Dr Robyn Whittaker
Programme Leader, Health Technology

Robyn graduated in medicine from Auckland University and worked in hospitals and Family Planning Association clinics before undertaking a Masters in Public Health. On completing training in Public Health Medicine she worked as a Public Health Physician at the Waitemata District Health Board from 2002-2004 where she was involved in establishing and implementing a Cardiovascular Health Project for the district, involving tobacco control, improving nutrition and physical activity, electronic decision support, cardiac rehabilitation and organised stroke care.

Robyn joined the Clinical Trials Research Unit as a Research Fellow in 2004. Her initial contributions were as a co-investigator on the unit’s smoking cessation studies (such as PQNIQ, SONIQ, RELIQ) and in developments arising from STOMP – the unit’s mobile phone text messaging smoking cessation programme. This included implementation as a national programme funded by the Ministry of Health and delivered by The Quit Group as ‘Txt2quit’; licensing of the programme for international use to HSA Global; and collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (Dr C Free) to deliver the Txt2stop UK trial of the programme. In 2008 she became Programme Leader of the Health Technology Research Programme. She has led the development of  multimedia mobile phone programmes for smoking cessation and depression prevention and is Principal Investigator on these studies (STUB IT and ADAPT).

She is a Fellow of the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine.

Robyn is currently (Sept 2010-Sept 2011) based in Washington DC, USA for a year as a Harkness Fellow in Health Policy.