Dr Vasoontara Yiengprugsawan

BA Thammasat University; MA Maxwell School of Syracuse University; PhD in Epidemiology, Economics and Population Health, Australian National University

Primary affiliation: CEPAR Associate Investigator, UNSW Sydney; Senior Research Fellow, Ageing Asia Research Hub, UNSW Sydney

Vasoontara Yiengprugsawan is an Associate Investigator, based at the UNSW Business School. Vas has been a CEPAR Associate Investigator since CEPAR I and continues to hold a part-time Senior Research Fellow position at the Centre for Research on Ageing, Health and Wellbeing at ANU. She holds a PhD in Epidemiology, Economics and Population Health and her areas of expertise include Epidemiology, Public Health and Health Services, Aged Health Care, Health Promotion and Primary Health Care. 

In 2016, Vas was awarded the Australian Endeavour Research Fellowship and was appointed as an Honorary Senior Lecturer based at University College London working on the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Between 2014 and 2016, she was awarded an 18-month Fellowship with the Asia-Pacific Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and led a regional comparative study entitled "Health System Responses to Population Ageing and Non-communicable Diseases in Asia" published by the World Health Organisation in 2016. 

In the past 10 years, she has led a range of analyses for the Thai Cohort Study (funded by the Wellcome Trust UK and the Australian NHMRC) on health-risk transition, health service use, and social determinants of health (50+ international peer-reviewed publications). She also contributed to analyses of other large cohort studies, including the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children and the 45 and Up Study of older Australians. 

Her professional contributions include involvement with the Australian Centre on Quality of Life representing the International Wellbeing Group for Thailand (2010-), appointment as a part of the international editor team for the Encyclopaedia of Quality of Life and Wellbeing Research (published by Springer in 2013), and served as an Associate Editor for BMC Public Health (2014-2016). Before joining the Australian National Unviersity, she worked as an Associate Migration Policy Officer at the International Organisation for Migration (Geneva, 2002-2005) drafting various policy papers, contributing to statistics for the World Migration Report, and coordinating the 3-volume training manual: Essentials of Migration Management. 

Keywords: Longitudinal Study and Cohort Analyses; Lifecourse and Social Epidemiology; Health Inequalities in the Asia-Pacific Region