A Public Health Perspective on Health of People with Disability

Professor Anne Kavanagh is the inaugural Chair of Disability and Health at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. She is Academic Director of the Melbourne Disability Institute – an interdisciplinary Institute which brings together researchers, government and non-government organisations, and advocates to create systemic change to improve the lives of people with disability. She is Co-Director of the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Disability and Health. Anne is a social epidemiologist and her research focusses on generating high quality policy-relevant evidence for change. She is a member of the Victorian Disability Advisory Council and the Independent Advisory Council of the National Disability Insurance Agency.

Anne Kavanagh's research is enriched by her own lived experience of disability as someone with a chronic condition and as a parent of a child with a disability. Anne is a proud alumni of Flinders University; she graduated with a medical degree in 1987 where she was taught by the late Associate Professor Deane Southgate. She has a PhD in Epidemiology and Population Health from the Australian National University and is a Fellow of the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine.