HealthHub
About the centre
HealthHub is Torrens University Australia's new flagship centre for health research. It brings together world-class expertise in public health, clinical sciences, mechanistic discovery, health systems research and implementation science plus translational innovation.
By uniting leading researchers, Higher Degrees by Research (HDR) students, and global partnerships, HealthHub creates a dynamic, interdisciplinary environment that supports excellence across public health, bioinformatics, epidemiology, simulation, and AI-enabled research.
With a commitment to integrity, collaboration, and real-world impact, HealthHub advances research that contributes to a health sector critical society, government and industry through knowledge creation - driving innovations that improve health outcomes in Australia and globally.
Professor Craig McLachlan, Centre Director
Professor Craig McLachlan research interests span translational health and medicine. His current focus is on equitable medical devices, rural health, health services provision in developing countries, community screening for cardiovascular disease, and the genetics and inflammatory pathways that contribute to disease. He leads our research clusters, Global Health - Communities and Health, Medical Device Innovation and co-leads Life and Complex Disease - Chronic Disease.
Contact Professor Craig McLachlan for project partnerships or to learn more about our research centre.
Explore our areas of research
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Global Health - Communities and HealthWe focus on health solutions including Nepalese cardiovascular health, community health (obesity and cardiovascular risk), Kenyan health systems and public health in general. In rural Australia, we wish to understand environmental drivers for disease, while in Nepal, we are seeking to develop solutions and knowledge for sustainable blood pressure management, and in Kenya we are exploring sustainable expansion of cardiovascular health systems.
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Innovation - Medical Device InnovationThis cluster focuses on medical device innovation in cardiovascular devices for improving blood flow, as well as neuroscience devices and digital health solutions. We have an interest in advanced simulation for modelling vascular flow and device interaction and are also developing energy efficient devices, including self-powered.
Explore this project -
Life and Complex Disease - Chronic DiseaseThis cluster explores complex disease by using clinical and biological data to understand drivers of disease and to identify potential new treatments. We use big data tools and resources such as Biobanks, Bioinformatics, Bayesian statistical and epidemiological modelling to understand the biological mechanisms of disease. Furthermore, using these tools and resources assists in generating new knowledge and focus on cardiovascular disease, metabolic health and obesity, and clinical sciences and therapeutic targets.
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Improving services and systems to promote trust and human flourishing
This cluster focuses on understanding and improving public trust in healthcare professionals and services and developing the fertile soil in society for humans to live their ‘best lives’ in order for enable human flourishing.
Cluster focus areas:- Trust
- Human flourishing
- Empowerment
- Human capabilities
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Social and commercial determinants of health and wellbeing
This research cluster focuses the social and commercial drivers that ‘cause’ illness in an attempt to develop actions to create health and wellbeing in our most marginalised and vulnerable populations. Our focus is on solutions aimed at illness prevention, under the banner of ‘prevention is better than cure’.
Cluster focus areas:- Ageism
- Racism
- Social class
- Stigma
- War and conflict
- Equity and access to services
- Vulnerability
- Resilience
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Sociology of emotions, wellbeing and the future
This cluster focuses the critically important functions that emotions have for human wellbeing and flourishing. Studies focus on understanding the structural drivers of negative and positive emotions and developing strategies for enabling positive emotions to flourish.
Cluster focus areas:- Hope, Love, Trust, Resilience, Happiness
- Fear, Loneliness, Anger, Grief
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Understanding and improving equity of access to, use of and benefits from healthcare services
This cluster focuses on understanding the reasons for unfair or inequitable access to healthcare services, in additional to inequitable outcomes in terms of illness and death. Studies also focus on developing and testing interventions to improve equity.
Cluster focus areas:- Equity in access to healthcare services
- Equity in treatment within healthcare services
- Equity in outcomes from healthcare services
Discover our live projects
Electrocardiograms (ECG) are the gold standard for clinical evaluation of heart electrical function and aid in the diagnosis of abnormal heart rhythms. This project aims to evaluate the impact of cardiovascular medication on cardiovascular function via ECG parameters. We evaluate ECG records of over 400,000 patients with 19-years of follow-up.
