Award-winning health researcher Professor Angela Dawson was recently announced as the new Associate Dean, Research for the UTS Faculty of Health. She tells us why women’s health matters, what makes UTS Health research unique, and why being a good leader involves bringing people with you.
Congratulations on your appointment. What are you hoping to achieve in this role?
Thank you. It’s a really important role in the faculty, and for me it provides an opportunity to make a significant contribution to the work of the faculty and to UTS more broadly. I’d really like to inspire others to deliver research that makes a difference to people’s lives. I want to ensure that all our researchers have equal opportunity to shine, because that makes me shine and it makes the whole university shine and delivers outcomes for health.
The role requires extensive collaboration across UTS. What does this look like?
It’s a very collaborative role with the other associate deans – Professor Megan Williams, the Associate Dean in Indigenous Health and Associate Professor Lynn Sinclair, who’s our Associate Dean Teaching and Learning. With that comes the challenge of making sure people are linked across the faculty, so the heads of schools and the heads of the research centres. I’m also looking forward to learning a lot from the associate deans of research in the other faculties and looking for opportunities for collaboration.
What do you see as the faculty’s unique research strengths?
One of our real strengths is our focus on social justice – addressing inequity in health is at the core of what we’re doing. Our commitment to Indigenous health and the health of vulnerable populations is a really important part of that. We’re also building a track record of including the voices of people with lived experience in our research.
Another thing that’s unique about UTS is that we don’t offer medicine, which can be a very dominant discipline. I’ve worked at the University of Sydney, UNSW, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and UTS is the first university health faculty I’ve encountered without it. That allows us to be both multidisciplinary and very nimble across the breadth of our research programs. We’ve got nursing, exercise science, allied and public health, so we’re really diverse – we do things from the womb to the tomb. We’ve also got methodological diversity, from qualitative researchers to biostatisticians and health economists, and our work spans the benchtop to the bedside, and into policy and practice. I’d say we’re very grounded in practice.
How did an arts career lead you into public health?
I come from a family of doctors and nurses and they were all looking at me to follow in their footsteps. And I went, ‘Nah, I’m doing visual arts!’ I did a Master of Arts and then I became completely disillusioned by that world. I went to South Africa for a holiday and ended up getting a job in a community arts program, making murals and printing t-shirts that were all about health promotion. That’s when I went, ‘Okay, this is actually quite useful.’ So, I worked on some health literacy projects in Malawi and in townships in South Africa and I just thought well, I’d better get a health qualification now!
Your research interests are broad but they’re really held together by your passion for women’s health. How would you describe your work?
I’m interested in maternal and women’s reproductive health – I have been for a long time. Even when I was working in the UK on huge malaria and HIV programs, it was really the women’s health aspect that I was particularly interested in. I’m interested in substance use disorders, particularly in pregnant and parenting women, and I’m on the Centre for Research Excellence in Alcohol and Health over at the University of Sydney, which is focused on addressing substance use in Indigenous communities. I also have a very strong interest in humanitarian emergencies where the empowerment of women and girls is really important. Women’s health is a reflection on the state of a society. If you sort women out first, you’ll have a healthier community.
What are the research achievements you’re most proud of?
Two things come immediately to mind: the impact that I made that won the 2016 Sax Institute Research Action Award [opens external site] to improve sexual and reproductive health preparedness in humanitarian emergencies. I can’t recall how many governments’ policies we were able to affect change in; the research ensured that sexual and reproductive health was added to the mix in the health preparedness programs of many countries. The other achievement that I’m really proud of are all the PhD students that I’ve worked with who’ve graduated and gone onto their own careers, particularly the international and Indigenous students. I’m proud to see them stepping up in their careers and making a difference in health.
Do you have a leadership philosophy?
To be authentic and credible. I want to demonstrate excellence through my own work – I feel that’s really important. If you’re going to talk the talk, you’ve got to have walked the walk as well. I’m a good listener and I really value everyone’s input. I want things to happen but in a collegial and fun way.
And finally, what has COVID taught us about the importance of health research?
It’s shown the importance of health research and quality health research and real-time information. The incredible collaboration that’s happened across the world, to deliver vaccines, for example, has really shown us what we can achieve as a global research community when we choose to pull together. I think people are now looking to science for answers.