Associate Professor Gehan Roberts
Deputy Director and Associate Director, Clinical Services
Associate Professor Gehan Roberts is a developmental-behavioural paediatrician and holds appointments with The Royal Children’s Hospital’s Centre for Community Child Health, the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and the University of Melbourne. Gehan completed his clinical fellowship in child development at the Boston Children's Hospital. He has a Masters in Public Health from Harvard University and a PhD in the field of child development from the University of Melbourne. Gehan coordinates the Victorian Training Program in Community Child Health, is an Associate Director (Clinical Services) at the Centre for Community Child Health, and is engaged in research, clinical supervision and teaching at both an undergraduate and post-graduate level. From 2016 to 2020, Gehan was the President of Australasian Society for Developmental Paediatrics, the peak body for Australasian doctors who care for children with developmental disorders.
Experience
In 2015 Gehan was appointed an Associate Director at The Royal Children’s Hospital, Centre for Community Child Health, with responsibility for the clinical service and fellowship training. He is involved in teaching medical practitioners, allied health workers, teachers and families, and also in curriculum development and program evaluation.
His fellowship training at Children’s Hospital Boston and current clinical practice facilitate involvement in a wide variety of clinical experiences within the field of developmental and behavioural paediatrics, including individual consultation for referred patients, follow-up of patients for ongoing behavioural and psychopharmacological care and leading multidisciplinary teams in comprehensive evaluation of children aged infancy to school age, referred with developmental and behavioural concerns.
His clinical interests are in the fields of developmental evaluation, behavioural consultation, learning disabilities and psychopharmacology. He is currently involved in research in the fields of developmental-behavioural paediatrics in the secondary care sector, quality improvement and long-term outcomes of very premature infants.
He has completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne, assessing school readiness profiles of very preterm children prior to entering school. In addition, Associate Professor Roberts has an interest in bringing more evidence- based medicine into the standard of care for children with behavioural and developmental difficulties.
He is passionate about medical education and supervises paediatric advanced trainees as well as at Honours-, Masters- and Doctoral-level students. His Masters in Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health, focusing on Clinical Effectiveness, Biostatistics and Epidemiology, has given him a broad and global perspective on child health and development and specific skills in teaching evidence-based practice, critical appraisal of research and designing and conducting studies. In 2009 he was appointed the coordinator of the Victorian Training Program in Community Child Health, the largest training program of its type in Australia.
