Visitor researcher at the Baker Institute

Paz Lopez-Doriga Ruiz

Since February, I am a visitor researcher at the Department of Clinical Diabetes and Epidemiology at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne (https://baker.edu.au/). My host is Dianna Magliano, she is head of population health at the Baker and works in Jonathan Shaw’s group.

I started in a postdoc position in December 2019, the title of my project is “Population based studies of social inequalities in diabetes diagnosis, incidence, mortality and treatment”. It is an epidemiological study where we are going to use nationwide register-based data and data from health survey like Tromsø and HUNT studies.

Now, I am participating in an international collaboration on trends in type 2 and type 1 diabetes lead by the epidemiology group at the Baker institute. The research group also works on datasets from the National Diabetes Service Scheme and link this registry data to administrative data. It has been an interesting learning experience to see how they work and organize their research project to secure high quality papers for leading international journals.

There has been also big focus on COVID-19 and diabetes association here, and the group had applied for funding to conduct some studies with Australian and international data.

We have been most of our time in Melbourne under lock-down, we have daily meetings with the group and some of the staff at the institute is coming back to the office during the last weeks. My husband is also a visitor researcher at the Cabrini Institute and my son started at the school in Melbourne at the end of January. We are staying here until December and we hope we can enjoy a bit more this country.

Paz Lopez-Doriga Ruiz