Lavender Otieno

Dr Lavender Otieno is a a culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD, Kenya) early career researcher (ECR) in the Discipline of Trauma and injury at the College of Medicine and Public Health. Her work focuses on understanding the nature, causes, and effects of human injury to support community-based prevention and intervention strategies, with a focus on CALD communities. As a Research Fellow and project manager, she currently manages an MRFF funded project titled SMART-PH (Digitising Information for Practice in Public Health), Australia’s first integrated public health and clinical data platform. SMART-PH aims to function as a common digital infrastructure to eliminate data siloes and improve healthcare decision making by enabling real-time collaboration. She also leads the evaluation of a state based early intervention community centred program known as the Empowering African Youth Program in collaboration with Department of Premier and Cabinet. Dr Otieno earned her BSc (Biomedical Science), BHMS (Hons) and PhD titled Impact of fatiguing exercise on corticospinal excitability and motor performance in young and older adults at the University of Adelaide. She went on to work at the interface of research and public health policy at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI) where she focused on the concerning rise in nicotine use among young Australians. Through collaboration with policy makers and public health researchers, Dr Otieno managed a government funded yearlong project aimed at identifying key areas for policy interventions to curb the growing access and use of nicotine vaping products among adolescents and young people.