Rate My Professor Moira Smith

Dr Moira Smith is a Senior Research Fellow, Co-Director of the Health Promotion and Policy Research Unit, and Teaching and Supervision Portfolio Leader in the Department of Public Health, University of Otago Wellington, within the Division of Health Sciences. She holds the qualifications BDS, PGDipSci, DPH, and PhD, with her doctoral studies conducted during a Health Research Council Clinical Research Training Fellowship. Prior to joining the Department of Public Health in 2010, she accumulated over 20 years of experience in clinical dentistry in New Zealand and the UK. Smith is an associate member of the Sir John Walsh Research Institute, Faculty of Dentistry, University of Otago, Dunedin. She chairs the New Zealand Oral Health Clinical Advisory Network, serves as Associate Editor for Gerodontology, and has supervised seven MPH students and three doctoral students to completion, while currently supervising two MPH and five doctoral students.

Her research interests include the broad determinants of health, gathering evidence to inform policy and create supportive environments, children's health—addressing harms from unhealthy food environments, alcohol, and gambling—and oral health inequities, particularly for older people in Aotearoa New Zealand. She employs qualitative research methods, policy research, and mixed-method designs. Key publications encompass 'Children’s everyday exposure to food marketing: an objective analysis using wearable cameras' (Signal et al., 2017), 'Kids’ Cam: an objective methodology to study the world in which children live' (Signal et al., 2017), 'Quantifying the nature and extent of children’s real-time exposure to alcohol marketing in their everyday lives using wearable cameras' (Chambers et al., 2018), 'The challenge of medication-induced dry mouth in residential aged care' (Thomson et al., 2021), and recent works such as 'Real-time recording: A scoping review of methods to study children's real-time exposure to food and food marketing online' (McNaughton et al., 2026) and 'Closing the equity gap in access to early lung cancer diagnosis in Aotearoa: Key informant perspectives and recommendations for action' (Signal et al., 2025). Her contributions have advanced objective measurement techniques in public health research using wearable cameras and GPS technology.