Associate ProfessorJo-An Occhipinti

Associate Professor Jo-An Occhipinti is an epidemiologist and systems scientist at the Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney. She is an NHMRC Principal Research Fellow and leads Generation Mental Wealth, a national research program developing new measures and policy insights to improve the mental wellbeing of young people by strengthening social participation, social cohesion, and other systemic foundations of wellbeing. She is also Co-Director of the University of Sydney’s Mental Wealth Initiative, a transdisciplinary initiative spanning public health, economics, business, law, and systems science, and working in partnership with global research, policy, and industry leaders to inform wellbeing-oriented economic and social policy.

Her research interests include how economic policy shapes the social conditions that impact brain health across the lifecourse, generating evidence to guide public and private investment decisions that influence population wellbeing, social cohesion, and long-term economic resilience.

Over more than a decade, Associate Professor Occhipinti has provided leadership in the application of systems modelling to inform health and social policy. She has led the development of more than 40 complex systems models used by governments, policy agencies, and institutions in Australia and internationally to support decision-making in areas including youth mental health and suicide prevention, health system planning, alcohol-related harms, chronic disease prevention, and broader social policy reform.

She has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, opinion pieces, and commentaries, with work published in leading academic journals including Nature, Nature Aging, Science, The Lancet Psychiatry, BMJ Global Health, and the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. She regularly contributes to public policy debate and has written for The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Conversation. She has delivered invited addresses to national and international policy forums, including the National Press Club of Australia and the United Nations General Assembly Science Summit. Her work has also been featured in major media outlets including the Australian Financial Review, ABC’s 7.30, Forbes, and Scientific American.

In addition to her academic roles, Associate Professor Occhipinti is Managing Director of Computer Simulation and Advanced Research Technologies (CSART), a not-for-profit alliance supporting international collaboration in systems modelling and policy innovation. She is committed to capacity building and interdisciplinary training in applied systems approaches to public policy.

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