Keynote

Emerita Professor Billie Giles-Corti has published over 400 articles, book chapters and reports, and by citations, is ranked in the top 1% of researchers in her field globally. She is an Honorary Fellow of both the Planning Institute of Australia and the Public Health Association and a Fulbright Scholar. In 2016, she was awarded an NHMRC Elizabeth Blackburn Fellowship as the top-ranked female fellow in public health in 2015; and in 2020, she was awarded the Town and Country Association’s Sir James Barrett Memorial Medal.

She is currently a VC Professorial Fellow and from 2016-2020 was an NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow. Between 2017-2020 she was RMIT’s Urban Futures Enabling Capability Platform Director, and between 2011-2016, she was a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne and Director of the McCaughey VicHealth Community Wellbeing Unit.

For over two decades, Billie and a multi-disciplinary research team have been studying the impact of the built environment on health and well-being. From 2014-2020, she led an NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Healthy Liveable Communities and worked closely with local, national and global policy-makers and practitioners in Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane and nationally.  Since 2014, she has been a Chief Investigator at the Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, responsible for working with sectors outside of health. She led its National Liveability Study, which initiated the Australian Urban Observatory https://auo.org.au which maps and disseminates policy-relevant urban liveability indicators for Australia’s 21 largest cities available for use by local government and the community.