Professor Anne-Louise Ponsonby
B Med Sci MBBS PhD, FAFPHM, FRACP

Professor Anne-Louise Ponsonby  is an epidemiologist and public health physician. She has extensive experience in the design, conduct and analysis of  population-based studies, then public health translation.

She is co-PI of a large birth cohort of over 10,000 infants that generated knowledge leading to a decline in sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) incidence. In Australia, SIDS deaths declined by 80%, from 1.9 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 0.2 live births in 2012 (Australian Bureau Statistics 2013).

More recently, Ponsonby’s work has been on combining population epidemiologic approaches with system biology, an approach she outlined in Nature 2014. Ponsonby is using this approach, within population-based studies, to investigate multiple sclerosis and early brain development. In particular, a current focus of her work is to use this comprehensive approach to better understand the possible adverse impact of some modern chemicals on brain development in early life.

Ponsonby has 427 publications.  Ponsonby has contributed to three patents. Ponsonby is on the research committee for the International Paediatric Multiple Sclerosis Study Group and part of several international collaborations. As a public health physician, Ponsonby has a highly active and consistently ongoing role in research translation and preventative medicine as evidenced by being an invited keynote speaker at the inaugural Annual National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia Research Translation Faculty Symposium, Melbourne, 2012. Ponsonby also works in other public health areas, including crowd-sourced forecasting using collective intelligence theory and prediction markets.