Professor David Preen is the Chair in Public Health at the School of Population and Global Health, The University of Western Australia (UWA). He was the Director of the UWA Centre for Health Services Research from 2006-2016 and holds an honorary academic appointment at the Swansea University (UK). Prof Preen has an established international reputation in the application of epidemiological methods to linked data research and has been involved with conducting public health and health services research using whole-population linked administrative health data for almost 20 years to study areas including: i) cancer service delivery, ii) pharmaco-epidemiology, iii) chronic disease management, iv) health of marginalised populations, and v) methodological advances using data linkage.

Professor Preen has been awarded over 75 competitive research grants as a chief investigator totalling $58.2 million and has published over 321 scientific works, most of which have used whole-population linked administrative health data. He has been awarded prizes at national and international level for his work, including the Peter Reizenstein Prize from the International Journal of Quality in Health Care for the best paper published by that journal, Top cited article 2021-2022 from the Australasian Journal of Ageing, Editor’s Choice Award from the Medical Journal of Australia and the Editor’s Clinical Highlights Award from the Journal of Rheumatology. Prof Preen has also received prizes from multiple national and international conferences.

Due to his expertise in linked data research, Prof Preen has been a member >20 national/international committees such as: i) Data Linkage Australia Advisory Board; ii) Sax Institute Board; iii) NHMRC Research Committee; iv) NHMRC Australian Health Ethics Committee; v) Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) Consortium Advisory Committee, iv) Chair of the Precision Public Health Asia advisory committee, v) Scientific Committee Chair for the inaugural International Data Linkage Conference; vi) Chair; Cancer Council of Western Australia Research Committee, vii) NPS MedicineInsight Data Governance Committee, and the viii) Australian Health Review Advisory Committee.  He has been an associate editor or editorial board member for multiple international journals including the International Journal of Population Data Science, Frontiers in Public Health Journal and BMC Health Services Research Journal. He has been involved with teaching linked data analysis courses for the last 10 years, being responsible for coordination of the UWA linked data training curriculum since 2012.

Chair in Public Health

Deputy Head of School - Research
School of Population Health, The University of Western Australia (UWA)