Dr Louise Baldwin

Biography

Louise Baldwin is an innovative and passionate leader in health promotion and public health in Australia and globally.    She brings a wealth of high level strategic planning, management and team leadership, evidence based approaches and innovative thinking to any role.  She is known for her ‘out of the box’ approaches to population wide health and her ability to conduct large scale programs and initiatives with resource efficiency and tangible outcomes.  She has over two decades of practice and research experience at the local, state, national and global levels. Known for her innovative approaches to community-based, collaborative health promotion, she has won several awards for her commitment to building healthy communities, especially in Queensland. Louise’s work has focused on multi-sector chronic disease prevention with many years of leading skin cancer prevention and early detection in a tribute to her late father. She is a passionate leader in evidence-based practice and working across sectors to create on-the-ground, community-based change.   She is currently expanding this work to identify opportunities between social entrepreneurship and social enterprise and the impacts for public health.

Louise has worked extensively across the nonprofit, government and tertiary sectors and as a successful private consultant.   Passionate about supporting the next generation of health promoters through research, teaching, advocacy and mentoring, Louise works tirelessly to create a future where health promotion is an integral part of the way our communities live, work, play and learn.   No longer content with seeing preventive health initiatives come and go, she boldly moved to QUT in 2016 to make a difference and establish a series of evidence based research programs to improve the health of communities plus undertake her PhD in sustainability of health promotion programs.

Louise is the founder and leader for two significant QUT action research programs:

• the QUT Healthy Cities and Towns ORCHID program  Our Resilient Communities – Healthy Innovative and Diverse : adapting the WHO Healthy Cities model to be contextually relevant for Queensland Communities and
• QUT Cool and Covered  a collaboration between Health, Creative Industries and Education Faculties and the design and planning industries to improve sun protective shade and apparel where Queenslanders live, work, play and learn.

Louise was recognised in 2018 as an inaugural Brisbane Lord Mayor's Convention Trailblazer for her extensive work in chronic disease prevention in Queensland and  national influence in health promotion.

Louise is currently:

Academic Lead Industry and Community Engagement - School of Public Health and Social Work

Chief Investigator QUT Design Lab

Affiliate Investigator  Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies, at Queensland University of Technology.

She is also a mentor with Curtin University and  the past chair of the National Skin Cancer Committee for Cancer Council Australia having served on various boards and committees in the nonprofit health sector.  Louise has held many positions with the Australian Health Promotion Association including Queensland Vice President and is an active member of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education, serving on the global membership committee.