Areas of expertise
- Epidemiology 111706
Research interests
Community engagement in developing countries
Community based participatory research
Social and cultural anthropology
Applied epidemiology
Public Health Surveillance
Infectious diseases and preparedness and outbreak response
Biography
Polly is interested in humanitarian work in developing countries and outbreak preparedness and response in emergencies. Polly has worked in developing countries as an epidemiologist/ International Health Regulations officer with World Health Organisation (including 2 years in Liberia as part of the WHO Ebola outbreak response). She contributed to Australia’s COVID-19 response as an epidemiologist based at the Australian Department of Health, with Aspen Medical’s Advisory team, and with WHO. Her many years working with national and international emergency preparedness and response, and her Masters in Applied Epidemiology (ANU), provide the foundation for her PhD interest.
The aim of her PhD is to provide evidence to increase and sustain community engagement in developing and delivering community-based interventions to improve social and health outcomes in low-middle income countries. She undertook field work in Sri Lanka where she worked with partners, stakeholders and the local community to develop and implement a community-based intervention to address intimate partner violence and substance misuse among families attending government pre-schools in poor areas.
Publications
- Ahmed, K, Bukhari, M, Mlanda, T et al. 2020, 'Novel approach to support rapid data collection, management, and visualization during the COVID-19 outbreak response in the world health organization African region: Development of a data summarization and visualization tool', JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, vol. 6, no. 4.
- Lokuge, K, Wallace, M, Subasinghe, K et al. 2018, 'Protocol for a cluster-randomised controlled trial evaluating the impact of a preschool-based capacity building intervention on intimate partner violence and substance misuse in Sri Lanka', BMC Public Health, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 1-9.
- Wallace, M, Kirk, M, Munnoch, S et al. 2010, 'An outbreak of Salmonella Litchfield on a car rally, Northern Territory, 2009', Communicable Diseases Intelligence, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 124-126.
