Rate My Professor Rebecca Bentley

Rebecca Bentley is Professor in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health within the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She earned her PhD and Bachelor's Degree with Honours from La Trobe University. Joining the University in 2005 as a researcher, she completed her PhD in 2007 and moved to a teaching and research position in 2012. In 2016, Bentley was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship to study the lifetime impacts of unaffordable housing on socio-economic status and wellbeing. She was promoted to full Professor on January 1, 2020.

Bentley, a social epidemiologist, directs the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Healthy Housing and leads the Healthy Housing Research Group in the Centre for Health Equity. Her research examines how housing conditions, affordability, tenure, suitability, and security influence health outcomes, particularly mental health, in Australia. She founded the international Housing Inequalities NetworK (THINK), chairs the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health Graduate Researcher Training Committee since 2017, and leads the Health Lens for the University's Hallmark Research Initiative on Housing Affordability Innovation. Key publications include "Housing disadvantage and poor mental health: a systematic review" (Singh et al., American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2019), "Housing affordability and mental health: does the relationship differ for renters and home purchasers?" (Mason et al., Social Science & Medicine, 2013), and "Association between housing affordability and mental health: a longitudinal analysis of a nationally representative household survey in Australia" (Bentley et al., American Journal of Epidemiology, 2011). In 2025, she received the NHMRC Fiona Stanley Synergy Grant Award for research on mould exposure in homes, demonstrating her significant contributions to understanding housing as a social determinant of health and informing policy.