Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Christine Cowie is an environmental epidemiologist working in the field of air pollution epidemiology with the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research and is a conjoint research fellow with UNSW School of Clinical Medicine and an affiliate with the Centre for Safe Air. Christine is particularly interested in the health effects of traffic related exposures, as well as other urban air pollution impacts, including wood heater emissions. She has expertise in exposure assessment, epidemiological study design and implementation, and seeks to conduct research with policy relevance. She has taught environmental health at UNSW and the University of Sydney and, prior to research, worked for over a decade in environmental health policy for the NSW Health Ministry.

Nicolás Borchers Arriagada is a Sohn Hearts and Minds Research Fellow and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research at UTAS. He is multidisciplinary data scientist and industrial engineer, specialised in environmental and medical sciences. He is a post doctoral research fellow with the Centre for Safe Air. His work intersects modelling, public health, health economics, bushfire management, and more broadly risks of climate related and extreme weather events. During his PhD he assessed the health burden of bushfire smoke in Australia and is currently working on novel methods to improve and refine population exposure estimates to wood heater smoke and landscape fire smoke PM2.5, assess the health burden of different climate related extreme events, and on using health economic and visualisation techniques to better communicate policy-related research.

Dr. Gongbo Chen is a research fellow at Monash University’s Climate, Air Quality Research Unit. During his PhD (2015–2018), he developed a satellite-based machine learning method for air quality prediction, applying it in epidemiological studies on air pollution’s health effects. From 2019 to 2023, he worked at Wuhan University and Sun Yat-sen University for four years. In 2023, he returned to Monash to continue his research. Dr. Chen was awarded the Monash Early Career Postdoctoral Fellowship, NHMRC Centre for Safe Air Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, and subsequently ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA). Dr Chen's research achievements significantly surpass the typical expectations for ECRs. Since 2017, He has published > 200 peer-reviewed papers, with 60 for which he was first/corresponding-author and 94% published in JCR Q1 journals, such as Lancet Planetary Health, JAMA Pediatrics, and Nature Communications. He is ranked among top 2% scientists worldwide 2022 (Stanford/Elsevier), with 7,158 citations and an h-index of 47 (Google Scholar). Dr. Chen has secured 6 grants as CIA with nearly $1 million in funding and won the Monash FMNHS Dean's Award for Excellence in Research - Team Award and Vice Chancellor Excellence Award for Research Team of the Year 2024.

Dwan is an environmental epidemiologist and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland's Child Health Research Centre. In 2025 Dwan was awarded a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Centre for Safe Air to implement evidence-based public health responses to bushfire smoke. With bushfires becoming more frequent, there's an urgent need for effective public health measures. Current advice to stay indoors may not reduce exposure to harmful smoke particles. Consumers want a practical kit to manage smoke exposure. Dwan's project will create affordable kits with materials for a box filter fan, a handbook, and family-friendly resources. Through a series of workshops, communities will learn how to use the kits, and 40 households will test them. The final kits will be distributed through workshops and online resources to help improve health resilience. with a particular interest in children's environmental health.

Dr Tingting Ye is an environmental epidemiologist based at Monash University. Her research focuses on the health impacts of bushfire smoke, air pollution, heat, and other climate-related environmental exposures. Through the Centre for Safe Air Postdoctoral Fellowship, she will develop a national framework to reconstruct historical bushfire-smoke PM2.5 exposure across Australia. This project will generate a research-ready dataset to support future health studies, climate adaptation, and safer-air policy. Tingting’s work combines exposure modelling, remote sensing, geospatial data integration, and environmental epidemiology, with the aim of strengthening evidence on long-term smoke exposure and health risk