Dr Colleen Cheek is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Healthcare Innovation, Macquarie University. A rural scholar and experienced health professional, Dr Cheek specialises in translational health systems research, which bridges the gap between evidence and practice to improve healthcare delivery across diverse settings.

Her career spans clinical, management, and executive roles in rural and metropolitan areas, across public and private sectors, and in acute, primary care, and educational contexts. This breadth of experience informs her systems-level understanding of healthcare strategy and operations and her ability to quickly comprehend meaning in changing conditions to detect the most important information, grasp its significance, and anticipate how to adapt to improve health systems in a range of contexts. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she played a key executive role within Tasmanian Health, leading critical service adaptations including hospital closure and recommissioning. Her experience of contemporary health systems firmed her resolve and interest in elevating health professional experience and wellbeing in system design and performance.

Dr Cheek has secured over $3.82 million in competitive research funding, supporting community-driven projects in digital health, rural workforce strategy, and service delivery models such as early intervention for children with autism. She has successfully led large-scale, multi-stakeholder programs in eHealth, population health, and disaster response, consistently delivering outcomes on time and within budget.

Currently, Dr Cheek leads an experience-based co-design project using human factors and systems science methods to adapt emergency department care for underserved populations, including culturally and linguistically diverse communities, adults living with disability or mental illness, older adults, and Indigenous Australians.  Dr Cheek is an expert in eliciting and making sense of user and provider perspectives,  in tailoring and facilitating codesign to different cohorts and improvement initiatives, and situates findings in improvement-oriented sustainable action that tackles some of the most wicked issues in healthcare.