Jennifer Welsh

Dr. Jennifer Welsh is a Research Fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH) at the Australian National University (ANU), where she specializes in social epidemiology with a focus on reducing health inequalities. She has established herself as a trusted partner within government and is emerging as a national leader in her field. Her work emphasizes policy-relevant health research using large-scale linked data assets, including the Person-Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA).

Dr. Welsh holds a Bachelor of Psychology (Honors), a Master of Public Health, and a PhD. Her educational background has equipped her with the methodological expertise needed for her work in epidemiology and population health research.

Her primary research interests center on understanding and addressing socioeconomic inequalities in health and healthcare. She specializes in using large-scale linked data to examine variations in health outcomes, particularly related to cardiovascular disease, chronic conditions, and mental health. Dr. Welsh's work often focuses on how socioeconomic position influences health outcomes and healthcare access across the lifespan. She is particularly interested in developing methods to measure and monitor health inequalities, creating new socioeconomic status measures for policy applications, and examining cardiovascular disease risk, prevention, and implementation. Her research frequently involves collaboration with interdisciplinary teams of academics and government policy partners to ensure practical application of findings.

Analysis of Dr. Welsh's recent publications (2023-2025) reveals a strong focus on health inequalities, particularly examining socioeconomic, educational, and occupational determinants of health outcomes. Her work frequently employs whole-population linked data approaches to investigate mortality patterns, vaccine uptake disparities, and healthcare system performance. A significant portion of her recent research addresses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, including vaccine effectiveness studies, telehealth implementation, and the pandemic's disproportionate effects on vulnerable populations like aged care residents. Her methodological expertise in data linkage is evident across her publications, which often combine census data, mortality records, and healthcare utilization information.

Dr. Welsh has secured multiple research projects through competitive funding, including work on understanding fatal burden of COVID-19 in aged care, analyzing telehealth impacts on primary care, and measuring health system performance using routinely collected data. She serves as Principal Investigator on projects focused on optimizing primary healthcare and measuring health inequalities, and as Co-Investigator on numerous collaborative studies with colleagues at ANU and government agencies.

She is actively involved in research training and supervision, with leadership responsibilities for ANU courses and external courses delivered to government. Her work with the Linked Data for Better Health research group demonstrates her commitment to advancing data linkage methodologies for population health research.