We would like to warmly congratulate Dr. Farnaz Sabet on receiving the Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence at the University of Melbourne.
Dr. Sabet is a General Practitioner and Global Health Fellow at the Centre for Adolescent Health, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, with extensive experience in global health practice and policy. She has worked for the government, international non-governmental organisations, and academia in Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia, and the Pacific.
Dr Sabet received one of seven awards for excellence for a PhD thesis completed in 2024 – not just from the Department of Paediatrics or even the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, but across the university as a whole.
Her PhD, “Evaluating the Outcomes of Participatory Women’s Groups for Pregnant Adolescent Girls,” investigated health programs for pregnant adolescents in low- and middle-income countries, including women’s groups practising what is known as participatory learning and action (PLA, see below).
Rather than focusing on preventing adolescent pregnancy, her research first involved a synthesis of intervention studies for how pregnancy outcomes can be improved for adolescent mothers and their newborns, an area that has been remarkably neglected despite millions of girls becoming pregnant each year.
With the Ekjut team (Smita, Nikki and Suchitra) and facilitators of women’s groups (ASHAs – government incentivised health workers)
The centrepiece of Dr Sabet’s thesis was a high-profile publication in The Lancet (2023) entitled “The forgotten girls: the state of evidence for health interventions for pregnant adolescents and their newborns in low-income and middle-income countries”. Until this paper, adolescent and maternal health programs had each assumed the other was covering pregnant adolescents. The journal timed the paper’s publication to coincide with the World Congress of the International Federation of Gynecologists and Obstetricians (FIGO) in Paris, where over 4000 delegates participated. Farnaz launched the paper at the Congress with an accompanying in-person commentary from WHO. The paper has subsequently contributed to momentum around advancing adolescent maternal and newborn care, including a global symposium.
Her thesis also specifically evaluated women’s groups practising participatory learning and action for pregnant adolescents in India. This involved in-depth interviews with young mothers which was undertaken in collaboration with Ekjut, a civil society organisation in India with over twenty years’ experience with PLA groups and University College London, as well as global synthesis of data from interventional trials to evaluate the effect of women’s groups on birth outcomes in pregnant adolescents. Given that PLA groups are a WHO-recommended intervention to reduce newborn death in low-resource settings and are being rolled out across multiple Indian states, and that pregnant adolescents are at higher risk of newborn death, her thesis findings have the potential to impact millions of pregnant adolescents and their newborns.
A women’s group practising participatory learning and action
Based in the Department of Paediatrics, Dr Sabet’s PhD spanned the disciplines of adolescent and maternal health with her supervisors being Professor George Patton (primary supervisor until his death in 2022) and Professor Susan Sawyer (supervisor from 2023) from the Centre for Adolescent Health and the University of Melbourne, Professor Audrey Prost from UCL Institute for Global Health and Professor John Carlin from MCRI Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (primary supervisor from 2023).
We warmly congratulate Farnaz on this most well-deserved recognition!