Richard Osborne

Distinguished Professor, Director of the Centre for Global Health and Equity, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia.

Richard is prolific public health researcher, educator and program implementer. His teams have developed and implemented evidence-based and practical tools and processes to make substantive impacts on health and equity, not only at the project level, but at the state, regional, national, and international levels.

He is Distinguished Professor of Health Sciences and Director, Centre for Global Health and Equity, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. He holds appointments at Santé publique France, University of Copenhagen, and NOVA University Lisbon. His team was recently awarded a prestigious 5-year Australian NHMRC Investigator Grant (L3) to advance health literacy development globally. He is a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (2018, 2021) top 1% most influential researcher globally, having published over 300 original scientific research papers.

He is an adviser to the World Health Organization (WHO). With global partners, his team created WHO’s 2022 Health Literacy Development for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases four-volume report. Five years of work with global experts and field workers generated new health literacy concepts and tools for practical implementation by Member States.

Richard attributes his team’s exceptional track record in innovation and subsequent impact of their tools and processes to authentic listening to diverse people with lived experience and the service providers in the field. This is reflected in the wide and repeated use of their tools by over 1000 teams, most notably the Health Literacy Questionnaire (HLQ) used in over 80 countries. Authentic and lasting impact is a key feature of the team’s Ophelia (Optimising Health Literacy and Access) co-design and services redesign process. It is featured in WHO National Health Literacy Development projects (20+ countries), and the EU Commission Joint Action on Cardiovascular Disease and Diabetes (JACARDI) where Ophelia, co-led with Santé publique France, is implemented by government agencies in 13 EU countries across 24 projects.

People close to him find him intensely focused on research quality, integrity and achieving real world outcomes. In recent years his team has focused on making impact on health equity through applying strengths-based, anti-colonial, locally-led methods from ideation to scale-up.