Bond University PhD EOI in Evaluation & Implementation Science

A cardiac nurse I meet with every month logged into our call last week with a job listing already open on her second screen. She had found the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare at Bond University calling for expressions of interest for a PhD in evaluation and implementation science, and she wanted me to tell her whether she stood a chance. Her Honours mark was strong and her acute care background was real, but the phrase "implementation outcomes" had her convinced the project belonged to someone more academic with a calmer heart rate.

Early in my mentoring career I would have opened her CV and circled what she lacked. I don't do that first anymore. I ask a different question: what does this project actually demand, and what evidence sits underneath it? The answers here turn out to be more specific, and more encouraging for working clinicians, than most applicants expect.

This particular call is not a scattergun doctorate. It sits inside a project funded under the Medical Research Future Fund 2025 Cardiovascular Health Mission, and its goal is entirely practical. The successful candidate will evaluate a strategy to integrate influenza vaccination into hospital-based care in the days after an acute myocardial infarction. A heart attack. The strongest evidence for early in-hospital vaccination has existed for years, and most Australian hospitals still haven't put it into routine practice. Closing that gap is the whole point of the project.

What the position actually funds

This PhD is not a speculative promise of future funding. It is attached to a national program of work administered through the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare and the Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine at Bond University, based at Robina on the Gold Coast. The candidate will work under the supervision of Professor Julie Redfern AM and Dr Alexandra Davidson, and the program is expected to generate peer-reviewed publications along with policy-relevant outputs that inform national and global secondary prevention strategies.

Professor Redfern brings a portfolio few PhD supervisors can match. She was named in the 2025 Australia Day Honours as a Member of the Order of Australia for her contributions to public health, to cardiovascular prevention research, to volunteer leadership with Surf Life Saving NSW, and to years of mentorship of early-career researchers. She holds an NHMRC Investigator Grant and has led research totalling more than $30 million over the past five years with more than 270 published articles. A supervisor's network and record in implementation work matter as much as the university's name. On that measure, this call sits well above the mean.

The evidence underneath the project

The clinical rationale for this PhD is unusually strong because it rests on a randomised trial most cardiologists now cite by shorthand: IAMI, the Influenza Vaccination After Myocardial Infarction trial. Conducted at 30 centres across eight countries and published in Circulation in 2021, it randomised more than 2,500 patients hospitalised with a heart attack to receive either the seasonal influenza vaccine or a saline placebo within 72 hours of admission or angiography. The result was a 28 percent lower risk of death, another myocardial infarction or stent thrombosis over twelve months, driven in part by a 41 percent reduction in all-cause mortality. The American College of Cardiology's trial summary notes those benefits arrived despite premature halting and crossover that would have biased results toward nothing.

Read those numbers a second time. A 41 percent drop in all-cause death from an intervention that costs very little, requires no new drug and can be delivered by a ward nurse. Benefits concentrate almost entirely within three months of the index event, which is precisely why delaying vaccination until the patient is back in the community squanders them. Australian practice, though, mostly still delivers influenza vaccination out in the community, where uptake in high-risk groups stays patchy and timing lapses. The new Bond project exists to evaluate whether a hospital-based vaccination program closes that gap, and whether it can be adopted and sustained at scale. Professor Redfern's larger body of work on digital approaches to cardiovascular prevention was profiled in the NHMRC's 10 of the Best publication, which gives a sense of the research culture the candidate joins.

What evaluation and implementation science means here

People outside the field hear "implementation science" and picture a survey. It is more exacting. Evaluation science is the systematic work of judging whether a program, policy or intervention did what it claimed, looking at process, outcomes, cost, equity and unintended effects. Implementation science studies how to get a proven intervention into routine practice: adoption, fidelity, reach and long-term maintenance. The two disciplines sit next to each other because Australian health systems now generate far more evidence than they absorb.

A candidate who can design an evaluation, measure implementation outcomes and talk to clinicians, patients, funders and health service managers in the same week is scarce. That scarcity is why calls like this one fill quickly, and why the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare has built its reputation on reducing low-value care, improving shared decision making, training clinicians in evidence use, and mapping the stubborn gaps between published evidence and everyday practice. The candidate will learn mixed methods by doing them, not by reading about them. Evaluation of the program and its feasibility, adoption and sustainability outcomes will sit alongside qualitative work on patient and clinician perspectives. That is the applied health services research most PhDs never touch.

