Dr Ratika Kumar

Dr. Ratika Kumar is a Senior Research Fellow in Population Oral at the UQ School of Dentistry. She is also an adjunct Senior Lecturer at Southern Cross University and an Affiliate Postdoctoral Fellow with the Manna Institute (Regional Universities Network).

Ratika completed her Ph.D. in 2018 from the University of Queensland and worked for the University of Newcastle and Southern Cross University in various postdoc capacities. Before enrolling in Ph.D. Ratika practiced as a Public Health dentist where her work involved researching, designing, and delivering dental public health interventions at the grassroots levels in India.

During and since Ph.D., Ratika has worked across multiple disciplines and research methodologies to explore oral health and tobacco control priorities in diverse populations. Her research in people with mental illness explored how to better communicate tobacco cessation and harm reduction messages using surveys, social media analysis and guidelines analysis. For the last five years, her research has focussed on implementing health service level tobacco control measures for improving the health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander pregnant women. She is a Chief Investigator on the large Global Alliance for Chronic Disease (GACD) project that will implement smoking cessation training for health providers working with pregnant Indigenous women across 100 health services in Australia. Her experience with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research has given her a strong foundation in community and consumer engagement and co-designing of interventions, particularly community-based interventions in priority populations.

Ratika is also passionate about health problems faced by Culturally and Linguistically diverse populations in Australia and currently working on two projects with collaborators across Australia.