Susan Morton (academic)

Susan Mary Bennett Morton is a New Zealand epidemiologist, and is a full professor of public health at the University of Technology Sydney, specialising in longitudinal studies of public health. In 2019, Morton was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to epidemiology and public health research.

Academic career
Morton completed a Bachelor with Honours degree in pure mathematics at Victoria University of Wellington, and taught mathematics in Lower Hutt before undertaking a medical degree at the University of Auckland. She also holds a teaching diploma from the Auckland College of Education. She was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to study at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she earned a PhD with a thesis titled Life course determinants of offspring size at birth: an intergenerational study of Aberdeen women. She worked on a dataset collected by Raymond Illsley, Professor of Medical Sociology at the University of Aberdeen in the 1960s, and showed that a woman's childhood social environment and growth influenced the birth weight of her children. At this point she became interested in longitudinal studies, and "the opportunity to provide evidence that could inform policy and make a difference by actually understanding what lived realities were about, rather than just looking at routine statistics or big data."

Morton returned to New Zealand and joined the faculty of the University of Auckland, where she was appointed full professor in 2019. Morton established the Centre for Longitudinal Research at the University of Auckland in 2010, and was the inaugural director of the centre. She was the director and principal investigator of the Growing Up in New Zealand longitudinal study until 2022. In early 2023 Morton was appointed as the inaugural Director of INSIGHT, a pan-university research centre focused on population health, based at the University of Technology Sydney.

Honours and awards
In 2019, Morton was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to epidemiology and public health research.