Associate Professor Fiona Haigh

Manager HIA Support Unit, Director Health Equity Research Development Unit

PHD, MPH, LLB, BsocSci

Fiona Haigh is  Director of the Health Equity Research and Development Unit (HERDU) and manager of the HIA Support Unit at the Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity, UNSW Sydney. Fiona is an applied public health researcher specialising in Health Impact Assessment (HIA) who has worked across three countries and internationally with health and other sectors to improve considerations of health and health equity in decision-making. Fiona has collaborated in the development of methods for HIAs, including ‘EPHIA’ – the European Policy Health Impact Assessment Guide Urban HIA methodology and, as part of her doctoral research, developed Human Rights Health Impact Assessment methodology.

Fiona has designed and taught university credit-bearing programmes on HIA as well as developed and conducted training sessions, workshops and ‘learning by doing‘ training models on HIA locally and internationally including HIA training for Pan American Health Organization member countries. These training programs have supported building capacity to undertake HIAs in more than 30 countries. Fiona has acted as an advisor to the World Health Organisation and is a member of the International Union of Health Promotion Global Working Group on HIA and the Society of Practitioners of Health Impact Assessment Steering Committee.

Associate Professor Ben Harris-Roxas

Ben’s research focuses on integrating primary health care and social care, the prevention and management of chronic conditions, and health impact assessment.
Ben has been involved in more than 40 HIAs since 2003, and has been involved in training more than 1,000 people in HIA. His doctoral research was on the use of equity-focused health impact assessment in health service planning and he developed Health Impact Assessment: A practical guide with colleagues at UNSW.
He has been chair of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education Global Working Group on health impact assessment and co-chair of the International Association for Impact Assessment’s Health Section. Ben has consulted for the World Health Organization’s Kobe Centre and the South East Asian Regional Office on health impact assessment and intersectoral action for health.
Ben currently supervises several higher degree by research students and contributes to Masters-level teaching on integrated care, health impact assessment, health inequalities, chronic disease management and environmental health.

Professor Evelyne de Leeuw

Professor of Urban Health and Policy Director, HUE (Healthy Urban Environments) Collaboratory, SPHERE Maridulu Budyari Gumal

Professor de Leeuw holds a Masters in Health Policy and Administration (University of Maastricht, The Netherlands, 1985), MPH at the University of California at Berkeley in comparative health systems research (1986) and a PhD in health political science (Maastricht, 1989).

She has been involved in WHO health promotion endeavours since the 1986 Ottawa Conference and attended all subsequent international health promotion conferences; at the fourth one (Jakarta, 1997) and eight one (Helsinki, 2013) she acted as conference rapporteur.

Since its initiation in 1986, she has been active in the international Healthy Cities movement. From 1992 to 2001 she held the position of Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Research on Healthy Cities at the University of Maastricht. She assists WHO regionally and globally in Healthy City evaluation reporting, most recently in special issues of Health Promotion International and the Journal of Urban Health.

She has worked with local, national and international government agencies on five continents in framing, defining and implementing strategies for Healthy Cities.

Between 1992 and 1998 she served two terms as Secretary-General of the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region. This enabled her to contribute to public health curriculum development in Schools of Public Health and Schools of Medicine.

Evelyne currently also holds appointments as Honorary Professor, Deakin University; Visiting Professor, Université de Montréal; and Visiting Professor, Maastricht University. Previously she held professorial position in public health, health promotion and political science at the University of Southern Denmark, Deakin University and La Trobe University (Australia).

Evelyne is Editor-in-Chief of the international peer-reviewed journal Health Promotion International and considered a leading global health promotion scholar, as evidenced by her appointments to high-level research panels (e.g., the Academy of Finland, and Science Ministries in Japan and Germany).

Karla Jaques

Research and Evaluation Officer

Karla Jaques is a Research and Evaluation Officer for the Centre for Health Equity Training, Research and Evaluation (CHETRE). She has worked at CHETRE since 2013 and has been involved in a range of research and evaluation. Karla has experience in the areas of Health Impact Assessment, Evaluation, Equity Analysis, Data Collection and Analysis, Education and Capacity Building. Karla provides support to HIA Learning by Doing participants.

Karla has a Bachelor of Public Health with minors in Indigenous and International Studies from the University of Wollongong and is currently undertaking a Masters of Public Health at the University of New South Wales.

Associate Professor Frederic Sitas

Director, Centre for Primary Care and Equity

Katie Hirono

Research Affiliate

Katie Hirono was a research officer at the Centre for Health Equity Training, Research and Evaluation at UNSW from 2013-2017. Her research focused on health impact assessment, health equity, and the social determinants of health. Katie is now a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh but we keep findings ways to keep her working with the CHETRE team.
Before joining UNSW, Katie worked with the Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to increase the use of health impact assessment in the U.S. Katie has also worked as a consultant to the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization in the department of Gender, Diversity and Human Rights, where she researched Indigenous health disparities in Latin America. During her master’s program at the University of Michigan School of Public Health she conducted qualitative research in Honduras using the Photovoice methodology. Her research assessed perceived barriers to healthcare and helped to inform the development of a community health system.

Katie also worked as the center coordinator for the Jay Weiss Center for Social Medicine and Health Equity at the University of Miami, and served as an eligibility specialist for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

She received a bachelor of arts in Social Relations and Spanish from Michigan State University and her master’s in public health from the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She is the recipient of the Department of State Foreign Language Acquisition Studies Fellowship, and the School of Public Health Dean’s Award.

Katie enjoys yoga, rock climbing and hiking in her free time.

Christopher Standen

HERDU Urban Development Fellow

 Christopher’s research interests span the interlinked areas of public health, transport and the built environment. He brings to the HIAConnect expertise in natural experiments, longitudinal data collection and analysis, discrete choice analysis, geographic information systems, data visualisation and data science. He will be assessing the health impacts and opportunities of urban development projects in the Sydney Local Health District, such as new transport infrastructure/services and residential developments.