Marita Hefler

Marita has designed and led several research projects and evaluations of public health programs in partnership with Australian Indigenous communities and previously in South East Asia. Her sectoral experience includes tobacco control, social media, health communication, health promotion, Indigenous health, youth health, prison health, lifecourse approaches to understanding health behaviour, blindness prevention and health services quality improvement. Marita primarily works in the Tobacco Control Research Program, where her research interests include use of social media, smoke free prisons, phasing out commercial sales of cigarettes and monitoring tobacco industry activities. She has particular expertise in qualitative research approaches, and her broader research interests include lifecourse approaches to understanding health trajectories and health disparities.

She holds a Heart Foundation Australia Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and is a Chief Investigator on two National Health & Medical Research Council-funded projects. She is the News Editor for the BMJ specialist publication Tobacco Control. Marita co-supervises five PhD students and two masters research project students and is co-lecturer for Qualitative Research Methods in the Menzies Master of Public Health program.