Rate My Professor Bronwyn Brew

Dr Bronwyn Brew is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where she joined in February 2023. An accomplished epidemiologist and biostatistician, she earned her PhD in 2014 from the University of Sydney for her thesis on 'Early life nutrition and child health and academic outcomes', along with a Master of Public Health and a Bachelor of Medical Science (Honours) from the same institution. Her distinguished career trajectory includes serving as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales' Centre for Big Data Research in Health since 2019, Assistant Professor from 2019 to 2022 and Postdoctoral Fellow from 2016 to 2018 at the Karolinska Institute's Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics in Sweden, Researcher at the University of Newcastle's Centre for Rural and Remote Mental Health in 2014, and Epidemiologist at NSW Health's Western Local Health District from 2011 to 2015.

Bronwyn leads an extensive research program focused on paediatric and maternal asthma and allergy, leveraging expertise in big data techniques, genetic epidemiology, family-based designs, asthma and allergy identification in cohorts, study design, rural and maternal mental health, transgenerational studies, and Indigenous asthma research. She has authored over 75 peer-reviewed publications, 64% of which stem from international collaborations, and has secured more than $4.1 million in competitive grant funding from Australian and Swedish sources. As chief investigator, she heads a 2021-2025 NHMRC Ideas Grant investigating bushfire smoke exposure during pregnancy and epigenetic changes in offspring, and a 2025-2027 Heart and Lung Foundation Grant (Sweden) exploring asthma and anxiety across pregnancy, childhood, and young adulthood—causes, consequences, comorbidity, and treatment. Her methodological innovations include a novel approach using paternal exposures as a negative control in perinatal studies (Brew, 2017, Scandinavian Journal of Public Health) to enhance causal inference, and co-development of the 'daggle' interactive teaching tool for directed acyclic graphs in epidemiology (Hanly et al., 2024, International Journal of Epidemiology). Select key publications encompass "Sublingual immunotherapy in children with asthma – a population-based register study" (2025), "Maternal asthma and lung function during pregnancy, childhood asthma and growth: the MAESTRO-Child study" (2024), "Asthma exacerbations and inhaled corticosteroid use in pregnancy and child asthma" (2024), "Effect of maternal asthma exacerbations on perinatal outcomes: a population-based study" (2020), and "Prenatal maternal psychosocial stress and offspring's asthma and allergic disease: a systematic review and meta-analysis" (2018).