• Population health
• Aged population health and employment
• Labour market, productivity and employment
• Working and well-being
• Household economics
• Program/intervention impact evaluation
• Other economic development issues

Tinh (Jimmy) Doan has a background in Applied Economics. He received his PhD in Economics from the Waikato University, New Zealand in 2011. His PhD thesis focuses on impact of microfinance on human capital formation for the poor in peri-urban areas.

Prior to joining ANU, he has worked for governmental departments in New Zealand. At Ministry of Social Development, he worked as a senior analyst, focusing on business planning, business intelligence, business performance framework development, business performance reporting and monitoring, data mining, modelling and conducting data analyses on social welfare and other social issues, labour market and economic analysis. He was a member of Waikato Regional Executive team. At Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment in Wellington, he worked as a research analyst for Research, Evaluation and Analysis team. He had worked with very large and complex datasets from the Longitudinal Business Database/Integrated Database Infrastructure developed by Statistics New Zealand to look at NZ firm performance, productivity, FDI, and competition. Key projects were NZ firm competition, productivity, firm internationalization (FDI, export, import) and R&D. He also worked on sector performance, R&D and tax incentive.

Apart from public sector roles, he was also a Research Associate at the University of Waikato where he had joined research with the university colleagues and supervised PhD students. In addition, he has been a fellow and advisor for the Vietnam National University, Hanoi, Vietnam. 

His key research interests include economics of education, human capital, labour market, productivity, social welfare,population health, working and well-being, and other economic development issues.

At ANU, Dr Doan's research focuses on time uses, gender inequality, health behaviour and health outcomes. His current projects are on time uses, time constraint, gender time inequality and their effects on health and wealth in the short and long terms. He also works with RMIT, Master Builder Associations NSW on a project for Construction young workers' WHS, and works for a joint project with Monash University, KPMG and Commonwealth Department of Health on impact of Covid19 on mental health, and a project on Tackling Indigenous Smoking.

Currently I work as part of an interdisciplinary team of academics on a Discovery Research Project “Addressing the hour-glass ceiling: New case for action on gender equality”. This project aims to quantify the underlying and uncounted time limit affecting gender equality in health, wealth and the labour market, laying the foundation for new policy action.

I am also a co-investigator on a Project with RMIT "Conversation about life, health and safety: Social supports for young construction workers' health and safety". The project aims to:

• help improve young workers’ awareness and preparedness to deal with risks to their health safety and wellbeing (at work and in life) and equip them to participate actively in work health and safety processes, and
• provide supervisors with the skills they need to support young workers in working in safe and healthy ways.

We will achieve this by examining the nature of supervisor-worker communication about safety issues, health (mental and physical) and experiences outside work, and implementing and evaluating interventions designed to foster healthy, safe and supportive workplaces for young construction workers.

Tacking indigenous smoking in Australia, in this project I mainly work on modeling and data analysis on evaluating impact of tobacco control policies on smoking prevalance and smoking behaviours. I also work on soci-economic determinants of smoking and smoking behavours.

I also work on motherhood and fatherhood and health outcome (mental health, vitality, role emotional, social functioning, general health).

Past projects:

ARC Linkage grant “Working longer, staying healthy, keeping productive”. The project aimed at investigating the complex longitudinal relationships between work participation, work conditions and hours, social and gendered disadvantage, income, savings and mature age workers’ productivity and health. 

The project investigated a major social, economic and policy challenge – how to design productive work that accommodates older workers’ health needs in ways that are fair and feasible. I contributed to strengthening and maintaining the Centre’s research leadership in social inequality, labour markets, time and health, by leading and supporting the collection and analysis of quantitative data.

Digging Deeper: Exploring the effects of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on social connectedness and mental health

In 2021 and 2022, I work in collaboration with Commonwealth Department of Health, KPMG and Monash University on project "Mental Health Modelling and COVID-19" to look at psychological distress and mental health service use during the COVID-19 outbreak in Australia using MBS, PBS, the Census, National Health Survey, tax data (Australian Tax Office) and social welfare benefit data (Department of Social Services), linked together in the Multi-Agency Data integration Project (MADIP) Datalab infrastructure from Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

Stage 1 (2021): Modelling effects of Covid19 on mental health distress and mental health service use, Australian Commonwealth Department of Health.

Stage 2 (2022): Modelling effects of Covid19 on mental health distress and mental health service use, Australian Commonwealth Department of Health.

Employment, socio-economic factors, time constraint, domestic unpaid work and time allocation between partners, food consumptions, sleep, physical  activities, weight gains/BMI and other health outcomes. Students (preferable master and PhD students) who are interested in these topics are welcome to discuss further research topics.

The key research aspects:

-Socio-economic determinants of health

-Causal relationship estimation

-Inequality in Health and health behaviour (decomposition approach)

-Time use, health behaviour and health outcome

-Smoking including vaping/e-cigarette smoking

Getenet Dessie Ayalew, PhD candidate: Double and triple burden of malnutrition, its socio-economic determinants, learning and health outcome and community views among children in Ethiopia from 2015-2024 in Ethiopia: Evidence from a National Sample.

Getu Debalkie, PhD candidate: Socio-economic disparities, health risk factors and non-communicable diseases in Ethiopia