Seminar Program
SPHPM seminars are held on Wednesdays from 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm in the Ground Floor Conference Rooms at
553 St Kilda Road unless otherwise stated. All are welcome and no RSVP is required.
Enquiries: A/Prof Anita Wluka +61 3 9903 0994 or SPHPM Reception +61 3 9903 0555.
Monash Ageing Research Centre (MONARC) seminars can be found here.
Air pollution and health in China
Prof Xiaoming Shi – Director, China National Institute of Environmental Health
Thursday 21 September 2017, 2pm–3pm | Conference Rooms, 553 St Kilda Road, Melbourne
The air pollution situation in China is complex. Since 2013, haze pollution weather has occurred in many regions of China. Public health risks caused by air pollution have been a serious concern for governments and the public. To address the air pollution problem, in recent years China has implemented a series of regulations, including the Air Pollution Law as well as the Air Pollution Control and Action Plan. The government has also developed environmental air quality standards. This presentation will give an overview of air pollution and health in China, and introduce projects conducted by China National Institute of Environmental Health.
Professor Xiaoming Shi is an epidemiologist and public health expert in China. He is the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health (NIEH) that is responsible for investigating, monitoring and evaluating health effects of environmental exposures nationally. His major research interests include environmental hazards and health effects, healthy aging, and the control and prevention of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). He has contributed to establish the National Human Bio-Monitoring Project, which has been set up and implemented in China since 2016. Currently, Professor Shi is leading a large-scale project systematically assessing the acute health risks of air pollution in China, and is in the process of developing a national environmental public health tracking project. He has experiences working with numerous NCDs and aging studies in Chinese populations.
Research into air pollution and respiratory disease – older, larger and wiser?
Dr Anna Hansell – Imperial College London
Wednesday 4 October 2017, 12:30pm–1:30pm | Conference Rooms, 553 St Kilda Road, Melbourne
Dr Hansell is an environmental epidemiologist at Imperial College London, with a special interest in health effects of air pollution, including that produced by non-anthropogenic sources and by waste management processes (incinerators and waste composting).
This talk covers some of her recent work on use of large cohorts to examine long term health effects of air pollution exposure: mortality risks from long-term (up to 38 years) exposure in the UK ONS Longitudinal Study and asthma prevalence, symptoms and incidence in relation to air pollution and noise in European biobank cohorts.
The scourge of significantitis: Will statisticians and epidemiologists rise to the challenge?
Prof John Carlin – The Murdoch Children's Research Institute
Wednesday 11 October 2017, 12:30pm–1:30pm | Conference Rooms, 553 St Kilda Road, Melbourne
John Carlin is a Professor in biostatistics at the University of Melbourne, with primary role as head of the Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics Unit at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (Royal Children’s Hospital). He has wide-ranging interests in biostatistics, including methods for handling missing data and longitudinal analysis, with a particular focus on the interface between methods (including inferential tools such as p-values) and practical problems in clinical and epidemiological research.
This talk will review and explain why there is a growing consensus among numerous authorities that the concept of statistical significance is not just flawed as a gold standard for licensing scientific findings as true but may actually be a major contributor to problems of poor research quality and irreproducibility. I will examine the prospects for addressing these problems by emphasising more descriptive presentations of data and acknowledging in a more fundamental way that all empirically based statistical conclusions are uncertain.
Occupational exposure to cleaning / disinfection products and respiratory health
Dr Orianne Dumas – Inserm (French National Institute for Health and Medical Research)
Wednesday 18 October 2017, 12:30pm–1:30pm | Conference Rooms, 553 St Kilda Road, Melbourne
Orianne Dumas, PhD, is a researcher at Inserm (French National Institute for Health and Medical Research) with expertise in occupational and respiratory epidemiology. She has conducted research in several large respiratory epidemiological studies, such as the Epidemiological study on the Genetics and Environment of Asthma (EGEA, France) and the Nurses' Health Study II (NHSII, USA).
Many people are regularly exposed to cleaning products and disinfectants in private homes or at work. Exposure levels are particularly high among healthcare workers. The impact of these exposures on respiratory health is a growing concern. Recent results regarding the relationship between occupational exposure to cleaning products / disinfectants and chronic respiratory diseases (asthma and COPD) will be presented. Methodological challenges (eg. exposure assessment, healthy worker effect) in the evaluation of health effects of these exposures will also be discussed.
The new data world (or why registries are sooo last century...)
A/Prof Chris Pearce – Director of Research, Royal District Nursing Service Institute
Wednesday 25 October 2017, 12:30pm–1:30pm | Conference Rooms, 553 St Kilda Road, Melbourne
Associate Professor Christopher Pearce is a practicing clinician in general practice, anaesthetics and emergency medicine, and an academic with a passion for the benefits that health informatics can bring. He has both research and policy experience in E-Health. He is the Director of Research, Royal District Nursing Service Institute and Inner East Melbourne Medicare Local, an Adjunct, Monash University and Visiting Fellow, Australian National University.
Vision for the Faculty
Prof Christina Mitchell, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences
Wednesday 1 November 2017, 12:30pm–1:30pm | Conference Rooms, 553 St Kilda Road, Melbourne
Understanding and promoting health practitioner behaviour change: an introduction
Dr Peter Bragge – BehaviourWorks Australia
Wednesday 22 November 2017, 12:30pm–1:30pm | Conference Rooms, 553 St Kilda Road, Melbourne
Peter Bragge is an Associate Professor at BehaviourWorks Australia, an applied behavioural research centre within the Monash Sustainable Development Institute.
Peter specialises in healthcare quality improvement through translation of research evidence into practices, systems, and policies. This involves research evidence synthesis, qualitative exploration of practice behaviour, stakeholder consultation to design behaviour change strategies and testing and embedding these into practice. He has published extensively in academic journals such as The Lancet and is active in other media such as The Conversation.