Who should put their name forward

Bond's eligibility language is precise: a Masters by Research, a Masters with a substantial research component, an Honours degree at Class 1 or Class 2 Division A, or research experience deemed equivalent. That last phrase matters more than it looks. A research assistant role or a publication record can satisfy it in the right hands. The official listing expects a Bachelor's degree in a health-related discipline with clinical training preferred across medicine, nursing, pharmacy or allied health, plus the ability to work in a multidisciplinary team and a working understanding of the Australian healthcare system.

I used to tell mentees to apply to anything that fit on paper. For implementation science EOIs, I have changed that advice. Desirable criteria in this call include hospital experience either as a clinician or in administration, prior work on a substantial research project with a defined dataset or set of interviews, and exposure to implementation science or health services research. If you have none of those yet, a research assistant role can close the distance faster than another certificate. The guide I keep pointing people to on excelling as a research assistant in Australia lays out how to convert project support work into the kind of evidence a selection panel actually reads. What would your file look like to someone with eleven minutes and forty other applicants to review? That is the only question that matters at this stage.

The funding question, honestly

Money is where most applicants stall, so let's do the arithmetic plainly. Eligible Australian and New Zealand citizens and Australian permanent residents receive a tuition fee waiver through the Australian Government's Research Training Program, known as the RTP, for the duration of the program. A living stipend, funded through the National Health and Medical Research Council project, is allocated for the successful applicant for up to three years. Bond publishes its 2026 full-time stipend at A$34,315 per year, indexed annually, which matches the national RTP base rate for the year. The national maximum in 2026 is A$53,608, so it is worth asking Bond directly whether this project includes a top-up above the base.

The successful candidate may also pick up paid tutoring or research assistant work inside the Institute or Faculty, dependent on experience and the terms of the scholarship. International applicants should read the eligibility lines on the Bond Research Training Program page with care, because the tuition waiver does not automatically extend to everyone. The dates matter as much as the amounts. HDR scholarship rounds at Bond close each year on 31 March and 30 September, and you cannot sit on both a Commonwealth fee offset and an equivalent award at the same time. Ask about all of this before you write a single paragraph of a research statement.

How the EOI actually works

An expression of interest at Bond is a screen, not the full application. You submit through the university's online portal rather than email, and your pack has six parts: the position title, a written statement of up to two pages describing your interest in the research project and proposed research topic, a second statement of up to two pages addressing the selection criteria, a current CV naming two academic referees, academic transcripts, and an example of written academic work such as an Honours thesis or peer-reviewed article. The deadline sits on Sunday 24 January 2027.

Most applicants mishandle the two statements by repeating themselves. They describe their interest twice and the selection criteria not at all. A smarter structure treats the first statement as the intellectual argument, which problem, which methods, why this project and this specific team, and treats the second as the evidence grid, criterion by criterion, in specific, recent and verifiable terms. If you have used R, Stata, NVivo or REDCap, name them in the first half page of the CV, not under a heading called additional skills on page four. The advice in this guide to writing a winning academic CV is worth following before you submit, because committees read what they asked for and stop there.

Once the EOI is lodged, Bond's Higher Degree Research Unit reviews it and decides whether to invite a full application. That next phase brings a detailed Research Project Proposal, referee reports, and a letter of offer if the file holds. The whole sequence can take six to ten weeks. That means the practical deadline is not late January; it is the moment you start drafting.

The one step to take this month

Don't begin with the two-page statements. Begin with your transcript. Pull it, check your Honours class or Masters research component against Bond's higher degree by research entry requirements, and send one precise question to the listed contact, Tanya Forbes at tforbes@bond.edu.au, once you have read the full position description and the Institute's own page. One precise question carries more weight than three broad ones.

My cardiac nurse mentee read the official listing while we were still on the call and noticed something she hadn't seen in the summary. The project's supervisors sit inside a cardiovascular prevention network that crosses hospital and community care, which means her ward experience was not a detour. It was the exact asset. That may be true for you too, but you won't know until you read the listing in full and write the first specific sentence about why this team, this project and this particular evidence gap. A sentence like that, written this month, is the only guarantee that January's deadline doesn't arrive with the application still half-formed in your head.

Submit the EOI through the Bond University application portal when the pack is sharp. And remember what an EOI is not: it is not a cover letter for a job you hope will be reshaped around you. It is a signal about fit, and the better the signal, the faster a supervisor talks to you.