Research Theme Champion: Health and Wellbeing

Associate Professor Freya MacMillan

School of Health Sciences
f.macmillan@westernsydney.edu.au

Freya is an Associate Professor in Interprofessional Health Sciences in the School of Health Sciences. She is also Deputy Director of the Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism Translational Research Unit, an executive member and lead of the prevention working group in the Maridulu Budyari Gumal Sydney Partnership for Health, Enterprise Research & Education (SPHERE) Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism Clinical Academic Group, a member of the Translational Health Research Institute, an International Union for Health Promotion and Education Registered Health Promotion Practitioner and a Senior Fellow of Advance Higher Education.

Her work focuses on diabetes prevention and management, as well as health promotion. She engages with communities, external healthcare workers and other professionals and academics to co-develop, implement, evaluate and translate lifestyle behaviour interventions into sustainable models. To do this, she utilises a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods guided by implementation science to develop novel community-based and health service interventions and for comprehensive and rigorous evaluation. She has a particular focus on models incorporating peer support, which are more likely to be adopted and integrated long-term into practice for culturally and linguistically diverse communities. Current collaborators in Australia include Local Health Districts, Primary Health Networks, Diabetes NSW & ACT, Sanofi, SPHERE and NSW Health. Overseas collaborators include Michigan Center for Diabetes Translational Research, University of North Carolina and The University of Auckland.

Freya joined Western Sydney University as a post-doctoral fellow in 2013 and was appointed a Lecturer in 2015. Since then, she has secured over $8 million to support her multi-disciplinary research projects, collaborating with a range of external partners to ensure meaningful, real-world impact. These funds include an NHMRC partnership grant with 13 external partners to tackle diabetes in Pasifika communities across Greater Western and South Eastern Sydney, through a church-based lifestyle peer support program. She is committed to ensuring the models she develops can be sustained following completion of her research through working collaboratively with partners to embed programs and services within existing infrastructure and by building capacity within communities and services for ongoing delivery.