Professor Sandra Eades

Biography

Professor Sandra Eades is Domain Head of Aboriginal Health. Sandra is a Noongar woman from Mount Barker, Western Australia, and is Australia's first Aboriginal medical doctor to be awarded a Doctorate of Philosophy (2003), which was completed in epidemiology at the Institute for Child Health Research, Perth. Sandra has recently been appointed an Initiating Fellow of the new Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. Sandra's research career has focussed on the epidemiology of Indigenous child health in Australia. Over the past decade, she has made substantial contributions to the area of Aboriginal health and has provided leadership at a national level in Aboriginal research. Sandra's PhD examined causal pathways to poor birth outcomes and significant illness in the first year of life among urban Aboriginal infants. Her research program follows on from this early work and includes a randomised controlled trial of a culturally specific smoking intervention for pregnant Indigenous women. She is currently leading a randomised controlled trial to test the effectiveness of a systems based collaborative to improve treatment for type 2 diabetes in 18 Aboriginal Community Controlled Primary Health Care Services in Western Australia, the Northern Territory, South Australia and Victoria. Sandra is strongly committed to capacity building. She has previously led a NHMRC Population Health Capacity Building grant that funded a research training program for five Indigenous researchers and six non-Indigenous researchers involved in programs related to Indigenous health. She continues to supervise and mentor Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal researchers making a contribution to this field.

Research Interest

Aboriginal Health