Emeritus Professor Suzanne Crowe AO
Emeritus Professor Suzanne Crowe AO is a physician-scientist and company board director.
Professor Crowe has a long-standing relationship with Monash University, graduating with honours in Medicine (MBBS, 1979), her Doctor of Medicine (MD, 1998), appointed Professor of Medicine and Infectious Diseases (1999) and appointed as an Emeritus Professor of Medicine, Monash University, in 2019.
In 1984, as a medical registrar at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, Professor Crowe co-founded the first Melbourne HIV Clinic at Fairfield Hospital.
This became the Victorian HIV Service at The Alfred hospital, where Professor Crowe, a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, worked as a Principal Specialist in Infectious Diseases until 2019.
Professor Crowe’s research career commenced in 1986. Awarded a Harkness Commonwealth Research Fellowship, she embraced laboratory research at the University of California, San Francisco.
Her early scientific discoveries still have clinical relevance and underpin the failure of antiretroviral treatment to eradicate HIV.
Returning to Australia as a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow in 1988, Professor Crowe was appointed the inaugural laboratory head at the new Burnet Institute. Subsequent appointments included Director of Virology, and Associate Director of Burnet Institute, until 2018.
Her research has focused on understanding HIV pathogenesis and comorbidities in HIV-infected individuals, where the clinical burden of HIV care has shifted in the modern era of combination antiretroviral therapy. She has co-authored over 300 publications, six books, and 85 book chapters. Her translational research, combined with her commitment to social justice, resulted in co-development of a low-cost point-of-care test which has increased global monitoring of HIV.
Related to this research is her commitment to developing science and improving medicine in resource-limited countries. Her supervision and mentoring of young scientists and medical graduates, particularly women, include PhD students from India, Vietnam, Malaysia, PNG, Indonesia, Botswana. She has initiated and led 50 HIV training programs for doctors and nurses in India, and in Indonesia, Lao, Myanmar, Fiji and PNG.
Professor Crowe worked as an advisor to the World Health Organization Global Program on AIDS for 25 years, as Deputy-Chair of the Australia India Council (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), on the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (India-China Working Group) and as President of the Australasian Society for HIV Medicine. She was a Director of St Vincent’s Health Australia for nine years. A Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, she currently uses her 30 years of clinical and research experience as a non-executive Director on the boards of two global ASX-listed companies.
Her honours include the Pricilla Kincaid Smith Medal (Royal Australasian College of Physicians), Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, and was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2020 for “distinguished service to health and aged care administration, to clinical governance, biomedical research, and to education”.