Sue is a Senior Research Fellow at Cochrane Australia, in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine where she leads the Melbourne GRADE centre and contributes to Cochrane’s program of work on the translation of research into policy. Her role includes producing and facilitating the use of systematic reviews for health policy decision-making. She has been lead investigator on six reviews commissioned to inform NHMRC national guidelines, and the methodological lead on reviews of public health and healthcare improvement interventions. She conducts research that aims to (i) advance methods for research synthesis and the uptake of these methods, and to (ii) develop practical, evidence-based approaches for enabling decision-makers to use research. Her collaborative research on methods for evidence synthesis has informed workshops and guidance for systematic review authors, including co-authoring four chapters in the 2019 edition of the Cochrane handbook. She is a lead investigator on a project to develop GRADE methods for overviews of systematic reviews, and a member of the NHMRC Health Evidence panel. Through her roles in Cochrane and the GRADE working group, she works with policy-makers and guideline developers to implement GRADE methods for assessing research and making evidence-based recommendations. 

As a postdoctoral fellow on the NHMRC funded Centre for Research Excellence in Informing Policy in Health with Evidence from Research (CIPHER), Sue contributed to the development of measures of research use in policy and the evaluation of a program to build capacity for using research in policy agencies.

Sue holds a Doctor of Philosophy in public health from Monash University (awarded 2013) for research on methods for evaluating quality improvement (QI) strategies, a Graduate Diploma of Education from the University of Melbourne, and a Bachelor of Science (Hons) from Monash University. Her doctoral research resulted in two highly accessed systematic reviews (>33K) reporting a framework and measures for evaluating QI in primary care.