HEALTH AND ECONOMIC BURDEN OF INTERSTITIAL LUNG DISEASES
RESEARCHER PROFILE (Filmed April 2024)
Dr Ingrid Cox
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Menzies Institute for Medical Research
University of Tasmania
Dr Ingrid Cox is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research, University of Tasmania. She is a physician and health economist by training and has extensive experience working in healthcare, including in clinical practice, public health, health policy and health planning, and has worked with regional governmental agencies in the Caribbean and international development partners working in health.
Dr Cox’s main research interests focus on respiratory diseases and primarily on the economic burden and economic evaluation of interventions and treatments for their management. She earned her PhD from the University of Tasmania where her doctoral research examined the health and economic burden of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) in Australia, one component of the NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence for Pulmonary Fibrosis, a national project implemented alongside the Australian IPF Registry and the Lung Foundation Australia. This research provided the first epidemiological profile and first costing estimates of the economic burden of the disease in Australia, providing essential evidence for health service reimbursement policies.
Dr Cos completed her PhD in 2022 and since then has been the recipient of two Fellowships, the first the Menzies Postdoctoral Fellowship and the second a Fellowship with Lung Foundation Australia.
Currently Dr Cox’s research work spans several areas including her continued work on IPF and other interstitial lung diseases on several national projects, health services research including some work with the Royal Flying Doctor Service, prostate cancer research and her current lung cancer research funded by the major project grant of the Royal Hobart Hospital Research Foundation.
Dr Cox holds executive committee positions on the Australian Health Economics Society, the Professional Society or Health Economics and Outcomes Research both nationally and internationally, is currently the President of the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand Tasmanian Branch and Chair of the Lung Cancer Special Interest Group.
Source: Supplied, Centre Of Research Excellence In Pulmonary Fibrosis
-
Brain ageing, dementia and psychiatric disorders
Professor Perminder Sachdev graduated from the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, in 1978 and completed his MD in Psychiatry there in 1983. Following time in New Zealand, he relocated to Australia, where he completed psychiatric training and a PhD at UNSW in 1991. His doctoral work examined ethnopsychological concepts in Māori culture. His early research focused on drug-induced movement disorders, including akathisia, tardive dyskinesia and neuroleptic malignant syndrome, while his later work has centred on dementia and pre-dementia syndromes, particularly neuroimaging, biomarkers and risk factors.
-
Life-changing donor milk for preterm babies
Dr Laura Klein is National Milk Research Leader at Australian Red Cross Lifeblood. Australian Red Cross Lifeblood is funded by Australian governments to provide life-giving blood, plasma, and transplantation and biological products.
Dr Klein works with clinicians and researchers across Australia to understand how donated breast milk can be used to improve outcomes for vulnerable babies. She’s passionate about generating evidence to improve the products and services that milk banks provide to donors and the families who receive donated breast milk.
-
Identification & characterisation of molecular drivers of therapeutic resistance
Professor Pieter Eichhorn is an internationally experienced cancer biologist and research leader whose career has been defined by high-impact contributions at the interface of functional genomics, translational oncology, and research infrastructure strategy.
He completed his PhD at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, contributing to the cloning of the gene associated with Cornelia de Lange Syndrome, before undertaking postdoctoral training at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in the laboratory of René Bernards. There, he performed pioneering functional genetic screens that identified key regulators of oncogenesis and therapy resistance, including critical roles for the PI3K signalling pathway in resistance to targeted breast cancer therapies.
