Dr Belen ZAPATA-DIOMEDI

Collaborator

Dr Belen Zapata-Diomedi completed her PhD in Public Health at the School of Public Health at the University of Queensland in 2017. She has undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications in accounting, finance and economics from Argentina, Spain and Australia. Dr Zapata-Diomedi’s PhD research contributed to the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Centre of Research Excellence (CRE) in Healthy, Liveable Communities in Australia. She led the CRE work program assessing the health and economic impacts of transport and urban planning. Dr Zapata-Diomedi was awarded an Endeavour Research Fellowship (2017–2018) to work in Cambridge for six months where she developed methods to assess the health impacts of transport scenarios in the English City Regions. She has ongoing collaboration with Cambridge resulting in obtaining funding from UKRI and NHMRC for the project JIBE, which she co-leads. In 2018 she was awarded the highly competitive RMIT VC postdoctoral fellowship to develop her research program within the Healthy Liveable Cities Lab. At RMIT Belen co-leads the Healthy Liveable Cities Lab.

Dr Zapata-Diomedi has collaborated with multi-disciplinary researchers and government in both Australia and the UK. In Australia, she worked in partnership with the Department of Health and the Heart Foundation in Queensland (Brisbane) and organised multi- and inter-disciplinary workshops and public lectures to promote the translation of research on healthy liveable cities into practice. She led a tendered research report for the New South Wales Department of Health addressing the health-related economic benefits of urban environments supportive of physical activity. In Melbourne, as part of JIBE, she works with a policy advisory group that helps with shaping their research for policy relevance.

Cambridge

Researchers

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