Zeljko is Professor of Public Health and Leader of the Active Living & Public Health research group at the Institute for Health and Sport, Victoria University. His research is centred around chronic disease prevention and promotion of well-being through healthy use of time. His interests span: prevalence, determinants, and outcomes of unhealthy time use; public health surveillance, policies, and interventions; statistical methods in epidemiology; and measurement methods.
He holds an honorary title of Assistant Professor of Quantitative Methods at the University of Zagreb. He is Secretary of the International Network of Time-Use Epidemiologists (INTUE) and Coordinator of the Victoria University Public Health Network (VUPHN).
His academic career started at the University of Zagreb, where he worked for nine years as a methodological consultant and lecturer/senior lecturer in statistics and theory of measurement. In 2011/12, he was an Erasmus Mundus funded postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Sport Science, Karl-Franzens University of Graz. In 2013, he joined the Prevention Research Collaboration at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Sydney to continue his postdoctoral research. Since August 2015, he has been employed at Victoria University.
His publication record includes >80 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, one book, one textbook, three book chapters, four academic reports, ten pop-sci articles and infographics, and >60 conference papers and abstracts. As a methodological consultant or supervisor he contributed to four bachelor, 25 masters and 17 PhD research projects.
He received several academic awards; the most prestigious being National Prize for Young Scientists, Croatian Parliament, 2010 and Vice-Chancellor’s Citation for Excellence in Research, Victoria University, 2018.