Margaret Stebbing

Population Health Academic

1.   Epidemiology of communicable and non-communicable disease
2.   Environmental health
3.   Media analysis
4.   Health impacts of dangerous climate change
5.   Risk perceptions and risk communication

Margaret came to MUDRIH in February 2009 from the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine.  Margaret grew up in West Gippsland and she has recently returned to a rural lifestyle in South Gippsland. Margaret's work at MUDRIH includes teaching and student supervision, collaborative population health projects and a research poerfolio that addresses current local issues in population health. Her professional background is in Nursing and public health practice and research projects with both Government and Divisions of General Practice in rural and remote settings in the Northern Territory, Nepal and China.  She has taught epidemiology and research practice in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and public health practice within Aboriginal Health Worker education and clinical programs.  Her research experience includes a cross sectional and cohort studies and drug safety trials.  Margaret’s research project for Master of Public Health was conducted in Nepal where she studied factors associated with gender differences in registration and treatment outcome in Nepal, and she spent 10 months coordinating a tuberculosis treatment program in a remote part of China with the international NGO Medecins sans Frontieres. Margaret's doctoral thesis was titled "Current issues in health risk perception in Australia". The thesis explored health risk perception with respect to nanotechnology, the environment, claims of cancer clusters and the media.  The findings support acknowledgment of the social and cultural origins of risk perception, and public engagement in the processes of defining, studying, measuring, managing and communicating risk in public health practice 

Margaret is also interested in health prevention, Indigenous health, environmental health, communicable and non-communicable diseases and the health risk perceptions and health impacts of dangerous climate change. Margaret is an active member of the Public Health Association of Australia and a committee member in the Environmental Health Special Interest Group.

Margaret Stebbing. (2009). 'Avoiding the Trust Deficit: Public Engagement, Values, the Precautionary Principle and the Future of Technology.' Bioethical Inquiry 6(1):37-48.

Margaret Stebbing. (2007). 'Qualitative methodology and questions of risk: linking the health of individuals to the health of populations.' Australasian Epidemiologist 14(2):29-32.

Margaret Stebbing, Evie Katz, Brian Priestly and Michael Abramson. (2008). 'Cancer clusters in the News: risk perception, risk communication and the media.' Australasian Epidemiologist 15(2):19-34. Population Health Congress 2008: An AEA Precis.

Stebbing et al. 'Social amplification of risk: news media and the emergence of a “cancer cluster” narrative in Australia.' In Communicating Scientific Risk through Mass Media – Theoretical & Empirical Explorations, Language & Scientific Imagination, 11th International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, Helsinki University, 28 July– 2 August 2008.