About

Professor Emeritus Joan Ozanne-Smith heads the Injury Prevention Research Unit at the Monash University Department of Forensic Medicine. She has qualifications in medicine, public health and sociology a research Doctorate in injury epidemiology and a Fellowship of the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine.

Her injury prevention research is multi-disciplinary, interfacing the methods of epidemiology and public health with those of other disciplines and includes injury prevention in low- and middle-income countries, drowning, safe design, child injury prevention and injury data systems. She has spent more than a decade as Director of major data systems: initially the Victorian Injury Surveillance System and more recently the National Coronial Information System.

Joan’s other interests include public health policy development, translation of research to prevention and building intellectual capacity in injury prevention. She is currently principal supervisor of 3 PhD students. Joan’s research is recognized widely through publications, awards and international invitations for consultancies and keynote presentations.

She is a co-editor of the WHO/UNICEF World report on child injury prevention (2008) and the WHO Global report on drowning: Preventing a leading killer (2014) and a contributor to the subsequent: Preventing drowning: an implementation guide (WHO 2017).

She has been closely linked to China as a director of the Australia China Alumni Association, Monash China Task Force, World Bank funded research, WHO consultancies including as lead consultant (China) on the Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Road Safety Programme (2010-2014), the Lancet China’s Health Reform series, capacity building projects and much more.

Her most recent China assignment was authorship of the introductory chapter of the text ‘Theory and methods on injury and violence prevention’ at the invitation of the Chinese Centres for Disease Prevention and Control (2017).