Professor Melanie Wakefield is Director of the Centre for Behavioural Research in Cancer at The Cancer Council Victoria in Melbourne Australia.  She is also a Principal Research Fellow of the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), and has adjunct Professorial appointments at the University of Melbourne (Psychology), University of Sydney (Public Health) and Deakin University (Health Sciences) in Australia.  She serves as Deputy Editor of the BMJ’s specialist international journal Tobacco Control.  She has a Masters Degree in Applied Psychology and a PhD in Community Medicine from the University of Adelaide, Australia.  Prior to her current appointments, Professor Wakefield held research positions in Chicago, United States; in Adelaide, South Australia; and in Nottingham, England.   

She has wide experience in evaluating tobacco control policies and programs, especially in understanding the effects of media campaigns and news media on smoking behaviour, the effects of smoke-free policies on smokers and non-smokers, and the impact of tobacco marketing on smoking behaviour. Professor Wakefield has been a chief investigator on over $20 million in research grants in the past five years from NIH and NHMRC.  She has published over 140 peer-reviewed journal papers, including experimental studies of forced advertising exposure and a range of pre-post population survey designs to assess media campaign effects.  She has pioneered the use of ecologic methods linking indices of campaign exposure to population surveys to understand more systematic effects of mass media campaigns on smoking attitudes and behaviour among youth and adults, thereby going beyond the evaluation of single campaign messages.