Congratulations to International Population Data Linkage Network (IPDLN) Scholarship winner Dr Georgina Lau from the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University.

Dr Lau is an early-career researcher whose work uses linked data to understand how people who sustain serious injuries engage with health services, with a particular focus on the relationship between substance use, mental health and injury.

Linking trauma and health service data

Working with Professor Belinda Gabbe, Dr Lau is linking data from the Victorian State Trauma Registry to the National Health Data Hub to create a linked data asset that will enable new insights into how seriously injured people access and use health services over time.

Her research focuses on reducing the burden of serious injury, both by preventing injuries from occurring and by improving recovery outcomes for those affected. She is particularly interested in using linked data to untangle the complex relationship between substance use, poor mental health and injury events, with the aim of developing more robust prevention strategies and treatment pathways.

For Dr Lau, one of the most important lessons from working with linked data is the value of early and sustained engagement with data custodians and linkage units, particularly when working across a mix of state and national datasets. Requirements and definitions can vary, and those early conversations help researchers anticipate challenges and stay ahead of them.

Emerging leader in injury prevention

In 2024, Dr Lau was awarded the inaugural Marilyn Lyford Memorial Emerging Leader Award at the Australasian Injury Prevention Network conference in Rotorua, New Zealand, in recognition of her contributions to substance use and injury prevention research. The award supported her attendance at a course on advanced analysis of linked health data, which has since underpinned her current work. At IPDLN, Dr Lau is looking forward to connecting with other early-career researchers working in the data linkage space and learning about the breadth of work being done in this field.