Energising public health
by Kelly Stone
Professor Kerin O’Dea has been recognised internationally for her work in public health research. Now the eminent academic and AO is relishing an opportunity to create a world class health research institute as the new director of UniSA’s Sansom Institute for Health Research.
Prof O’Dea is looking forward to building on the Sansom Institute’s recognised expertise in pharmacy, quality use of medicines and biomedical science, to cover the full spectrum of health research from the laboratory to population health and health policy and practice.
"Applied research that is relevant to contemporary health issues will be the focus," she said.
Prof O’Dea’s own research has been published extensively in national and international peer-reviewed journals and she is frequently invited to present her work at conferences around the world. She has made major contributions to understanding the relationship between diet and chronic diseases, particularly Type 2 diabetes and related conditions.
"I do see my role more as a mentor these days, but I am still very much involved in research," she said.
"I’m interested in what I call therapeutic nutrition, which is using diet to prevent and treat chronic conditions. My own research is focused on nutrition, as well as Indigenous health and diabetes – and all of the risk factors and complications of diabetes, many of which can be treated with a healthy diet.
"One of the things I’m interested in for example is if you are overweight and have unhealthy weight, which is central fat around the abdomen; can diet help you change that? Can we move fat around the body and move it from the stomach to the hips and thighs, because fat in different depots has entirely different effects."
Prof O’Dea has conducted research into hunter-gatherer diets versus Mediterranean diets and says it’s the Western diet "we’re not keen on".
"The Mediterranean diet is a model which I think is a very good one to apply to western societies like ours, because it has lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, and it does have some meat and fish but not large amounts and that’s the kind of thing I would support," she said.
"When you look at socially disadvantaged populations, they tend to maximise calories per dollar and if you do that, you tend to eat fat, sugar, flour, refined foods…whereas the healthy foods, the ones we advise people to eat, are much more expensive per dollar, such as lean meat, fish, fresh fruit, vegetables and nuts. When people are disadvantaged, they have less choice, so we have to take that driver of food choice into account."
Prof O’Dea is active on many national committees advising government on nutrition, health and health research, including the Research Committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the National Indigenous Health Equality Council. She has held research positions in Europe, the US and Australia and her appointments in Australia over the past 20 years include Deakin University (PVC Research), Monash University, Menzies School of Health Research, and most recently as Professorial Fellow in the Department of Medicine (St Vincent’s Hospital) University of Melbourne and Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute.
Prof O’Dea said she was attracted to UniSA by the challenge to build a strong health research institute, as well as by the University’s managerial support to foster research capacity.
"I’m looking to establish an institute that is very broadly based," she said.
"The Division has recently made three key professorial appointments in epidemiology (Prof John Lynch), social epidemiology (Prof Mark Daniel) and health economics and health service evaluation (Prof Leonie Segal).
"The NHMRC has always been big in biomedical research but increasingly there are targeted programs to build research capacity in Australia in the areas of clinical, population health and health services/health policy, so it’s important for us to be well positioned in those areas.
"And while we’ll be a broad-based institute, we do have five strategic themes – molecules to medicine, health and wellbeing through the generations, Indigenous health, prevention and management of chronic disease, and translating research into policy and practice.
"At the heart of these themes is the application of research into products, policy and practice. Our goal is to have our research very much linked to a health question."
Supporting the Sansom Institute’s young researchers is important to Prof O’Dea, who says researchers are often at their most creative in their 30s.
"Early career researchers are the ones we really want to help to grow their careers. That’s very important to us," she said.
"We also want to make sure that our PhD students have at least one supervisor who is research active and who can put our students on a good trajectory for future success."