DrElizabeth Kirkwood

Elizabeth Kirkwood is a Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Sydney School of Public Health at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on improving the health and wellbeing of women and children in low‑ and middle‑income countries, with particular attention to how gender shapes the design, delivery, and impact of health interventions. Dr Kirkwood teaches widely across the Master of Global Health program, where she is a lecturer, tutor, and course coordinator for Advocacy for Women’s and Children’s Health.

Her expertise lies in applying a gender lens to assess global health interventions—from developing context‑specific analytical tools to measuring programmatic impacts on women’s empowerment. Her interests include gender‑responsive approaches to nutrition-sensitive and nutrition-specific interventions, exploring how women’s empowerment influences household food security, agricultural productivity, and maternal and child health and nutrition outcomes. She also investigates the gendered impacts of clean cooking interventions and broader determinants of gender roles within households.

Dr Kirkwood has extensive technical research and international project management experience across South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific. She is a GEDSI Technical Advisor for the DFAT‑funded SAPPHIRE Regional Health Program, she provides strategic guidance and technical support to integrate gender equality, disability, and social inclusion across program design, implementation, and monitoring (Kiribati, Vietnam, Cambodia and Fiji). Elizabeth is technical lead for GEDSI design and analysis on the DFAT KONEKSI Integrated Data System project to empower female health cadres in village‑level nutrition decision‑making in Indonesia. She is the technical lead for gender analysis on two large NHMRC-funded RCTs in Bangladesh—Shonjibon Cash and Counselling, where she conducts mixed‑methods research on the gendered impacts of cash transfers and nutrition behaviour change communication, and Poriborton Extension, evaluating how clean cooking interventions influence gender roles. She is the Chief Investigator on a UNICEF Timor‑Leste project examining the drivers and determinants of dietary quality for children aged 6–23 months, and on a study in Laos exploring barriers and facilitators to women’s engagement with reproductive, maternal, and child health services through a gender‑based analytical framework. She was recently awarded both a Cornell Ignition Grant and a SSEAC Collaborative Research Grant.

Across her teaching and research, Dr Kirkwood’s work centres on understanding and addressing the gendered determinants of health, with the aim of advancing gender equality and promoting meaningful inclusion for all.