Professor Simon Chapman

Simon Chapman is Professor in Public Health at the University of Sydney. He is a sociologist with a PhD on the semiotics of cigarette advertising, author of 10 books and major government reports and 132 peer reviewed papers. His books include Over our dead bodies: Gun law reform after Port Arthur (Sydney:Pluto 1998); The Last Right? Australians take sides on the right to die (Sydney:Mandarin 1995); The Fight for Public Health:Principles and Practice of Media Advocacy (BMJ Books 1994 with Deborah Lupton); Tobacco in the Third World:a resource Atlas (International Organisation of Consumers' Unions 1990) Great Expectorations: Advertising and the tobacco industry (London:Comedia, 1986);and The Lung Goodbye: tactics for counteracting the tobacco industry in the 1980s (IOCU 1983). His main research interests are in tobacco control, media discourses on health and illness, and risk communication. He teaches annual courses in Public Health Advocacy and Tobacco Control in the University of Sydney's MPH program.

Since 1984, he has been a member of the World Health Organization's Expert Advisory Panel on Tobacco and Health. In 1997 he won the World Health Organisation's World No Tobacco Day Medal. He has been a member of the Governing Council of the Australian Consumers' Association since 1982 and is currently its chairman. He is editor of the British Medical Journal's specialist journal, Tobacco Control. In 2001 the US National Institutes of Health awarded him a grant of $1.6m to study 40 million pages of internal tobacco industry documents.

At the conference he and his colleagues will present a special session on document research in Australia.

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