Dr Ming Li
NHMRC Research Fellow
Dr Ming Li commenced with UniSA in March 2008 as a Research Fellow in chronic disease epidemiology. She was previously a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the George Institute of International Health of University of Sydney on a NHMRC post-doctoral fellowship. Her research focused on understanding the impact of social and environmental factors on health-related behaviours and health conditions such as overweight and obesity, metabolic disorders in children and adolescents in different cultures (developing and developed countries) in order to further develop targeted interventions.
Sponsored by Wellcome Trust, she has worked as a chief investigator on a comprehensive assessment of overweight and obesity, social and environmental surroundings and lifestyle behaviours such as diet, physical activity and sedentary behaviours. She has established a clear picture of the association between the emerging health problem with health behaviours and the environment in adolescent in China. Her PhD project lead to a great success in publishing and sharing research results in 6 international journals (European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Medical Science in Sports and Exercise, Journal of Adolescent Health, International Journal of Paediatric Obesity, Obesity review, Prevention and Control) and 9 conferences since 2005.
During her PhD program, she trained in epidemiological research methodology, nutritional epidemiology, clinical epidemiology, biostatistics, health education and promotion, social medical science. As a PhD candidate, she also worked as an evaluation member exploring the impact of lifestyle behavioural change on preventing overweight and obesity, and also a cohort study exploring the health service and diet on healthy ageing at the Centres of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Newcastle, Australia.
She worked as a lecturer in Xi’an Jiaotong University in China since 1996 and supervised post graduate students undertaking programs of maternal and children’s health. She has been trained in clinical medicine and has a thorough understanding of mechanisms and clinical management of diseases.
Dr Li has broad interests in exploring the relationship between social, environmental and lifestyles with epidemical chronic conditions (overweight and obesity, metabolic disorders, CVD) in various age groups in different cultural backgrounds. Her multidisciplinary training provides the foundation for exploring the physiological pathways of chronic diseases and developing preventive approaches in tackling these epidemics.