Francis Mitrou

Professor Francis Mitrou is currently Program Head – Population Health, where he oversees population health themed research occurring under several research teams at The Kids Research Institute Australia. He is also Team Head of the Human Capability Team.

Francis has followed a non-traditional research career path, coming to academia via a 14-year career in the Commonwealth Public Service which intersected with high level consulting to the academic sector via his employer. He is an economist initially trained at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in the 1990s on a range of economic and social survey vehicles before entering research full-time in the early 2000s via an ABS consultancy to The Kids Research Institute Australia. He has many years of experience in the design, conduct and management of large-scale population surveys of adults, children and their families, including Indigenous families. He has expertise in the use of linked administrative data for research, Indigenous health and wellbeing, and economic evaluation, with a focus on child and adolescent mental health, social disadvantage, and life course trajectories.

Francis is a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (#CE200100025 - The Life Course Centre). He has close involvement in the national discussion around use of Commonwealth data for research and policy across the health and human services and has sat on the design committees of several national surveys of health and social wellbeing run by ABS. Francis Chairs The Kids Research Institute Australia's Linked Data Committee and leads the ARC Life Course Centre’s Data for Policy Portfolio which engages Commonwealth human services and data agencies in research activity. Francis was a member of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s Closing the Gap Refresh Technical Advisory Group, which reset the parameters around Closing the Gap for the next decade. His research goal is to make a positive difference in the lives of disadvantaged children and families through the application of a life course approach to human capability research, whereby targeted, evidence-based population intervention can help prevent entrenchment of costly disadvantage.