The Melbourne Children’s LifeCourse Initiative: A Treasure Trove of Cohorts for Understanding Health Across the Life Span
Dr. Meredith O’Connor, Senior Research Fellow and Program Lead, LifeCourse, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute
About the presentation:
The Melbourne Children’s Campus is a global leader in longitudinal and life course data. LifeCourse serves as a collaborative hub encompassing over 20 core longitudinal cohort studies, spanning conception to adulthood, and involving over 40,000 participants. These studies offer extensive data collection, including biosamples, imaging, and linkage to administrative data. This presentation will showcase how researchers can harness this vast data repository to address a wide range of questions crucial to understanding early life health and its impact throughout the life span. By utilising data from multiple cohort studies, researchers can benefit from further advantages such as replication of findings, improved precision in estimation, and exploration of similarities across diverse societal contexts and developmental periods. The presentation will offer illustrative examples of multi-cohort approaches, showcasing the practical benefits and challenges of these methodologies. For more information, please visit: https://lifecourse.melbournechildrens.com.
About Meredith:
Dr. Meredith O’Connor is a developmental psychologist specialising in investigating health pathways over the life span through large-scale prospective longitudinal cohort studies. With expertise in analytic approaches like replication and pooled analyses, she provides senior leadership and management to the Melbourne Children’s LifeCourse initiative, supporting over 30 cohort studies. Dr. O’Connor also contributes to the design of seminal longitudinal studies in Australia, including the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children.
Contact: meredith.oconnor@mcri.edu.au.
This seminar is jointly organised by the Mohn Centre for Children’s Health and Wellbeing and the Centre for Paediatrics and Child Health (PaeCH) at Imperial College London. If you would like to present as part of this monthly seminar series please contact mohncentre@ic.ac.uk.