Rate My Professor Roanna Lobo

Associate Professor Roanna Lobo is a Senior Teaching and Research Academic and Deputy Director (Partnerships) at the Collaboration for Evidence, Research and Impact in Public Health (CERIPH), School of Population Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, Curtin University. She completed her PhD in Public Health at Curtin University in 2012, developing an evaluation framework for peer-based youth programs as part of the My-Peer Project, supported by a three-year Healthway health promotion research training scholarship awarded in 2007. Her earlier qualifications include a Master of Health Psychology from the University of Surrey in 2003 and a BA Honours in Psychology and Physiology from the University of Oxford in 1989, denoted as MA (Oxon). Lobo joined Curtin University in 2004 at the Western Australian Centre for Health Promotion Research (WACHPR), progressing through positions as Research Associate, Lecturer, Research Fellow, Senior Lecturer, and recently promoted to Associate Professor. Over two decades, she has taught postgraduate and undergraduate units in health promotion, health planning and evaluation, and qualitative health research methods, while supervising students from Bachelor to PhD levels.

Lobo's research employs participatory action research, co-design, peer-based interventions, and systems thinking methodologies to address health disparities, help-seeking behaviors, and service access among marginalised populations, including Indigenous communities, migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, at-risk youth, and LGBTIQA+ individuals. Her specialisations cover sexual health promotion, HIV and blood-borne virus prevention and evaluation, intimate partner violence experiences and support needs, and community health interventions. She has led and contributed to projects such as the Sexual Health and Blood-borne Virus Applied Research and Evaluation Network (SiREN) as Research Fellow and Project Manager, and initiatives improving care for LGBTIQA+ people experiencing violence. With over 107 publications and more than 1,100 citations, key works include "Supporting health promotion practitioners to undertake evaluation for program development" (BMC Public Health, 2014), "Migrant sexual health help-seeking and experiences of stigmatization and discrimination in Perth, Western Australia" (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2016), "Sexual health help-seeking behavior among migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia living in high income countries" (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2018), and "Managing qualitative research as insider-research in small rural communities" (Rural and Remote Health, 2018). Awards include School of Population Health Interdisciplinary Seed Funding (2023) and Innovation Award (2022). She chairs the Curtin University Human Research Ethics Committee.