Dr Sam Toloo Sheikhzadeh Yazd

Research Skills: I have earned great skills stemming from my passion for and experience in teaching, research and working in different cultures and organisations:

• Project management from writing the proposal to implementing the research and disseminating the results, specifically:

1. Literature review including systematic
2. Planning, designing and developing data collection tools and techniques
3. Preparing ethical applications
4. Data collection (e.g. interviews, surveys), and training and supervision of staff
5. Data management and statistical analysis, particularly large datasets (>1 mil records)
6. Writing reports and peer reviewed publications

• Liaising and communicating with a variety of stakeholders including academic staff (different disciplines), medical specialists, government representatives, and the general public
• Intimate understanding of the cultural and social differences and their influence on people's experiences, attitudes, and actions.
• Knowledge and understanding of workplace health and safety.

Major Research Projects

• 2017-2022:

1. Reducing Emergency Department demand through expanded primary healthcare practice. Funded by Emergency Medicine Foundation (EMF).

• 2014-2017:

1. Evaluating the impacts of the 4-hour rule in public hospital emergency departments in Queensland. NHMRC Partnership project in collaboration with UNSW and QEMRF.
2. State-wide Workforce and Activity-Based Funding (ABF) Modelling for Queensland Emergency Departments. QEMRF funded project.

• 2012-2014: Heatwave warning systems and health protection initiatives. School of Public Health and Social Work, QUT. My responsibilities included: Literature review, data analysis and publications.

• 2008-2012: Managing the mixed method research project Emergency Health Services Queensland (EHSQ) at the School of Public Health and Social Work, QUT. This was an ARC-Linkage project in partnership with Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS). The aim of the project was to understand reasons for increasing demand for pre-hospital (ambulance) and hospital based (emergency departments) emergency health services. We collected and analysed public data, patients’ records (ambulance and emergency departments) and surveyed patients’ reasons for using these services. My responsibilities included: day-to-day management of the project; liaising with stakeholders and the research team; supervising the PhD student and the research support staff; conducting the literature review; designing the research method and patient surveys in collaboration with the PhD student and stakeholders; oversee the processes of: obtaining ethics approval, data acquisition from Queensland Health and QAS (>5 million records), sampling, recruitment and training of data collectors for the fieldwork data collection (i.e. survey of 969 patients and companions in 8 emergency departments across Qld); data cleaning and analysis, preparing reports, papers and presentations.

• 2006-2008: Project manager and research adviser for several large projects at the (then) University of Queensland Social Research Centre (now called Institute for Social Science Research) including:

1. Schools Officers Workload Management Survey for Queensland Public Sector Union (QPSU) and Queensland Department of Education (DETA);
2. Client Satisfaction Survey for the Australian Federal Police (AFP);
3. Client Intercept Polling 2007 and DIAC 2008 Client Satisfaction Survey for Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC);
4. Environmental and public helath issues in Mount Isa: 2007 community survey. Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland.

In all of these projects, I played a major role in liaising with clients on behalf of UQSRC to understand their needs, providing clear advice on appropriate research method, assisting with designing survey tools (e.g. telephone, paper, online, face-to-face), overseeing fieldwork process, analysing the data and reporting the findings.

• 2004-2005: Data analysis and literature review for projects at Queensland Alcohol and Drug Research and Education Centre (QADREC) at the UQ's School of Population Health. Some of the findings have been published in refereed journals.