2011 Healthy Development Adelaide Award

Professor John Lynch was presented with the Healthy Development Adelaide Award at the 7th annual HDA Oration ‘Why are economists interested in early childhood health and development'.

John Lynch is the Professor of Public Health in the Discipline of Public Health within the School of Population Health and Clinical Practice, at the University of Adelaide. He is also a Visiting Professor of Epidemiology in the School of Social and Community Medicine at the University of Bristol (UK).

He is an internationally recognized scholar in epidemiology and public health with more than 200 publications. In 2007 his work in public health was recognised with an honorary Doctorate in Medical Science from the University of Copenhagen. In 2009 he was awarded a prestigious NHMRC Australia Fellowship. He has been an associate editor of the International Journal of Epidemiology since 2005.

John Lynch has held academic appointments in the Department of Epidemiology at the University Michigan (USA) and was a Canada Research Chair in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McGill University in Montreal (Canada) and in the Sansom Institute at the University of South Australia. His research interests include early childhood development, lifecourse processes, health and social inequalities, population health information systems, evidence-based public health and improving the public health research-policy-practice nexus.

Oration overview: The 2011 HDA Oration will bring together research themes from several disciplines that have been foundational in focusing attention on the importance of supporting early childhood development for individuals, communities and societies. These include the fetal origins hypothesis, lifecourse epidemiology, early life nutrition, evidence from pre-and post natal, early childhood and pre-school intervention trials, cognitive neuroscience, personality psychology, and the econometrics of investing in early childhood programs. Australia and in particular South Australia has robust policy frameworks, innovative programs and world class research capacity to make important contributions to advancing the science and practice of early childhood health and development.