Dr Mohammed Junaid is currently working as a Research Fellow at the King Edward Memorial Hospital for Women, Subiaco and School of Population and Global Health, UWA. He also works one day a week as a Research Officer with the Child Disability group at the Telethon Kids Institute.

Dr Junaid is a clinician-researcher specialised in dental public health. He is a dentist by training and holds a master’s degree (MDS) in Public Health Dentistry from India and a Diploma in Dental Public Health from the Royal College of Surgeons of England (first dental public health specialist graduated from India to obtain this qualification). Furthermore, he has recently completed his PhD in Dentistry and Public Health from the University of Western Australia which was supported by the Australian Government International Research Training Program and Stan and Jean Perron Top-Up Scholarship. His PhD provided population level evidence on the epidemiology, neurodevelopment and hospitalisation outcomes of children born with rare craniofacial birth defects not documented previously.

He has a long-standing track record as a successful clinical academic with membership of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, UK and an associate fellowship of the Higher Education Academy, UK. He has worked as a senior lecturer in Public Health Dentistry for four and a half years in India (2014-2018) and was involved with managing and teaching this specialty to final year undergraduate dental students adopting different pedagogical approaches in diverse learning environments catering to individual student needs. Currently, he continues to tutor and mark public health coursework units of undergraduate students at the School of Population and Global Health and the UWA Medical School and is regularly invited as a guest speaker in dental public health and biostatistics in India.

Organisationally, he has served as an academic committee member for Meenakshi Academy of Higher Education Research University, Chennai, India, participating in improving quality of dental education within the university and served as a research resource person for the state-owned Tamil Nadu Dr MGR Medical University teaching biostatistics to different medical specialties including dentistry.

He has independently practiced clinical dentistry as a general dental practitioner in India for eight years between 2011 and 2018 before moving to Australia to pursue his PhD in 2019. In addition to private practice, he has worked in diverse clinical settings including peripheral settings and outreach programmes providing ambulatory oral health services focussing on rendering primary oral health care by travelling to remote, and marginalized communities in Tamil Nadu, India.

Apart from clinical practice, as a dental public health specialist, he has successfully co-designed a school oral health program for a private school in Chennai, India, actively participated in the Tamil Nadu oral precancer screening program and led many oral health promotional activities in the wider community.

He has a strong research track record in population health with 28 research publications (Scopus/WoS indexed) with many published in high impact dental and paediatric journals and serve as a peer reviewer of many international medical and dental journals of repute. Most importantly, he belongs to a small league of oral epidemiologists globally having significant expertise in the analysis of linked population administrative data (big data). He is a chief investigator on the proposed project [2023-2026; 0.4FTE] to explore mental health service use among children with craniofacial anomalies (through their life-course) in Western Australia using linked population data funded separately by the Australian Cranio-Maxillo-Facial Foundation, the Australian Dental Research Foundation (ICD-Dr Syd Dobbin AM grant-2020) and Perron Foundation totally valued at AU$ 213,211.35. Additionally, he was also awarded with the Perron PhD Career Launching award valued at AU$ 20,000 as he transitions into a post-doctoral phase of his career. He has built a strong collaborative network of multi-disciplinary researchers from across the country and worldwide working closely together on topics of national and global public health importance including Indigenous health, oral and craniofacial diseases, child disability and infectious diseases. Apart from his role as an independent researcher, he also currently supervises a dissertation of a Master of Public Health student at UWA and has previously supervised research and mentored many postgraduate dental students in India. Furthermore, in his current part-time role as a research fellow at King Edward Memorial Hospital, Subiaco he will be part of a subcommittee to review and monitor quality of research within the institution.

Dr Junaid is very passionate about reducing burden and improving life outcomes of children born with craniofacial birth defects through the application of complex linked population (big) administrative data and has strong research interests in population oral health, health inequalities, rare diseases, child disability, Indigenous health, and infectious diseases.

Population oral health, craniofacial birth defects, linked data analysis, health inequalities, rare diseases, child disability, Indigenous health, and infectious diseases

May 2015 - Dec 2018

Senior Lecturer, Meenakshi Ammal Dental College and Hospital, Chennai, India

June 2014 - May 2015

Senior Lecturer, Ragas Dental College and Hospital, Chennai, India

English, Urdu, Hindi and Tamil

(i) Mental health disorders among children born with craniofacial anomalies in Western Australia.  A population based datalinkage study.

(ii) Rheumatic Heart Disease - Pregnancy (RHD-P) project. A multijurisdictional population based datalinkage study.

(iii) CDKL5 Deficiency Disorder - hospitalisation outcomes, medication use and sleep patterns, utilising the unique International CDKL5 Disorder Database.