My research sits at the intersection of measurement, modelling, population health, and health education. I was originally trained in cognitive and behavioural modelling, with a focus on formal models of eyewitness identification decisions. This background continues to shape my work: I am interested in how we define, measure, and interpret complex phenomena when the available data are partial, changing, or structurally biased.
My main research program applies this perspective to oral epidemiology, with a particular focus on periodontitis. Periodontitis is a progressive disease in which the evidence of past disease can be lost as affected teeth are extracted. This creates a major measurement challenge for surveillance, cohort studies, and clinical research. My work develops new methods for understanding disease burden when the observable tooth set changes over time, including tooth-level reconstruction, spatial modelling, network analysis, and machine learning approaches. The goal is to improve how periodontitis is measured in population datasets and to support more accurate, equitable, and clinically meaningful estimates of oral disease burden.
I also study the relationship between oral health and broader health outcomes, including chronic disease, multimorbidity, diabetes, and potentially cognitive decline. This work reflects my broader interest in oral health as part of general health, rather than as a separate or peripheral domain. By combining epidemiological methods, psychometric thinking, and advanced modelling approaches, I aim to develop tools that better represent the experiences of people with high disease burden, particularly those who are most likely to be under-represented by conventional measures.
A second area of my research focuses on cultural safety education in health and dental education. In collaboration with Aboriginal researchers and educators, I contribute to the evaluation and refinement of cultural safety curricula and teaching practices. This work examines how staff understand, engage with, and apply cultural safety principles in educational settings, with the aim of strengthening culturally responsive teaching and supporting healthcare graduates to practise in ways that are safe, respectful, and accountable to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities.
Across my research, I bring experience in program evaluation, public health, psychological modelling, psychometrics, and oral epidemiology. My work is unified by a commitment to improving the quality of measurement and evaluation in health systems, especially where standard approaches risk obscuring inequity, misrepresenting disease burden, or failing to capture the complexity of real-world populations.