Angela Taft

Angela Taft is currently Adjunct Professor and former Professor/Director of the Judith Lumley Centre (JLC) of Mother, Infant and Family Health, where she worked for over twenty years. She was also formerly the National Convenor of the Women's Health SIG of the Public Health Association of Australia. Angela is a social scientist who established and led two inter-related fields of women's health research at JLC: (1) Prevention and reduction of violence against women and children and (2) Planned parenthood and reproductive rights. Over the last twenty years she has led competitively funded programs of research on intimate partner/gender-based violence, contraception and induced abortion. She published the first national population study of the prevalence and health impact of IPV over time in the Australian Longitudinal Study of Women's Health. She undertook the first NHMRC funded partner violence intervention study MOSAIC, now being replicated in an NIH funded study in Michigan and in over 100 regions of Peru. She has led competitively funded studies of emergency contraception, access and equity in abortion care, Cochrane systematic reviews and trials of IPV interventions in primary care. She was Chief Investigator in two Centres of Research Excellence: SAFER FAMILIES (University of Melbourne) and SPHERE (Monash U). She is completing HARMONY, an NHMRC Partnerships in Health pragmatic cluster RCT of family violence care for migrant/refugee women in general practice. She has initiated and led programs of gender-based violence health system reform and training in Timor-Leste to which she is still committed.