IPEN Research
Teams
New Zealand
IPEN Adult and Adolescent Team
IPEN Adult Primary Investigator
Grant Schofield
Orcid ID: 0000-0001-8865-7821
Grant Schofield research interests include public health, especially the prevention and treatment of chronic disease. The focus of his career is how lifestyle can be used as medicine or to prevention.
For the first two decades of his research career, his focus has primarily been physical activity and exercise. He has led important work in understating how to better design urban environments to get people moving. Furthermore, he has led sedentary behaviour research. This research includes standing desks, measuring physical activity, and encouraging play – especially risky play in children. His team forms part of large international groups including the IPEN. This has meant collaborations across more than 20 countries in protocol development, grant funding, data sharing and publication.
IPEN Adolescent Primary Investigator
Erica Hinckson
Orcid ID: 0000-0003-3928-7830
Professor Erica Hinckson is the Head of the School of Sport and Recreation and Associate Dean AUT-Millennium at the Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences at Auckland University of Technology. A professor with expertise in physical activity, built environment, and citizen science research.
Currently, a project leader in an ~8mil MBIE grant (2020), Te Hotonga Hapori-Connecting Communities: Enhancing the impact of major urban regeneration on community wellbeing. Co-Chair of the steering committee for the Lancet series on physical activity 2024. One of the most successful international initiatives for increasing knowledge transfer among physical activity scientists, medical and allied personnel, public health professionals, and government agencies: The Physical Activity Lancet Series.
She is on the steering committee of IPEN, which seeks to understand the associations between features of the built environment and physical activity in adults, adolescents and children and provide recommendations for city planning.
Research Team
Scott Duncan
Orcid ID: 0000-0002-8402-2930
Professor Duncan is the Head of the Physical Activity and Nutrition Department in the School of Sport and Recreation, AUT University. Areas of expertise include the measurement and classification of physical activity, programme design and evaluation, curriculum-based health and wellbeing interventions for children, and determining the effects of the built environment and daily mobility on health outcomes. He is particularly interested in engaging children in healthy lifestyles through traditional unstructured play and independent mobility. Current research includes several large-scale lifestyle interventions in school, community, and workplace settings.
Hannah Badland
Orcid ID: 0000-0002-8936-2715
Professor Badland’s research examines how the built environment is connected to health, wellbeing, and inequities in both adults and children internationally. She has a particular interest in vulnerable communities. Her interdisciplinary, mixed-methods research program engages with end-users, typically policymakers and non-government organisations, to influence on-the-ground change. She is currently working on two major research themes. One is enhancing the social determinants of health for those with disability. The other focuses on reducing inequities in early childhood development. The emphasis in both these streams is investigating how local built and social environments support or hinder opportunity and understanding impacts of any inequity.
Professor Badland earned her PhD in public health from Auckland University of Technology (New Zealand). Here she investigated associations between the built environment and travel behaviours in adults. Since then, she has been employed in research intensive positions internationally, leading to over 160 research articles in leading interdisciplinary journals. Furthermore, she has received more than $20M in competitive research funding. Hannah was the inaugural Australian Health Promotion Association Thinker in Residence, recipient of the Scopus Australia and New Zealand Outstanding Researcher of Excellence in Women Research Award, is a Salzburg Global Fellow, has received more than 30 awards and prizes, and is an Associate Editor for Health & Place.
Professor Badland has been a member of the IPEN since 2007. Her role is as a Chief Investigator in the New Zealand IPEN adult and adolescent projects. She oversaw the study designs and data analyses of the research programs. Professor Badland’s IPEN activities was supported by a New Zealand National Heart Foundation Post-doctoral Research Fellowship and New Zealand Health Research Council project funding.
Professor Badland is the Director of the Social Equity Research Centre and a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow at RMIT University. She will be commencing an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in 2024.
Tom Stewart
Orcid ID: 0000-0001-5915-3843
Tom is a Senior Research Fellow and Statistics Advisor at the Human Potential Centre, located at AUT Millennium. He is currently the Head of Research for the School of Sport & Recreation. His research is broadly based in public health, with a focus on physical activity epidemiology, understanding the environmental determinants of health, and finding preventative solutions for reducing the prevalence of chronic disease. His recent interests include combining big data and machine learning to tackle a range of public health research challenges.
Suzanna Mavoa
Orcid ID:
Ester Cerin
Orcid ID: 0000-0002-7599-165X
Ester Cerin is the Leader of the Behaviour, Environment and Cognition Research Programme (BECPR) at the Mary MacKillop Institute for Health Research, Australian Catholic University. She also holds honorary professorial positions in the School of Public Health of the University of Hong Kong and Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute (Melbourne).
A psychologist and statistician, she has been studying environmental and psychosocial determinants of health and health-related behaviours, with specific focus on physical activity, for more than 15 years. She has authored over 250 papers on these topics in high-impact journals. She is co-founder of the International Cognitive Health and the Environment Network (ICHEN), which explores how urban environments impact cognitive health.
Ester joined the IPEN in 2004. She is one of the main investigators of both the IPEN Adult and IPEN Adolescent studies. Specifically, she is principal investigator of the Hong Kong arms, co-investigator of the Australian arms, member of the Executive and Publication Committees, and chief analyst of both the IPEN Adolescent and IPEN Adult studies.
She is also a co-investigator of the New Zealand arm of the IPEN Adolescent study. Ester has led the work on the adaptation and validation of various versions of the Neighbourhood Environment Walkability Scale (NEWS). NEWS is the IPEN tool for assessing perceptions of the neighbourhood environment. She currently leads a team of analysts for the IPEN Adolescent study which is supported by the Australian Catholic University. The BECPR group at the Mary MacKillop Institute for Health Research is now the IPEN coordinating centre.