Jennifer Koplin

A/Prof Jennifer Koplin is Group Leader of Childhood Allergy & Epidemiology at the University of Queensland Child Health Research Centre and Principal Research Fellow with the HERA 360-Kids Community Network. She leads the Evidence and Translation Hub of the National Allergy Centre of Excellence (www.nace.org.au) and the Food Allergy Prevention stream of the NHMRC-funded Centre of Research Excellence in Food Allergy (CFAR; www.foodallergyresearch.org.au). From 2019-2022 she was the Director of CFAR and Group Leader of the Population Allergy Research Group at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia.

A/Prof Koplin has over 15 years of research experience in epidemiology and allergy, and has developed an internationally recognised program of research in the epidemiology of childhood food allergy. Her research has explored the prevalence, natural history, causes and consequences of childhood allergic disease. She has led a series of large NHMRC-funded population-based allergy cohort studies including the EarlyNuts study and age 10 follow up of the HealthNuts cohort, collectively involving over 7,000 participants. She is also a co-investigator on the SchoolNuts and MACS studies as well as several food allergy prevention RCTs (VITALITY, PrEggNuts, TrEAT and Pebbles), an RCT of food allergy treatment (LMNOP) and collaborates on research exploring immunological mechanisms underlying childhood food allergy and improving food allergy diagnosis.

Her recent research focused on using population-based studies to inform the design and implementation of prevention interventions and determine their effectiveness in reducing allergy prevalence at the population level. She also has a strong research interest in the role of infant feeding in allergy prevention and contributed to the development of new Australian and international guidelines on infant feeding for preventing food allergy. In 2018, she received a National Health and Medical Research Council project grant to conduct the first study internationally to measure the impact of these guidelines on infant feeding practices and the population prevalence of peanut allergy.

A/Prof Koplin has been awarded over $20 million in competitive research funding as chief investigator, including 6 NHMRC project grants, 2 consecutive NHMRC fellowships and a Centre of Research Excellence. She has authored more than 220 peer reviewed journal articles with >9,000 citations and is on the editorial board of the international Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice.