We bring together a leading group of academics who are undertaking multidisciplinary research, advocating for structural change and forging multisectoral partnerships to address global health inequities.
Our research spans six key research themes including environment and climate change, nutrition and food systems, infectious diseases, principles of global health practice, health policy, systems and delivery and gendered determinants of health.
The environment and climate change theme focuses on understanding the health risks and impacts associated with climate change and environmental degradation. It also explores adaptation and mitigation strategies to build resilience at individual, community, and systemic levels.
By employing an integrative, transdisciplinary, and multisectoral approach to research, we strive to create an equitable, sustainable, resilient, and healthy future for all. Our world-leading research and education on climate change and planetary health have informed evidence-based policy and decision-making, yielding multiple benefits for communities.
As an integral part of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, this project aims to develop meaningful indicators to track progress on health and climate research and responses to inform policy changes to advance climate change mitigation and adaptation in the region. The project has wide stakeholder engagement to influence climate policy and has mobilised health professionals to take action on climate change.
The multidisciplinary team involves researchers from 20+ institutes. Lancet Countdown Annual Reports can be accessed here2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023. Associated Policy Briefs for Australia are available on the Lancet Countdown website.
This project aims to address the global syndemic of climate change, malnutrition and childhood obesity by collaborating with partners in China and India. The project will generate new evidence from Sydney, Shanghai, and New Delhi, by conducting quantitative analysis and stakeholder workshops to advance research and inform policy.
Dr Kerrie Wiley’s program of research focuses on the integration of social science evidence into the global fight against vaccine-preventable and vector-borne diseases in Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Dr Kerrie Wiley is also a member of the Social and Behavioural Insights in Immunisation (SABII) research group.
Units taught within the Master of Global Health program directly relevant to this theme include:
The nutrition and food systems theme is dedicated to optimising food and nutrition security, and reducing the environmental impacts of food systems, globally. Our research focuses on food environment policy, characterising context specific elements of the triple burden of malnutrition, commercial determinants of disease, micronutrient deficiencies in women, and infant and young child feeding practices.
Our research is performed in partnership with local, state, and national governments and multilateral agencies, with an emphasis on co-design, community-led approaches, and capacity building. We currently have active research collaborations across Asia, the Pacific region, and Australia.
This four-year research project aims to raise the visibility of women, infants and young children in the food systems transformation agenda, and make ‘first-food systems’ a core component of thinking, research and policy action.
This project aims to identify barriers and enablers for effective policy implementation in Local Government Areas in NSW and assess the extent to which initiatives or objectives contained in policy documents translate into action ‘on the ground’. This knowledge gap will be addressed by making explicit and novel links between the food environment (e.g. food accessibility, convenience), and food system governance in NSW.
This project seeks to understand the mechanisms to improve the quality of diets in children 6-23 months in Timor-Leste in collaboration with UNICEF, the Ministry of Health and HAMNASA. Applying qualitative situation analysis and Trial of Improved Practices (TIPs), the study will inform the development of the country’s strategic guidelines and nationwide scale-up plan for improving the quality of young children’s diets.
This study is supported by UNICEF Timor Leste.
The Shonjibon Cash and Counselling (SCC) study assessed the effectiveness of unconditional cash transfers combined with a mobile application on nutrition counselling and direct counselling through mobile phones in reducing the prevalence of stunting in children at 18 months in rural settings in Bangladesh. This study assesses the SCC’s “spillover” impact by surveying ‘neighbouring’ mothers’ infant and young child nutrition knowledge and practices.
Units taught within the Master of Global Health program relevant to this theme include:
The Infectious Diseases theme is about understanding the impacts of infectious diseases on people and health systems and working with affected communities to identify effective, implementable, and sustainable solutions.
Our work focuses on those who are left out of protective policies and intervention designs, through the political marginalisation of intersecting aspects of their identity, including Indigenous, socio-economically marginalised, mobile or migrant populations, as well as infants, children and adolescents.
We collaborate with partners in Australia and multiple high-burden, often lower-resourced settings in Asia, Africa and the Pacific, with an emphasis on multi-disciplinarity, nested socio-behavioural sciences, community-led approaches, and capacity strengthening.
This project aims to co-develop innovations to optimise tuberculosis (TB) services, including case identification, prevention, treatment, and post-TB care for adolescents and young adults in Namibia. This work will contribute to reducing poor outcomes at each stage of the TB care cascade for this group, who are disproportionately impacted.
This project is supported by the African Academy of Sciences.
In partnership with the Centre for Sexual Health & HIV/AIDS Research (CeSHHAR) Zimbabwe, this project is examining and measuring how the Zvandiri program helps adolescents flourish within their communities by developing the character strengths embedded within the Indigenous concept of Zvandiri (Accept Me as I Am).
The project is developing youth-centred and locally salient mechanisms to describe and measure positive mental health and capture the impact of this community-delivered peer support preventive intervention which protects adolescents’ mental health. Watch a short advocacy film highlighting some of the findings from our work here.
This project is supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation.
As part of an ongoing program of embedding social science within clinical trials to improve the effectiveness and acceptability of paediatric HIV treatment, Associate Professor Bernays is conducting qualitative research in two large multi-country clinical trials with children and adolescents who are living with HIV.
The first trial, BREATHER + examines the safety, efficacy and acceptability of taking Dolutegravir, a widely used HIV treatment regimen, five days a week (taking the weekends off taking treatment). The second trial, LATA is examining the safety and acceptability of long-acting injectable administration of anti-retroviral treatment.
This is part of a long-standing partnership with leading HIV centres in Uganda and South Africa, the MRC/ UVRI & LSHTM Research Unit in Uganda and AHRI in South Africa, as well as University College London and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
This project is supported by ECTDP and Viiv Healthcare.
NeoSEAP is a multicentre and multicomponent international project that is being rolled out at 10 clinical sites across five countries in South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
Supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), the International Society of Antimicrobials and Chemotherapy (ISAC) and AVANT, our researchers are working on NeoSEAP sub-studies that include NeoSEAP_PS, NeoCOL, ACORN, and NeoQual. Together, these studies contribute to tackling Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) in neonatal sepsis in Australia and beyond.
In collaboration with Central Queensland Hospital and Health Services, Fiji National University, and Frank Hilton Organisation, this project measured the vaccination status of children with disability in the Suva-Nausori corridor, Fiji. It also seeks to better understand the community's social and behavioural drivers for vaccination. Read more about the project’s dissemination here.
his project was supported by the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and is part of the Australian Regional Immunisation Alliance.
Units taught within the Master of Global Health program relevant to this theme include:
This theme is concerned with research on global health practice – that is, research on how to identify, promote, and entrench principles for fair, equitable, and ethical engagement in global health efforts, which may include research, fieldwork, training, capacity support, outbreak investigation, policy and program design, community engagement, service delivery, and policy advocacy.
As global health efforts involve working with marginalised individuals and communities, this theme is concerned with ensuring that those efforts uphold the dignity of people who are marginalised as knowers.
This project aims to fill an urgent gap in the field of global health – how to institutionalise respect for beneficiaries’ dignity as knowers. The project is doing so by investigating strategies that helped to institutionalise evidence-based practices in the fields of health care and health policy. Expected outcomes include practical strategies to institutionalise dignity-based practices in knowledge production, use and circulation.
In 2020, we started the Hidden Epidemics and Epidemiological Obfuscation Research Network to bring people together from around the world to present and discuss case studies of epidemiological obfuscation. Since then, more than 30 case studies of epidemiological obfuscation have been presented at our fortnightly seminars by researchers, clinicians, journalists, and patient advocates, and hundreds more have joined us remotely to discuss them (you can find some of the talks here and here).
In collaboration with Reconstra Utama Integra, we conducted a mixed methods evaluation of a UNICEF Indonesia multisectoral intervention to assess its feasibility, acceptability, coverage, scale/replicability and effectiveness. The evaluation found considerable variation across districts in relation to key intervention outcomes.
This project highlighted the complex challenges of working in decentralised settings with district level stakeholders who have varying capacities for the implementation of multisectoral interventions.
This project was supported by UNICEF Indonesia.
This project combines two related studies that explore the ethical challenges involved in engaging adolescents in health research. This research will provide critical insights that can be used to inform guideline reform so that adolescents’ perspectives are represented in research on issues that affect them.
The units where this theme is taught include:
Global health is practiced within health systems at different scales of organisation, from the community to subnational, national, and global scales. Those health systems are shaped by formal and informal policies made and applied at each of these levels, and how policies between these levels interact to influence how programs, including health reforms, are delivered.
