Pip Henderson

Pip (she/her) works as a Research Officer within the FHMRI Trauma and Injury team and an active member of the Health Equity Impact Program (HEIP). Her interdisciplinary research spans public health, education, and sport, with a focus on improving equity and quality across policy and practice.

Pip currently contributes to several major projects, including the large-scale, MRFF-funded, public health initiative, SMART-PH (Digitising Information for Practice in Public Health), and an evaluation of the Department for Premier and Cabinet's 'Empowering African Youth Program'. Her work supports efforts to strengthen data-driven decision making, community wellbeing, and culturally responsive service delivery.

With a proven track record of delivering high-quality research outputs, Pip has produced comprehensive reports for a wide range of national and local organisations. These include the South Australian Department for Education, the Australian Sports Commission, Tennis Australia, Volleyball Australia,  and the Australian Council for Health, Physical Education and Recreation (ACHPER). 

Pip's research practices are grounded in meaningful community engagement. Working directly with community members (including students, players, coaches, teachers, principals, sport and community leaders) has facilitated her deep understanding of the value and complexities of education, sport, and health across a variety of settings. These experiences have also enabled her to develop research and evaluation skills that have been demonstrated in international contexts. For example, her work within a sport-for-development project developed by Oceania Hockey Federation (funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade [DFAT]) as part of the Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning Team demonstrated her capacity to manage large, cross-cultural projects with multiple stakeholders across Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu.

As a non-Indigenous person, Pip is committed to decolonising education and advancing antiracism within health and education settings. This commitment is illustrated through her PhD research where she utilised critical race theory and critical whiteness scholarship to explore constraints to educational equity (with a specific focus on culturally responsive education in schools and the inclusion of Indigenous Knowledges in tertiary settings). She has also worked on research projects exploring practitioner practice and education delivery at the interface of Western and Indigenous knowledge systems, which included presenting a co-designed framework at the 2023 LIME Conference on Ngambri and Ngunnawal Country.

Pip's ongoing work is dedicated to equity, community-centered research, and collaborative approaches that respect diverse ways of understanding.