Susan Prescott is a Professor of Paediatrics in the School of Medicine at the University of Western Australia. She is a Paediatrician and an Immunologist at the Perth Children’s Hospital. Susan is a Founding Director of the ORIGINS Project at the Telethon KIDS Institute, a $26 million legacy project based at Joondalup Health Campus examining how the environment influences health throughout life, and how we can improve this. 

She is also Editor-in-Chief of Challenges journal, and founding Director of inViVO Planetary Health, an global initiative of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN). This interdisciplinary network is focused on the links between personal and planetary health through social and ecological justice.

Her interests and expertise are focused around early life risk factors for inflammation as an antecedent (and preventive target) for a broad range of noncommunicable diseases (NCD), with a particular interest in early onset NCDs such as allergy, obesity and mental health. She isthe Founding President of the multidisciplinary ‘DOHaD’ Society in Australia and New Zealand (Developmental Origins of Health and Disease).

She works at the highest international level of her field, and is a former Director of the World Allergy Organisation (WAO), andformer Head of Children’s Allergy Immunology Research at University Of Western Australia.

In addition toover 300 scientific publications, she is also author of several booksfor an international public audience:The Allergy Epidemic – a Mystery of Modern Life, The Calling,and Origins - Early Life Solutions to the Modern Health Crisis, and most recently The Secret Life of Your Microbiome: Why Nature and Biodiversity are Essential to Health and Happiness – 2018 Gold Medal winner of the Independent Publishers Book Awards (health), and 2017 Finalist in the Foreword Reviews Indies Book awards. 

She has received numerous prizes, awards and fellowships including a Winston Churchill Fellowship. Over the course of her career Susan has raised over $50 million in research funding as Chief Investigator. In 2009 she was awarded a prestigious Practitioner Fellowship (2009-2018) by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and in 2010 her work was recognised in the “10 of the best” in Australia.Susan cares deeply about the social determinants of health, and takes a holistic approach to life.

A practicing physician at Perth Children's Hospital, Susan cares deeply about the social determinants of health, and takes a holistic approach to life. She is involved in a wide variety of activities promoting an idea of holism, in which inclusion is upheld, diversity is celebrated and the notion of all working together to solve our shared global challenges is encouraged. 

Her inspiration to study medicine came from her grandmother, one of the few women to study medicine in the 1930s, and her love of research and academia was inspired by her grandfather Sir Stanley Prescott, former Vice-Chancellor of The University of Western Australia.