Centre for Safe Air
CAR funding extended under NHMRC's Centre for Research Excellence program
02 September 2022
We all need clean, safe air to remain healthy. Our new Centre for Safe Air, led by Prof Fay Johnston, will be funded from 2023 to 2028 and will research and provide solutions to tackling the main sources of outdoor air pollution in Australia.
The quality of the air we breathe is fundamental in keeping us healthy, now and into the future. Because we all need clean air, even relatively small changes in air quality - for better or worse - translate into large health impacts at the population level. Taking a multidisciplinary approach by bringing together areas in physical, biological and health sciences has the potential for massive health gains to be realised through an urgently needed systematic and comprehensive focus on air safety in Australia.
The vision of our new centre is to achieve great improvements in population health, safety, and resilience in the face of existing, emerging, and escalating outdoor air hazards through evidence-based policy and practice interventions.
We will focus our activities across three areas:
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Landscapes: How can we measure, track, predict and manage outdoor air hazards at national and regional scales?
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Community: What are the options for homes, schools or workplaces to mitigate the health burden from outdoor air hazards?
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Individual: Who are most vulnerable and how we can best protect them?
A schematic of these three streams is found below:
Working with external stakeholders we will implement a research program grounded in a translational research framework. With this foundation, we will provide Australian government agencies, health practitioners and consumers with the first high quality data and evidence required to inform policies and practical interventions aimed at reducing exposures and health impacts of airborne threats from air pollution, bushfire smoke and allergens.
Our research team will include the following members:
