Naomi Priest

Professor Naomi Priest is a lifecourse and social epidemiologist. She is Group Leader of Social-Biological Research at the Centre for Social Research and Methods, Australian National University, co-located at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute.

She has extensive experience in qualitative, mixed methods, and large-scale quantitative analysis, as well as in the conduct of collaborative research and policy and practice implementation related to child and adolescent health and health inequalities.

Her research program is focused on examining how social forces and social exposures become biologically embedded and embodied, and on understanding and addressing inequalities in health and development, throughout the life course. Much of this work focuses on social determinants of health and health inequities in mental health and cardiovascular disease for Aboriginal and ethnic minoritised children and adolescents, with a major focus on racism and discrimination.

After training as an occupational therapist and working in community child health, Naomi received her PhD in 2009 in population health at the University of Melbourne. She then completed a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) post-doctoral fellowship 2010-2014 also at the University of Melbourne with training in social epidemiology. In 2014-15 she was a Visiting Scientist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Since 2015 she has been at the Australian National University, co-located at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute since 2016. She held a NHMRC Career Development Fellowship from 2017-2021.