Karen Villanueva

Karen Villanueva is a Research Fellow at the Social Equity Research Centre, RMIT University, Melbourne, and an Honorary Research Associate at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. Her research focuses on how urban neighbourhoods shape child health behaviours and outcomes. 

Karen has a public health research background and has managed national interdisciplinary projects applying mixed methods on place and health in an early childhood context. She has an established track record in child liveability, big data, and project management of Australian Research Council, philanthropic, and other Federal and State-funded government projects. A sample of her recent research and project management experience includes:

•    The Data to Decisions project uses big data and qualitative research methods to develop neighbourhood built environment indicators of early childhood development. Karen has experience conceptualising, facilitating the linkage of, and applying spatial measures and indices of the neighbourhood built environment to child mobility behaviours and health outcomes, including early childhood development. She helped to secure the linkage of spatial built environment measures (e.g., parks, housing, walkability, transport) to over 200,000 children’s homes in the 2015 Australian Early Development Census. 

•  The Research Alliance for Youth Disability and Mental Health (or 'RAY') program aims to improve the mental health and wellbeing of young Australians with disability. Karen is a Research Fellow on the program and is involved in exploring supportive neighbourhood built environments for children and youth with disability. More about the program can be found here: https://www.raydisabilitymentalhealth.org/about-us

•    'What works for place-based approaches in Victoria' produced a meta-synthesis review of the factors influencing Australian place-based approaches for the Victorian government, identifying several policy and practice key learnings of direct relevance to policies for children and families (Alderton and Villanueva et al. 2023). These findings have been used to develop training across the Victorian Government public sector. More about the project can be found here: https://jss.org.au/programs/centre-for-just-places/place-based-approaches-research/

•   The Kids in Communities Study (KiCS) is an Australian mixed-method investigation of how community-level factors in five areas—physical environment, social environment, socio-economic factors, access to services, and governance—influence early childhood development outcomes. Karen was the project manager for the study, which involved a collaboration of academic experts from six national and international universities, and policymakers and child development professionals from over 10 government and non-governmental partner organisations. More about the project can be found here: https://www.mcri.edu.au/kics

Before joining RMIT University, Karen was at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, the University of Melbourne, and the Centre for the Built Environment and Health, the University of Western Australia. She has also worked as a Project Coordinator for Emergency Risk Management at the City of Bayswater Local Government, Western Australia.