Bio
Karen Peres is a dentist with two master's degrees, one in Paediatric Dentistry and another in Public Health. She completed her PhD in Epidemiology at the University of Sao Paulo in 2002 after spending one year at University College London, UK. Karen was a professor in Epidemiology in Brazil until 2012, when she moved to Australia. She was a researcher at the Australian Research Centre for Population Oral Health (ARCPOH), University of Adelaide, Australia, until 2018, where she was the Director of The Dental Practice Education Research Unit (DPERU). In September 2018, Karen was appointed as Associate Professor of Dentistry, School of Dentistry and Oral Health, Griffith University, Australia. Karen joined the National Dental Research Institute Singapore, National Dental Care Centre Singapore, as a Principal Investigator and Professor at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, in May 2020.Karen is an internationally recognized researcher in the field of Child Oral Health and Oral Epidemiology and spent seven years as a member of the Research Advisory Committee of the Australian Dental Research Foundation and South Pacific Child Oral Health taskforce.
Her research areas of interest include child oral health epidemiology, inequalities in general and oral health, life course epidemiology, oral health surveillance, the relationship between oral health and general health, and the assessment of the effectiveness of oral health programs for children. Karen has been involved in international collaborative work on breastfeeding effects on several children's health outcomes. Their findings were worldwide spread and resulted in a special issue of The Lancet published in 2016 (DOI: 10.1016 / S0140-6736). She has supervised more than 30 Masters and PhD students, authored fourteen book chapters and more than 150 peer-reviewed papers. Her work has received more than 11000 citations, an H index of 62. She was a CI of an NHMRC partnership grant of the National Adult Oral Health in Australia. She is one of the coordinators of oral health studies nested in the internationally known Pelotas, Brazil birth cohort studies. She is currently coordinating the International Consortium of Oral Health Birth Cohort Studies project, sponsored by the Borrow Foundation, UK.
Education
Master of Public Health
University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Diploma in Public Health
University of Sao Paulo, Brazil