Rate My Professor Gabrielle McCallum

Associate Professor Gabrielle McCallum serves as Head of Discipline in the School of Nursing and Associate Professor in Nursing within the Faculty of Health at Charles Darwin University. A dedicated nurse academic with over two decades of experience working in the Northern Territory, she earned her Bachelor of Nursing from the University of South Australia in 1998, followed by a Graduate Diploma of Public Health and Master of Public Health from Charles Darwin University in 2008 and 2010, respectively, and completed her PhD there in 2015. She also holds positions as Senior Research Fellow, Senior Lecturer, and Program Leader of the Child Health Respiratory team at the affiliated Menzies School of Health Research. Her research addresses important clinical questions in paediatric respiratory medicine, filling critical gaps for children and adolescents at risk of poor lung health in Australia, Timor-Leste, and the Asia-Pacific region. This includes acute lower respiratory infections, bronchiectasis, clinical trials, and the development of culturally appropriate educational resources for diverse settings.

Gabrielle McCallum has led multiple large NHMRC-funded multi-centre randomised controlled trials and observational studies with multidisciplinary teams extending to New Zealand, Alaska, Malaysia, and Timor-Leste, including the world’s first randomised controlled trials on bronchiolitis in First Nations children. Her work has translated into health policy changes for post-hospitalisation follow-up of bronchiolitis, influenced national and international treatment guidelines, and driven a paradigm shift in paediatric respiratory management across the Northern Territory. She developed and evaluated the first First Nations-specific educational flipcharts for common childhood respiratory conditions such as bronchiolitis, pneumonia, bronchiectasis, and asthma, which have been adapted into the multi-lingual mobile application “Lung Health for Kids”. Key publications include “Extended Versus Standard Antibiotic Course Duration in Children <5 Years of Age Hospitalized With Community-acquired Pneumonia in High-risk Settings: Four-week Outcomes of a Multicenter, Double-blind, Parallel, Superiority Randomized Controlled Trial” (Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, 2022), “Three-weekly doses of azithromycin for Indigenous infants hospitalised with bronchiolitis: A multi-centre, randomised, placebo-controlled trial” (Frontiers in Pediatrics, 2015), “Antibiotics for persistent cough or wheeze following acute bronchiolitis in children” (Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2017), and “Comparison of Profiles of First Nations and non-First Nations children with bronchiectasis over two 5-Year periods in the Northern Territory, Australia” (Chest, 2021). In 2017, she received the National Excellence in Education Leadership award in the Women in Leadership category. She serves as a primary supervisor for higher degree by research students.