ARC grant success for SPH researchers
Wednesday, 22 October 2008Drs Robert Ware, Abdullah Al Mamun and Rosa Alati were awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project Award to investigate attrition in longitudinal studies.
Longitudinal studies are excellent tools for monitoring health due to their ability to examine changes in diseases over time. SPH has played key roles in several significant longitudinal studies including the ongoing Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health and the Men, Women and Ageing study.
While yielding valuable information, longitudinal studies inevitably suffer from attrition, or loss of participants, which leads to questions regarding their validity.
The SPH grant will research the causes of attrition, and the effect it has on longitudinal studies.
“We hope that our findings will lead to improved design and analysis of longitudinal studies,” says Dr Ware.
Head of School, Professor Alan Lopez, said the grant’s success is a great credit to the researchers, especially considering that the overall success rate of submissions to the ARC ECR scheme is only 15.5%.
“I congratulate Rob, Mamun and Rosa on this excellent achievement which reflects the significant contribution being made by early career researchers at the School, as well as our continuing strength in longitudinal studies.”
The grant, worth $350,000 over three years, will commence in 2009.
Mamun, Rosa and Rob were previously Fellows on the School’s NHMRC Capacity Building Grant in Longitudinal Studies (2003-2007), Chief Investigators on that grant were Professor Alan Lopez, Professor Gail Williams, Professor Annette Dobson, Associate Professor Christopher Bain and Professor Jake Najman.
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