Elizabeth Eakin

Biography

Professor Elizabeth Eakin has built a program of research around behavioural approaches to chronic disease prevention and management focusing on telephone-delivered lifestyle interventions. This program emphasises physical activity (newer work on too much sitting) and dietary behaviour/weight loss interventions in a wide range of population subgroups, including office-based workers, and those with type 2 diabetes and breast cancer. Elizabeth Eakin is Director of the Cancer Prevention Research Centre, Professor of Health Behaviour Interventions and NHMRC Senior Research Fellow within the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland. She holds an NHMRC Senior Research Fellowship (2008 – 2012, 2013 – 2017), is Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Psycho-oncology Cooperative Research Group, and is a past president of the Australasian Society for Behavioural Health & Medicine. As a behavioural scientist working in the field of population health, she has developed an internationally recognised program of research in health behaviour interventions in chronic disease prevention and management. Her research emphasises CONSORT-designed, pragmatic randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of physical activity, dietary behaviour and weight loss interventions, using broad-reach delivery modalities (telephone and text messaging) to maximise population reach. Attention is given to rigorous measurement of health behaviours and biomarkers of disease risk; development of intervention protocols guided by and contributing to the science of behaviour change and maintenance; and systematic evaluation of outcomes important to informing translation into practice, including cost-effectiveness. She has conducted numerous such RCTs involving over 2000 trial participants in health-service and community settings, with examples of the uptake of this work into population health practice across community and state-wide translational initiatives.

Research Interest

Disease prevention and control