The purpose of this study is to understand the strengths of existing food security programs, and to provide insights into how the comprehensiveness and implementation of these programs could be strengthened to improve outcomes for communities.
In partnership with Universitas Airlangga and University of Pattimura, this project aims to improve child nutrition in Indonesia, particularly in rural and remote areas such as Banyuwangi and Central Maluku Districts. By implementing a real-time data system and empowering local female health cadres to contribute to evidence-based village planning and decision-making, the project ensures better nutrition interventions that are tailored to community needs.
This project is supported by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Partnership Program (KONEKSI)
This is a multi-method evaluation of the role of the PPHSN in achieving IHR 2005 core capacities. It identified strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to improve the coordination of disease surveillance in the Pacific. This project was conducted in collaboration with The University of Queensland and Griffith University. See more on the project here.
This project was funded by The Pacific Community (SPC).
This project evaluated the Lao PDR Electronic Immunisation Register (EIR) and identified opportunities to improve data for immunisation decision-making, design strategies for vaccine uptake, improve implementation, scale-up, and sustainability, and promote health system strengthening. Read more about the project here.
This project was supported by the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and is part of the Australian Regional Immunisation Alliance (ARIA)
This project, in partnership with New South Wales Health, uses a modelling approach to investigate the interplay between individual opinions on intervention policy and disease dynamics. These simulation results will assist in the development of real-world public health policy in Australia, increasing societal resilience to ongoing and future pandemic threats.
The units where this theme is taught include:
Gender inequality has health-related consequences, perpetuating structural harms and risks. Gender is one of the foremost contributing factors and social determinants affecting health outcomes, yet it is frequently overlooked in health programs.
We adopt an intersectional approach to gender, recognising that it is dynamic, changes over time, and is influenced by a range of factors, including race, ethnicity, age, class, ability and religion, as well as the political, environmental and social contexts in which people live.
SAPPHIRE was developed to address the burden of disease, exacerbated by a decrease in resilience to environmental and climatic changes in Asia Pacific regions. The research emphasises community participation, infectious and chronic disease control, health system strengthening, One Health adoption, climate change adaptation, and Gender Equality, Disability and Social Inclusion (GEDSI) integration for regional health security.
The GEDSI component is designed to strengthen and embed awareness and inclusivity, with mechanisms for routine measurement and evaluation to support the iterative improvement of GEDSI outcomes throughout the partnership (local and international). The objective of our gender equality outcome is to facilitate a transformative shift in local institutions' practices and in the practices within our own implementation teams, through a comprehensive plan for the integration of a GEDSI responsive framework.
This project is supported by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Regional Health Partnership.
In collaboration with CARE International in Lao PDR, this study seeks to understand women’s reproductive, maternal and child healthcare-seeking behaviour to better support their access and engagement with healthcare services. Using a gender lens, the research will explore intrahousehold and societal gender-based power dynamics and key relationships that may influence women’s freedom of movement, and their access to and uptake of reproductive, maternal and child health services.
In collaboration with CARE International in Lao PDR, this research assesses the interlinkages between livelihoods and health and nutrition outcomes for women in rural Laos using a gender-based perspective.
The study will generate insights for policy and programmatic interventions to improve the well-being of women in the region and to provide contextual knowledge that will inform the design of a larger-scale intervention.
This project assesses the impact of using liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for cooking to reduce household air pollution exposure on child health outcomes in Bangladesh.
The primary aim is to evaluate if reduced exposure to household air pollution through the provision of LPG for cooking from early gestation through to age two improves child anthropometry, health, and neuro-cognitive developmental outcomes, compared to children who are exposed to emissions from usual cooking practice.
We will evaluate how the intervention effects changes in gender roles, for example, shifts in the division of labor, improved self-efficacy, women’s access to and control over resources, altered work and time usage due to less time collecting biomass fuels, changes in household decision-making and women’s bargaining power, and changes in patterns of domestic violence.
This theme is taught in all units within the Master of Global Health program, including the units below:
Email: syd_globalhealth@sydney.edu.au
Mailing address
Sydney School of Public Health
Edward Ford Building, A27 Fisher Rd,
University of Sydney NSW 2050
To reflect our commitment to communities leading research, and our belief that global health imagery should centre the storytelling of those most acutely affected, our website features artwork from the Art of Health initiative.
