Projects

Dr Penny Gleeson is a member of a large team of researchers that have been awarded an ARC Linkage Grant of $1.5 million over 5 years. The project proposes the first comprehensive history of cancer and its control in Australia, 1925-2025. The project will take an interdisciplinary approach to better understand cancer as a lived experience, uncover social inequities, interrogate cultural representations, analyse policy and power, and understand advocacy and education. The project aims to explore the national response to cancer as a population health and individual challenge by working with industry to examine the history of the national effort across science and medicine; surveillance, screening and education; policy and law; advocacy and education; and as manifested in Australian cultural life. The results should significantly inform improved future practice and health outcomes.

Professor Catherine Mills, Associate Professor Neera Bhatia, Dr Karin Hammarberg, Dr Molly Johnston and Dr Giselle Newton  – $777,889.00

This project aims to address ethical, social and regulatory issues in sperm donation for family formation in Australia to ensure that all people who need the assistance of a sperm donor to become a parent can do so safely. This project expects to generate new knowledge to address the informal provision of sperm via the internet, while also improving the formal and regulated system of sperm donation. Expected outcomes include a more ethically robust and equitable system for accessing donor sperm for family formation achieved through cohesive, stakeholder informed recommendations. It is expected to have long-lasting benefits for people who donate sperm, people who need to access donor sperm and for people conceived through sperm donation.

06 Feb, 2026

The Commercial and Economic Determinants of Health Research Translation Centre is a new 5-year collaboration between Deakin and VicHealth.

The Centre aims to better understand how businesses, industries, and market systems impact health, and explore practical solutions towards healthier, fairer and thriving communities. With an explicit focus on research translation for public health impact, the Centre hopes to drive change in policy systems and incentivise business models that can better support population health and equity.

We aim to do this by:

Generating targeted research, knowledge translation, and dissemination to understand and reshape commercial and economic determinants of health

Transdisciplinary collaboration and engagement with a wide range of interest holders across research, the public sector, non-government organisations, community groups and the business community.

The Centre seeks to be a platform to grow and sustain policy-relevant research activities that create meaningful societal change locally and globally.

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18 Mar, 2024

This is a funded project that aims to develop a trans-national, trans-disciplinary understanding of children’s medical tourism.  Children’s medical tourism is “the bi-directional movement of children (less than 18 years of age) to and from a country to seek advice, diagnosis and treatments”. The distinctively international nature of children’s medical tourism demands an international research base to understand the scale and extent of the phenomenon and competing questions it raises in different jurisdictions.

This project seeks to:

• Develop an expanding network of academics and practitioners with an interest in children’s medical tourism with apresence in Africa, Asia, North and South America, Europe and Oceania.
• To bring to light aspects of the many questions that children’s medical tourism raises in international law, philosophy and bioethics, social science and the provision of healthcare that may not be apparent in a single national context.
• To improve the diversity, inclusivity and coherence of research into children’s medical tourism

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