Fran Baum is a Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Director of the Southgate Institute of Health, Society and Equity at Flinders University. She was named in the Queen’s Birthday 2016 Honours List as an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to higher education as an academic and public health researcher, as an advocate for improved access to community health care, and to professional organisations”. Professor Baum is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and one of Australia's leading researchers on the social and economic determinants of health. In 2008 she was awarded a prestigious Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship focusing on development of effective government and community responses to social determinants of health inequity and social exclusion. She holds several other national competitive grants investigating aspects of health inequity, and has an extensive teaching career in public health.

Professor Baum's numerous publications relate to social determinants of health, including Aboriginal people's health, health inequities, primary health care, health promotion, Healthy Cities, and social capital. Her text book The New Public Health (4th ed 2016 OUP) is widely used as a core public health text.

She is currently preparing Governing for Health a book to be published by Oxford University Press, New York