Healthy Working Lives Group
The Healthy Working Lives Research Group is based in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine. The research team works with diverse partners, across multiple disciplines and settings, and using a range of research methods, to design, conduct and translate research that has real-world impact. The research program encompasses three main themes of prevention, recovery and systems.
| Professor Alex Collie is the Director of the Healthy Working Lives Research Group and the Division of Health Systems, Services and Policy in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University. He is also President of the Scientific Committee on Work Disability Prevention for the International Commission on Occupational Health (ICOH), the peak global scientific body for work and health research; Chair of the Living Labs program for the Australian National Centre for Healthy Ageing; and a member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts. Alex is also an ARC Future Fellow (2020 to 2024) and a Churchill Fellow. Professor Collie is an applied public health and social policy scholar. His research and teaching focus on work injury rehabilitation, occupational health and social protection schemes for personal injury. He leads a multidisciplinary, mixed methods research program set in Australian and international personal injury schemes such as workers’ compensation, motor vehicle crash compensation and disability insurance. Prof Alex Collie currently collaborates with MARC members on various projects, including: Development of NORTISS: The National Occupational Road Transport Injury Surveillance System |
 | Dr Michael Di Donato is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Healthy Working Lives Research Group at the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University. His doctoral studies explored the interaction between income support systems and healthcare for workers with low back pain. Dr Di Donato’s research seeks to understand the impact of policy changes on healthcare service use and social welfare outcomes in compensated workers, to create readily reportable indicators of quality of care delivered to workers with low back pain, and continue development of a large scale health service research database. His areas of interest include social welfare and income support systems, healthcare delivery and quality for low back pain, and how compensation system policy influences worker disability and recovery. Dr Di Donato currently collaborates with MARC members on projects including: |