Robyn McDermott

Robyn McDermott is Professor of Public Health Medicine at the Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention James Cook University, Senior Clinical Research Fellow (Queensland), NHMRC Practitioner Fellow and Professor of Public Health in the School of Population Health (UniSA) and the Sansom Institute for Health Research (South Australia).

Robyn previously served as Professor of Public Health Medicine at JCU in Cairns from 2002-4 and prior to that, as Medical Epidemiologist in the Cairns Tropical Public Health Unit from 1995. She has been a Research Fellow at the Menzies School of Health Research in the NT and spent many years working as a clinician and health services manager in rural and remote Australia, and in refugee health in South East Asia in the 1980’s and 90’s.

From 2000 to 2004 she served as Vice President, then President of the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine and numerous advisory committees to state and commonwealth governments. Robyn has worked as a consultant for WHO, AusAID, the World Bank and State and Commonwealth governments and others, in health services and Public Health. Her research interests are in chronic disease epidemiology, clinical quality improvement and disease prevention. She has chaired NHMRC Grant Review Panels for Projects, Fellowships and Capacity Building Grants and has had continuous NHMRC funding as lead investigator since 1998, totalling more than $12 million.

Robyn has co-ordinated and taught Masters level courses in Epidemiology and Health Economics while in the Northern Territory, and a new masters course in chronic disease and public health at James Cook University, as well as contributing to undergraduate teaching on the new JCU Medical Course.

Qualifications: MBBS University of Sydney 1978, FAFPHM The Royal Australasian College of Physicians 1990,MPH Harvard University 1993, PhD University of Sydney 2002