Role:
Director
Committee memberships:
Chair, Cancer Research Committee
Member, Nomination, Governance and Remuneration Committee
Professor Fran Baum AO is a public health social scientist with a special interest in creating healthy, equitable and sustainable societies. She is a professor of health equity, The Stretton Institute, The University of Adelaide, Australia.
From 2009-2021 she was a Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor and Director of the Southgate Institute for Health, Society and Equity at Flinders University.
She was named in the Queen’s Birthday 2016 Honours List as an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to higher education as an academic and public health researcher, as an advocate for improved access to community health care, and to professional organisations”. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and of the Australian Health Promotion Association. She is a past National President and Life Member of the Public Health Association of Australia. She is Chair of the Global Steering Council of the People’s Health Movement – a global network of health activist (www. phmovement.org). She also served as a Commissioner on the World Health Organisation’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health from 2005-08.
Fran Baum is one of Australia’s leading researchers on the social and economic determinants of health. She holds grants from the National Health & Medical Research Council and the Australia Research Council which are considering health inequities and public policy, social determinants of health and Health in All Policies.
For the past decade she has worked closely with SA Health on their HiAP initiatives. These grants include an NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence on Policies for Health Equity of which she is one of the two co-Directors. Her book, The New Public Health (4th ed. published January 2016 Oxford University Press), is widely cited and used in many public health courses. Her book Governing for Health (Oxford University Press, New York, January 2019) examines how a society can be organised to best promote health and equity.