Associate Professor Gabrielle Davie

Research

With a background including a master's in Biostatistics from the University of Melbourne and 20 years of involvement in quantitative research projects, Gabrielle has a diverse range of research experience and interests. She has been in the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine since 2005; prior to that she worked at the Wellington Campus of the University of Otago in the Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics Unit at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne.

The use of routinely collected datasets for health research, in particular in the area of injury, is a key research area of hers. She has considerable expertise with accessing and analysing New Zealand’s hospital discharge data, mortality collection, coronial case files and injury compensation claims for research purposes. This has resulted in Gabrielle being a named investigator on numerous research projects, as well as leading projects in the areas of injury surveillance, injury outcomes and the intersection between rurality, deprivation and ethnicity. While on research and study leave in the UK, Gabrielle led research that used UK primary care records to investigate the risk of fracture for those with incident type 2 diabetes.

Gabrielle leads a team of data managers / programmers that provide crucial expertise to researchers across departments and campuses of the University of Otago. She has received funding to further develop her skills and experience as a leader of health research utilising routinely collected data. Gabrielle enjoys collaborative research environments, often working in teams involving national and international researchers.

Gabrielle is currently a named investigator on multiple research projects funded by a range of sources including the Health Research Council and the Otago Medical Research Foundation. Two examples of current research includes ‘A rural-urban classification for New Zealand health research and policy’ (HRC; 2019-2022) and ‘Evaluating the impact of prehospital care on mortality following major trauma’ (HRC; 2018-2022). To date, Gabrielle has led two projects that use Statistics New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), a powerful large research database containing data from government agencies, Stats NZ surveys and non-government organisations.