Dr Anna Peeters

BSc(Hons), PhD

Research Fellow

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Dr Anna Peeters is a public health researcher, particularly interested in the provision of information to facilitate objective and equitable choices in public health by policy makers, practitioners and the public. After doing a PhD in genetics and virology, she trained in the fields of epidemiology and medical demography, focusing on the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of various targeting strategies for the prevention of cardiovascular disease.

Her training began in this Department and then continued in the Department of Public Health, Erasmus Medical Centre (The Netherlands).  She then extended her analysis of issues surrounding chronic disease in an aging population to obesity- illustrating a 6 year life expectancy loss in those obese at age 40 compared to those with normal weight. In 2003, she commenced a VicHealth fellowship to further explore this research in the Australian context. The fellowship aims to comprehensively describe the burden of overweight and obesity in terms of lifetime risks of disease and years lived with disease and disability. These findings will be used to describe the implications of trends in obesity for population health and socio-economic inequalities in health in the Australian population.