Rate My Professor Craig Dalton

Craig Dalton, BMed, MMSc, is a public health physician employed by the NSW Government and Conjoint Associate Professor in the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Newcastle. He earned his Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Medical Science in Clinical Epidemiology from the University of Newcastle. A graduate of the CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service in Atlanta, Georgia, he completed a Preventive Medicine Fellowship in the Foodborne and Diarrhoeal Disease Branch at the CDC in 1995. His career encompasses health protection in communicable diseases and environmental health, including international work such as investigating a cholera outbreak in the Gaza Strip in 1994 and teaching public health surveillance in Bhutan. He has served as course coordinator for Buddhist and Other Contemplative Traditions at the University of Newcastle and is a member of the National Influenza Surveillance Committee.

Dalton founded FluTracking.net in 2006, establishing the world's largest crowd-sourced public health surveillance system. By June 2025, it had collected over 33 million weekly surveys from more than 320,000 participants to track influenza-like illness, COVID-19, RSV, bushfire smoke impacts, thunderstorm asthma, and heat-related illness across Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Hong Kong, and Argentina. FluTracking received Research Australia's Data Innovation Award in 2018. A publication on community COVID-19 control by Dalton and colleagues was cited by Dr. Anthony Fauci during a White House briefing, influencing US guidelines. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed articles, including 'Using after-action reviews of outbreaks to enhance public health responses: lessons for COVID-19' (Medical Journal of Australia, 2022), 'The Pandemic REspiratory Virus Epidemiological SurveillaNce Trial - A self-swab surveillance system for respiratory viruses nested within FluTracking' (Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2025), 'Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Australian educational settings' (The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, 2020), and 'Insights From Flutracking: Thirteen Tips to Growing a Web-Based Participatory Surveillance System' (JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, 2017). Dalton wrote the ebook 'How NOT to Piss Off a Community' on engaging communities in high-outrage, low-trust settings. His research interests include applied public health practice, influenza surveillance, foodborne disease epidemiology, environmental health impact assessment, risk communication, and contemplative practices in public health.