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Biography
Dr Caitlin A. Howlett is a behavioural science Research Projects Officer within the Public Health & Wellbeing Group at CSIRO. She works across a range of research projects that are broadly focussed on improving public health and wellbeing, changing retail food environments, and designing and delivering behaviour change interventions to prevent the onset of chronic conditions, particularly through the use of smartphone technology. She has skills in managing large-scale projects, designing and administering online surveys, data analysis, and conducting large-scale systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Caitlin is interested in how scientific knowledge is translated and applied to real-world contexts to improve public health outcomes and trajectories. Recently, Caitlin has become interested in co-designing research in collaboration with consumers to enhance its relevance and real-world significance.
In 2023, she completed her PhD program at the University of South Australia. Her doctoral work investigated cognitive flexibility - the ability to effectively adapt cognitive and behavioural strategies in response to changing task or environmental demands - as a marker of vulnerability in people with persistent pain conditions. Particularly, her work focused on improving the psychometric understanding of self-report and neuropsychological assessments that are typically used to assess cognitive flexibility, which, in turn, has been influential in shaping how the construct of cognitive flexibility is currently conceptualised and operationalised in research and clinical settings.