Foundation Director
Jane is the Foundation Director of the Australian Centre for Behavioural Research in Diabetes (ACBRD), established in 2010 as a partnership for better health between Diabetes Victoria and Deakin University. She has a PhD in health psychology from Royal Holloway, University of London, is a chartered psychologist, a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Jane leads a large and varied program of research in Australia, with established and ongoing international collaborations (particularly in the UK and Denmark), through which she aims to improve the quality of life and self-care of people with diabetes, and encourage healthcare professionals to better understand the impact of diabetes and its treatment from the individual’s perspective. Her principle research interests focus on developing, evaluating and enhancing provision of structured diabetes education; restoring awareness of hypoglycaemia and preventing recurrent severe hypoglycaemia; expectations, experiences and optimisation of new diabetes treatments and technologies; the experience of social stigma related to diabetes; monitoring and reducing diabetes distress; investigating the needs of specific ‘hardly reached’ populations, e.g. young adults with type 2 diabetes, adolescents with type 1 diabetes, women with diabetes planning and during pregnancy. Jane also has a strong interest in the development, use and interpretation of measures of psychological processes and outcomes in diabetes, also known as patient-reported outcomes (PROs).
According to ExpertScape, among worldwide researchers, Jane ranks in the top 0.2% and 0.15% for type 1 and type 2 diabetes, and she is Australia’s leading behavioural diabetes researcher. Jane has published 210+ articles in peer-reviewed journals, two books, several book chapters, two position statements, one international guideline and 220+ conference abstracts. Google Scholar metrics show there have been >8,400 citations of her work (>6,050 since 2016), and she has an H-index[1] of 42, an i10-index[2] of 128. SciVal indicates she has a field-weighted impact factor of 2.01 (i.e. twice the world average (1.0) and well above the Australian average (1.48). Twenty-three percent of her publications are among the top 10% cited worldwide, and her research has been cited in more than 100 countries.
In 2018, Jane was honoured to be the subject of a Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology profile: ‘Jane Speight: tackling diabetes and its stigma Down Under’. In 2019, her profile featured by The Lancet in a virtual collection to mark International Women’s Day: #LancetWomen.
Jane has been an investigator on several trials and research programme, attracting funds of over $72 million, with $63 million achieved since 2015. These include: the EU IMI2 4-year HypoRESOLVE grant (2018-2022); UK NIHR 5.5-year DAFNEplus (2016-2021); the NHMRC MaGDA-2 study (2019-2022); the NHMRC GooD4Mum study (2020-2024); the NHMRC PREDICT study (2021-2026); and the MRFF TTRA 2-year Project LISTEN (2021-2023).
[1] H-index indicates that at least ‘h’ publications have at least ‘h’ citations
[2] i10-index is the number of publications with at least 10 citations
orcid.org/0000-0002-1204-6896