Behind the science and the soundbites stood a Deakin professor guiding the nation through a pandemic, one interview at a time.
By Judy Baulch.
In late 2019, Deakin Distinguished Professor Catherine Bennett first heard chatter in public health channels about an unusual illness circulating in Wuhan, China. Instantly, her epidemiologist radar went up.
Just a month before, she had fallen ill upon returning home from an international research trip, accompanied on the flight from Dubai by a very unwell-looking fellow passenger curled up on the seat behind her. A few days later, Catherine was diagnosed with pneumonia. A month later, the research collaborator she had been visiting in Denmark came to Australia via Dubai and he too was bedridden for a week with ‘some weird respiratory thing’.
As rumours of a strange new virus in Wuhan reached the wider world in early 2020, Catherine was making a slow recovery. She stayed busy with her long-term research into the community spread of treatment-resistant staph infections and preparations for another year of teaching our future epidemiologists.
‘We’ll never know whether I and my colleague had COVID-19 back then in November-December 2019, or a nasty flu strain, but I acquired a post-viral syndrome with lingering effects to this day.’
Within a few short months, as the viral illness that became known as COVID-19 swept the world, she was a household name, sought by the media and acknowledged as a voice of reason for her calm provision of facts over opinion and reassurance for the public. She got used to being recognised in her local shops.
She adapted, like thousands of other educators in Australia, to teaching her classes online. And like thousands of other researchers, she navigated closed international and local borders to continue her research projects and to engage in COVID-19 research in real time.
‘We’ll never know whether I and my colleague had COVID-19 back then in November-December 2019, or a nasty flu strain, but I acquired a post-viral syndrome with lingering effects to this day,’ Catherine says. ‘So I was very aware from the outset how quickly new viruses can move globally, how unwell they can make you, and how the effects might not be short-lived.’
For more than three years, Catherine was a daily presence on our television screens and in our news feeds, and continues to help the media and wider community understand the epidemiology of COVID-19 and other infectious disease risks.
By 2024, she had written or featured in 45,000 media items in Australia alone, and many more around the world, including contributions to Science, Nature, The British Medical Journal, Forbes, The Economist, BBC, Associated Press, CNN, Bloomberg, Aljazeera, Europe Now, Inside Story and Reuters. At the height of the pandemic, she was conducting 20 or more interviews a day from her dining room or front garden, while worrying whether her morning live cross would pick up her audio over the background noise of the grocery delivery or rubbish collection.
She explained ‘the numbers’ and how to interpret them to the media and the public and served as a pandemic-response adviser to government, industry and institutions globally. She weathered public adoration and occasional disapprobation, and turned her LinkedIn profile into a daily blog to counter rising misinformation. And she became Deakin’s face of the pandemic, with a new section of its website dedicated to amplifying her expertise and commentary to the University’s communities.
‘While it [the level of fame] happened progressively, it’s still a very strange thing,’ Catherine told The Guardian in 2021. ‘As a researcher at a university … you want to actually make people’s lives healthier and safer. But you rarely get to hear from the public in the way we are now. It’s a mark of how strange these times are, but at the same time it’s the bit that reinforces your drive to contribute.’
With the intense focus on Catherine’s COVID-19 response work, including being invited by the Prime Minister to lead the health component of the Independent Inquiry into the Australian Government COVID-19 Response, it’s easy to forget she was already established as one of Australia’s leading epidemiologists, specialising in community transmission of infectious diseases. Her leadership as a Head of School between 2010 and 2019 built Deakin’s School of Health & Social Development into one of the most successful research schools at the University. By the end of her term, she helped Deakin to move into the top 100 Public Health universities globally for the first time.
It was this expertise and reputation that led to her being approached to provide scientific advice to governments, industry and media around the world during the pandemic. She was called on to present her research and analysis to parliamentary inquiries in Australia and the United Kingdom, was an invited speaker in international forums and advisor on data analysis in Asia. She was also an expert witness in COVID-19 related cases before the courts, the coroner and in industrial relations hearings.
Her contributions to the COVID-19 response and her work on the Independent Inquiry led to her being invited to 2024’s royal reception at Parliament House.
‘I made the PM’s Christmas card list!’ she observes. ‘It is part of the extraordinary opportunities and recognition received over these past five years!’
‘As a researcher at a university … you want to actually make people’s lives healthier and safer. But you rarely get to hear from the public in the way we are now.’
As Catherine’s profile grew, so did epidemiology as one of the most interesting careers in public health. People began to recognise how important it is to have knowledgeable and experienced epidemiologists.
Epidemiology encompasses the core research methods that underpin medical research and public health practice, from the design and analysis of clinical trials, to conducting large scale studies to understand emerging health problems, to the containment of outbreaks. The day-to-day workload of an epidemiologist can involve:
‘Public health and epidemiology contribute to the health of the entire population through the prevention of disease and identifying the best evidence-based care for those who are unwell,’ Catherine explains. ‘It’s responsible for improving and saving many lives.
‘The problem solving to arrive at a solution that could impact many people’s lives is incredibly satisfying. It’s that moment where you have sufficient evidence to show that the world needs to change a bit to be a safer place and you can explain why and how. Being able to use your skills, research and experience to create real change in people’s lives is a highly rewarding part of the job.’
During the pandemic, Catherine contributed to the introduction of Deakin’s new specialist graduate diploma in epidemiology intelligence and expanded the infectious disease epidemiology training in the master’s level advanced epidemiology unit available to students in this and other postgraduate degrees.
‘These teaching programs dive into analytic epidemiology to fulfil the increased demand for real-world knowledge and application of epidemiological skill sets that have seen a resurgence since the beginning of the COVID pandemic,’ she says.
Catherine has also been teaching pandemic content as it evolved in real time in Deakin’s medical degree and a range of undergraduate and postgraduate health units. She’s had feedback that some prospective students were so impressed by Deakin’s visibility through Catherine’s COVID-19 analysis that they decided Deakin was now the place to study public health and changed their university preferences as a result.
Catherine has received numerous accolades for her teaching over the years, including an esteemed Australian Award for University Teaching. ‘I have no doubt my joy of teaching, and what I have learned from my students about effective communication, helped me through the COVID-19 communications and explains the snowball effect in media engagement,’ Catherine reflects.
‘They described me as ‘accurate, articulate and engaging,’ and that’s exactly what we practice as researcher-led teachers!’
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‘Public health and epidemiology contribute to the health of the entire population through the prevention of disease and identifying the best evidence-based care for those who are unwell.’
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