Professor Rebecca Ivers is Head, School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney, honorary Professorial Fellow at the George Institute for Global Health, and NHMRC Senior Research Fellow. Ivers leads a global research program focusing on the prevention and management of injury. Trained as an epidemiologist, her research interests focus on the prevention of injury, trauma care, and the research to policy transfer in both high and low income countries. She has a substantial program of research addressing the global burden of injury, with a particular focus on equity and the social determinants of health, taking a life course approach. Her work has a strong focus on implementation and sustainability. Ivers has worked extensively with the World Health Organisation, contributing to multiple Good Practice Guides and global advocacy across unintentional injury.
Ivers has overseen studies examining the burden and risk factors for injury in low-income settings (including Vietnam, India and China). Current global projects involve a large scale initiative implementing community drowning interventions in Bangladesh (https://www.georgeinstitute.org.au/sites/default/files/barisal-project-factsheet.pdf) , and work on scaleable interventions for drowning in India and Vietnam. She also leads work on fracture care and works with investigators from McMasters University on a NHMRC funded prospective study of 40,000 people examining the incidence and predictors of mortality in people sustaining traumatic fractures in low income country settings (http://www.inormus.ca). In Australia she has led large pragmatic trials across multiple areas of road safety and falls, and works with a team of investigators and PhD candidates on NHMRC funded work on burn care in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, focusing on patient outcomes and development of culturally safe models of care. With a large team of investigators and collaborators, she is now commencing work on a NHMRC funded cluster randomised control trial of a healthy ageing program, the Ironbark Program, to evaluate effectiveness in preventing falls in older Aboriginal people. Her work on development and implementation of driver licensing support programs for young Aboriginal people has directly influenced government funding of support programs across multiple states. Ivers is also an investigator on three Centres of Research Excellence in adolescent health, one focusing on Aboriginal child and adolescent heath (https://www.crereach.org.au/), one on access to health services (https://www.why.org.au/) and one commencing in 2020 on Driving Global Investment in Adolescent Health at the University of Melbourne.