Professor Robyn Tapp has throughout her career translated population-based data into significant relevance to the individuals who will benefit from primary and secondary prevention of diabetes and its severe complications.

Robyn began her studies on diabetes-related complications as a PhD student at the International Diabetes Institute and Monash University, leading the complications study of the Australian Diabetes Obesity and Lifestyle study (AusDiab), and then carried out post-doctoral research at Imperial College London as part of her NHMRC Sidney Sax Fellowship.

Her collaborative research draws on expertise from the fields of endocrinology, ophthalmology, cardiology and epidemiology. It is only by crossing fields that we are able to develop a cohesive picture of the physiological and pathological mechanisms associated with diabetes and systemic vascular disease and to study how these processes develop over a lifetime, what we can do to detect and manage them, and how these impact society more broadly.

Her range of projects, making use of a network of international collaborations, includes a diabetes prevention trial in India and a life course study on the impact of childhood growth patterns and latent cardiovascular risk factors on the heart and vasculature in adult life in Finland.

Translational research has included the development of an online diabetic retinopathy grading course (now translated into 7 languages), an online management course for diabetic eye disease and the preparation of a successful Medical Services Advisory Committee application to have retinal photography given a Medicare item number in Australia.