Rate My Professor Flora Tzelepis

Associate Professor Flora Tzelepis is based in the School of Medicine and Public Health within the Faculty of Health and Medicine at the University of Newcastle. She earned her PhD in Health Behaviour Sciences from the University of Newcastle in 2010, with a thesis examining the effectiveness of proactively offered NSW Quitline telephone support on smoking cessation rates, and a Bachelor of Science (Psychology) with Honours from the same institution in 1998. Her career began as a Research Officer at the Centre for Health Research & Psycho-oncology (CHeRP), a collaboration between Cancer Council NSW and the University of Newcastle, from 1999 to 2001, advancing to Senior Research Officer until 2010. She then held a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow position in 2010, followed by a Leukaemia Foundation of Australia/Cure Cancer Australia Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship from 2011. Tzelepis progressed to Associate Professor at the University of Newcastle and is affiliated with the Hunter Medical Research Institute.

Her research specializations include chronic disease prevention in priority populations, such as the effectiveness of emerging behavioural interventions and strategies to increase uptake of under-utilised services. Key projects encompass a large randomised trial on the long-term effectiveness of real-time video counselling for smoking cessation among rural residents and an NHMRC-funded cluster randomised trial evaluating electronic feedback and referral to telephone and online support for reducing multiple health risk behaviours among vocational education students. She developed and psychometrically evaluated the Quality of Patient-Centered Cancer Care measure, which has been translated and adopted internationally. Tzelepis has authored over 120 peer-reviewed research papers, garnering more than 4,200 citations. Notable publications include 'Proactive telephone counseling for smoking cessation: meta-analyses by recruitment channel and methodological quality' (Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2011), 'A randomised controlled trial of proactive telephone counselling on cold-called smokers’ cessation rates' (Tobacco Control, 2011), and the Cochrane review 'Real-time video counselling for smoking cessation' (2019). She has secured over $7.1 million in competitive grant funding as chief investigator on more than $2.1 million, supervised six PhD students to completion, and served on NHMRC Clinical Trials and Cohort Studies grant panels. Tzelepis received four consecutive competitive fellowships: Leukaemia Foundation of Australia/Cure Cancer Australia, National Heart Foundation, Cancer Institute NSW Early Career, and NHMRC Career Development Fellowship.