Bio

Adam Dunn leads Biomedical Informatics and Digital Health and is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney.  His research is about applying data science and machine learning in clinical epidemiology, aiming to improve the use of clinical trial evidence in systematic reviews and clinical practice; and in public health, aiming to improve health behaviours by monitoring how evidence and misinformation are taken up in different communities.

He has led projects funded by the NHMRC, AHRQ, NLM/NIH, and WHO; is Convener of the Digital Health and Informatics Network at the University of Sydney, is Affiliate Faculty with the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital; and has held editorial roles with four journals.

Affiliations

• Theme Lead (cf. Head of Department) for Biomedical Informatics and Digital Health and Associate Professor in the School of Medical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
• Convener of the Digital Health and Informatics Network at the University of Sydney.
• Affiliate Faculty (since 2018) with the Computational Health Informatics Program, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, United States.

Memberships

• Member, Society for Research Synthesis Methodology.
• Member, Evidence Policy and Influence Collaborative at the Charles Perkins Centre, The University of Sydney.
• Member, American Medical Informatics Association.

Current research

• Public health: Applications of data science and machine learning in public and preventive health. These include using social media data to estimate spatiotemporal patterns of the health information that people see and engage with online; tracking the spread and persistence of misinformation, disinformation, conspiracies, and false advertising; and developing and testing interventions that aim to improve health literacy, evidence-informed decision making, and health behaviours.
• Clinical epidemiology: Applications of data science and machine learning in the production, reporting, and synthesis of clinical evidence. These include measuring biases that affect the integrity of clinical trial research reporting and synthesis; examining the impact of financial conflicts of interest and their disclosures on biomedical research; and new tools to facilitate access to and use of clinical trial registrations and structured results data.

Major current and past projects

• WHO Infodemic Management (2021-2022) “Developing a toolkit for capturing online and offline information diets in ways that vary in granularity and participant effort”
• NLM R01 (R01LM012976; 2019-2022) “Coupling results data from ClinicalTrials.gov and bibliographic databases to accelerate evidence synthesis”
• NHMRC Project (APP1128968; 2017-2020) “Monitoring the gap between evidence and vaccination behaviour by sampling the location-specific consumption of health information from news and social media”
• AHRQ R03 (HS024798-0; 2016-2017) “Developing Methods to Improve Systematic Reviews Using Clinical Trial Registries”
• NHMRC Project (APP1045065; 2013-2015) “Using collaboration networks to measure bias and inefficiency in the production and translation of evidence about cardiovascular risk”

History

• Biomedical Informatics and Digital Health, School of Medical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney (2020 – present), doing health informatics.
• Visiting Associate Professor, Department of Primary Care Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya (2018, 2019).
• Centre for Health Informatics at UNSW (2008-2014) and then Macquarie University (2014-2020), doing health informatics.
• International Alcoa Foundation Conservation & Sustainability Fellow at Curtin University  (2006-2008), doing landscape ecology of invasive species.
• Undergraduate training and PhD (2007) at The University of Western Australia in the suitably ambiguous area of complex systems and computational modelling formalisms, while modelling the spread of bushfires.

Panels, committees, and other organisational units:

• Convener, Digital Health and Informatics Network, Faculty of Medicine and Health, the University of Sydney (2022-present)
• NHMRC Postgraduate Scholarships Peer Review Committee for Health Services (2018)
• Macquarie University Academic Senate (2019-2020)
• Macquarie University Fellowship Panel (2015, 2016, 2017) and Co-chair (2018, 2019)
• Macquarie University Research and Research Training Committee (2019-2021)
• Macquarie University Freedom of Speech, Inquiry & Assembly Working Group (2019)
• Macquarie University Research Enrichment Program Executive (2018-2019)
• Macquarie University Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences Promotion Committee Level D (2019)
• Macquarie University Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences Promotion Committee Level C (2017, 2018, 2019)
• Macquarie University Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences Promotion Committee Level B (2015, 2019)
• Macquarie University Research Infrastructure Panel (2015, 2016)
• Macquarie University Postgraduate Research Fund Panel (2016)
• AIHI’s HDR Committee member for the Centre for Health Informatics (2016-2018)
• UNSW Postdoctoral Academy Committee and Sub-Committee (2012-2013)

Contact

My email address adam.dunn@sydney.edu.au. If you are a prospective postgraduate scholar and haven’t been in contact with me before, please include specific details of the kinds of projects you want to work on in your first email.

On this website, I keep an up-to-date list of my published articles along with media mentions, the talks I give, and the peer review and editorial work that I do. Because I work across several disciplines, citations to my work are generally a bit more reliable at Google Scholar. My Erdős number is four. You can tweet at me on Twitter here: @adamgdunn. I don’t have any active accounts on any other social platforms.