Andrea Smith

Andrea is a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Health Innovation (AIHI), faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Macquarie University. She works within AIHI’s Centre for Healthcare Resilience and Implementation Science (CHRIS), where the focus is on investigating the myriad, dynamic interactions between interconnected webs of clinical professionals, their patients, healthcare technologies, communication systems and equipment.

She completed her undergraduate degree in Molecular Biology at the University of Leicester in the UK after which she worked as a resarch assistant at the University of Edinburgh before going on to complete a post-grad diploma in publishing. She then worked in health and science publishing, including journal publishing and healthcare communications and consultancy, in both the UK and Australia for more than 10 years. In 2010 she completed a Masters in Public Health at the University of Sydney before undertaking a PhD at the University of Sydney with Professor Simon Chapman and Professor Stacy Carter. Her PhD looked at how and why Australian smokers quit without using pharmacotherapy or behavioural support. While at the University of Sydney she also worked with Cancer Council NSW and Cancer Institute NSW on a number of tobacco control projects, including retail regulation of tobacco and utilisation of the online iCanQuit forum.

Before starting her current post-doctoral position at Macquarie University, Andrea was a lecturer and unit coordinator teaching both core and elective qualitative research methods units of study into the Masters of Public Health program at the University of Sydney.

Her current research involves working with the NHMRC-funded Melanoma Centre of Research Excellence looking at how the Melanoma CRE’s evidence-based interventions can be aptly implemented into clinical practice and state and nation-wide health policies. This involves looking at important attributes of the interventions such as equity, affordability, implementation feasibility, acceptability, sustainability and scalability.