Louise Baur PhD

Professor Louise Baur is a paediatrician and an internationally renowned childhood obesity researcher. She has a special interest in the prevention and management of child and adolescent obesity and has for over 25 years also studied various aspects of adult obesity. Professor Baur has been instrumental in raising the profile of childhood obesity as an issue of clinical and public health importance, in Australia and internationally. Her body of research has helped define management efforts around childhood obesity and improved our understanding of the factors that help prevent obesity in the first few years of life. Her work also has helped define predictors of obesity and the metabolic syndrome in young people, and the complications of obesity.

Professor Baur is the Director of the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in the Early Prevention of Obesity in Childhood and is an active member of The Prevention Research Collaboration, a specialised research group within the Sydney School of Public Health. Professor Baur engages widely with professional organisations and the community. She was a member of the WHO Ad Hoc Working Group on Science and Evidence for Ending Childhood Obesity and is an Associate Director of the University of Sydney’s WHO Collaborating Centre in Physical Activity, Nutrition & Obesity. She is also the President-Elect of the World Obesity Federation and is Co-Chair of WOF's Policy & Prevention Committee.

Prof Baur is a Founding Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health & Medical Sciences. She is a member of the Governing Board of the Sydney Children's Hospitals Network. She has received numerous awards recognising her many contributions. In 2010 Professor Baur was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) ‘for service to medicine, particularly in the field of paediatric obesity as a researcher and academic, and to the communit through support for a range of children's charities’. In 2020 she was awarded the Royal Australasian College of Physicians Howard Williams Medal “for an outstanding contribution to paediatrics and child health in Australia and/ New Zealand”.