This project examines associations between genetic contributions to cardiovascular and obesity disease risk in Australian rural communities and will identify genetic traits contributing to cardiovascular disease. We have access to biobanks covering rural regions of NSW and VIC.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death around the world. In many forms of heart disease, including arrhythmias and cardiomyopathies, inflammation mediated by immune cells play a significant role in disease progression. In this project, we employ specialised bioinformatic algorithms to genetic sequencing data to define immune cell populations.
This project employs high level computer simulations to identify medical device targets with a current interest in aortic devices and carotid artery devices to assist cardiac function.
The IMPAACT study supports the early diagnosis and treatment of common health conditions among older Australians by enabling them to provide evidence-informed views on screening in order to facilitate the translation of these perspectives into health policy.
Discover our partners
Our partnerships are national and international with organisations that align with our Be Good Principles. Partnerships are developed at an individual, group, centre and institutional level and align with our university research themes and build our reputation and profile.
Our project aims to explore cardiovascular health solutions in Nepal through a collaboration with the Nepal Development society on blood pressure data for joint publications and supervision of HDR students. We specifically are interested in health systems solutions to improve blood pressure screening and treatment for high blood pressure, and have 2 PhD students aligned to the project.
This project aims to explore health and wellbeing in the community of Ararat with support from the local hospital. Our current PhD student is exploring carotid artery disease in this rural community.
Meet our Centre Members
Associate Professor Belinda Lunnay is a Senior Research Fellow with Torrens University.
Associate Professor Gesesew conducts research in Medicine and Public Health, which aims at improving the HIV care continuum in Ethiopia and other developing countries.
As an emerging social scientist with an interest in human flourishing, relational sociology, occupational science, and feminist philosophy.
Dr Mingzi Zhang is an expert in biomedical engineering with dual PhDs in engineering and biomedical sciences.
Dr Fauk is a Senior Research Fellow. He mainly applies qualitative methods and social cognitive theories to public health problems.
Dr Pinki Dey is a researcher in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, specialising in the application of quantitative approaches to unravel complex biological systems.
Ethel Osazuwa is an early career mixed methods researcher focused on wellbeing, youth, gender, and acculturation.
Professor Mwanri is a public health physician by training and has research experiences in public health in general, global health and migrants’ health in particular.
Professor Ward is a social scientist and he applies and critiques various methodologies and social theories to contemporary public health problems.
Professor Li has over a decade of training in cardiovascular physiology and biophysics and has focused on understanding the mechanisms
Dr Bereket Duko is a Senior Research Fellow in PHEHF and an early career researcher in public health and epidemiology. He completed his PhD in Epidemiology in 2022 and has published over 95 peer-reviewed articles.
Meet our Centre Collaborators
Associate Professor Ambagtsheer has more than 20 years’ experience working in the health field, as a researcher, planner and consultant to all levels of government and the private and not-for-profit sectors.
Dr Abirami Ramalingam
Dr Abirami Ramalingam is a learning facilitator at Torrens University Australia with expertise in molecular biology.
Dr Gavino is a Fellow with CHEF and a Senior Learning Facilitator in Public Health and Digital Health at Torrens University.
Dr Assareh is a Torrens University Adjunct and Senior Analyst at NSW Health-Agency for Clinical Innovation qualified in Industrial and System Engineering (BEng, MEng), Management (MSc), and Statistics (BSc, PhD).
Dr Sarasvathi has over a decade of experience in molecular genetics majoring in gene silencing, gene cloning, characterisation and expression.
Dr Sonia Sharmin is a Lecturer and Learning Facilitator in Public Health at Torrens University Australia.
Professor Virginia Drummond is a French Brazilian Visiting Research Fellow with a Ph.D. in Management from the University of Paris-Dauphine.
Dr Taylor performs a pivotal role in driving bioinformatics research at Torrens University and undertakes novel and fundamental human genomics-based
Research stories
Learn more about some of impactful projects and partners at Torrens University's Centre for Healthy Futures.
