Adjunct Associate Professor
Rosana Pacella

Biography

Rosana has extensive high-level experience in quantitative analysis and is skilled at managing a diverse portfolio of research and engaging with multiple stakeholders. She will be joining the University of Greenwich as Director of the Institute for Lifecourse Development in October 2019. She is currently Head of Research at the University of Chichester where she leads in developing and implementing the University’s Research policy, and manages preparations for the current Research Excellence Framework (REF) submission, aiming to maximize research impact and raise the quality and visibility of the University’s research. Previously, she was Associate Professor at the Australian Centre for Health Services Innovation, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and still holds an adjunct appointment there. While at QUT, she established and led a health services research team conducting economic evaluations of evidence-based wound management innovations. She was awarded the QUT Vice-Chancellor's Performance Individual Award for the impact of this research on policy and practice. Methodological interests include burden of disease analysis and comparative risk assessment, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, economic modelling and cost-effectiveness analysis and how decision makers value health care costs and weight economic evidence. She is an internationally recognized expert in assessing national and global burden of disease, with an emphasis on mental health disorders and interpersonal violence related risk factors including child maltreatment, bullying and intimate partner violence. Recent work has contributed to international knowledge by conducting the first study to quantify the burden attributable to multiple forms of child maltreatment in Australia. She is an expert advisor on the Global Burden of Disease Collaboration, and the Australian and South African national burden of disease studies. She is an ongoing member of the QUT Childhood Adversity Research Program conducting research on the prevalence, consequences and disease and economic burden of child maltreatment and bullying. She was the lead investigator on the $2.3 million NHMRC project to conduct the first national study of child maltreatment in Australia, 2019-23, before moving to the UK and remains an investigator on this study. She has played an important role internationally, in building capacity in burden of disease assessments among researchers who are employed or contracted by governments. More recently she has expanded her interests to training clinicians and researchers in cost-effectiveness methods. She has published in high-profile journals including the Lancet, PLOS Med, and Child Abuse & Neglect. She has been awarded £2.1 (AUD 3.8) million in research funding since 2014 from nationally competitive schemes. She obtained her PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1993 and is currently supervising 4 PhD students.