Karen Canfell AC D.Phil. FAHMS is the inaugural Director of the Daffodil Centre and is a Professor within the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney. She is Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, an NHMRC Leadership Fellow, and holds a D.Phil (PhD) in epidemiology from the University of Oxford. She is an epidemiologist, modeller and translationally-focused population health researcher, and her research program focuses on providing policy-makers with an evidence-base for decision making across the cancer control continuum.
Karen has received multiple awards including the 2020 Elizabeth Blackburn Investigator grant award from the National Health and Medical Research Council for leadership in Health Services Research, the 2021 Cancer Australia Senator Jeanne Ferris Award for Gynaecological Cancer Research, and the 2022 Public Health Association of Australia NSW Public Health Impact Award. In 2019 Karen was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and in 2024, Karen was appointed as a Companion of the Order of Australia for eminent service to medicine as an epidemiologist, particularly through cancer research, to tertiary education, and as a mentor and leader.
In 2019 she was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Science, and in 2020 won an Elizabeth Blackburn Investigator grant award for leadership in Health Services Research. In 2015 she won the NHMRC National Award for Research Excellence and was also nominated that year as a Woman of Influence by Westpac and the Australian Financial Review.
In 2021 she was invited to give the prestigious Richard Doll Seminar at Oxford where she spoke as co-leader of the World Health Organization (WHO) Cervical Cancer Elimination Modelling Consortium on the topic of the WHO’s strategy for the elimination of cervical cancer (The road to cervical cancer elimination).
Karen was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in the 2024 King’s Birthday Honours for “eminent service to medicine as an epidemiologist, particularly through cancer research, to tertiary education, and as a mentor and leader”.