Associate ProfessorLeigh-Anne Hepburn

Associate Professor Leigh-Anne Hepburn is a design researcher whose work sits at the intersection of health, policy, and community resilience. Her research advances critically engaged, practice-led design approaches to understanding how care, decision-making, and wellbeing are produced within complex social and institutional systems.

Her work integrates design theory, participatory and co-design methodologies, and qualitative inquiry to examine how lived experience functions as a form of evidence in shaping services, policies, and systems. Across a sustained program of collaborative research in health and wellbeing, inclusive policymaking, and community-based resilience, she has developed design-led methods that surface relational, informal, and often overlooked infrastructures of care.

Internationally recognised for her contributions to transdisciplinary and policy-engaged design research, Hepburn works across academic, government, and community contexts to build shared capacities for systems change.