established Australia’s—and the southern hemisphere’s—first Master of Public Health program in 1980, he has spent over fifty years shaping health policy and advancing evidence‑based prevention. He has authored numerous books and research papers, edited Tobacco Control for 17 years, and received major honours including the WHO World No Tobacco Day Medal and the American Cancer Society’s Luther Terry Award. In 2013, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for his distinguished contributions to medical research and public health. His career highlights are here. He has published a 425pp career memoir in free open-access of his reflections on his 50 year career. It can be downloaded here.
- The new gift automation workflows are officially live. You can find further information regarding the workflows as well as gifts and philanthropy generally on the Legal Portal for Gifts & Philanthropy.
- Fast Track Contracts now offers five automated, plain‑English agreements—including research services, consulting, collaboration, confidentiality, and staff affiliate deed poll. The mobile‑friendly system guides users from request to signature in six quick steps, helping staff finalise low‑risk contracts faster and focus on research.Learn more about Fast Track Contracts or share your feedback or ideas for improvement with OGC’s Legal Operations team
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In case you missed the Whole fo School Meeting
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