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PhD TRAINING – BUILDING RESEARCH CAPACITY

Capacity building opportunities for Thais and Australians for PhD training and research have been created, with five PhD scholarships awarded from a highly competitive international field in early 2005. These five research students - three Thai and two Australians - were recruited in Thailand and Australia in 2004, enrolled at The Australian National University (ANU) in 2005 and commenced their fieldwork in 2006. Two of these students have now successfully completed their theses and graduated in 2009. An additional Thai student has now joined the project, also in 2009.
The PhD student research is helping inform and enrich data from the main cohort and provide points of comparison. It also creates opportunities from the collaborative, institutional and academic links forged between Thailand and Australia as a result of this project. PhD topics include sexual health transition, projecting future health outcomes for the STOU cohort, birthing and maternal health transition, transport transitions and automobility, economic modeling of the inequalities of the health transition, and climate change and thermal stress in Thailand.

Research Students at NCEPH, ANU
The initial questionnaire has enabled us to identify informative sub-groups for further transition studies. These ancillary studies deepen understanding of the distal determinants of risks, risk perceptions, and their transitions. For example, we can examine transitions from poverty-related subsistence agriculture environments (unsafe water, poor hygiene, indoor smoke) to modern industrial settings (occupational hazards, environmental disturbance or toxicity) and to risks emerging with affluence (obesogenic environments, changing diets, fast food, smoking, recreational drugs, motorcycles, helmet use, drink-driving). At the family level, we can explore the fertility transition and upstream drivers of family formation, inter-generation contrasts (if living with children or parents), health service use, disease beliefs, self-treatment and health treatment decisions We will use a variety of research methods, choosing the most efficient and appropriate for a given task
Areas of interest include the following:

• Industry transitions and changing work risk factors (e.g. thermal stress, transport);
• Changing management of workplaces, associated stress and health;
• Modern air pollution and its impact on health and days of restricted activity;
• Changing exercise levels measured with pedometry and related to socio-ecology;
• Changing culinary practices as risks for cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity;
• Modern urban diets and food production, globalisation, consumer freedom, advertising, and cultural resistance to dietary change;
• Family formation and impacts on fertility, modernity and health behaviour.
• Transport and injury – ecological analyses comparing aggregated experience;
• Changing rates and influences on tobacco and alcohol consumption;
• Asthma and risk factors in Thailand (an excellent ‘transition' marker);
• Social integration, mental health and urban-rural environments;
• Health service use, foregone use, self-treatment and ‘modernity'.