Dr Anthea Lindquist

Anthea Lindquist is a passionate clinician researcher, balancing roles as an obstetrician and perinatal epidemiologist. She practices clinically at the Mercy Hospital for Women, a major tertiary referral centre in Melbourne, where she heads up one of the obstetric units. Anthea completed her PhD in perinatal epidemiology at the University of Oxford UK and now also co-leads the Perinatal Epidemiology group at the University of Melbourne. In addition to supervising multiple PhD, Masters and medical students and nurturing the next generation of perinatal researchers, Anthea leads a dynamic and clinically-focussed portfolio of research. Her work examines the long-term impacts for mother and baby following different exposures during pregnancy and the periconceptual period. Together with her team, Anthea has been the first to publish in the field of obstetrics using big data and causal inference methods to mimic the conditions of a randomised trial. This approach has allowed Anthea and her team to examine research questions in pregnancy that would be infeasible or unethical to study in randomised trials, such as the long-term school-age outcomes for children conceived via IVF. Funded by an NHMRC Emerging Leader Fellowship and a Norman Beischer Medical Research Foundation Clinical Fellowship, Anthea and her team are commencing the next phase of big data studies, looking at exposure to common but under-studied medications during pregnancy and the longer-term implications for the pregnancy, the mother and the child.