Natalie Walker

Natalie K. Walker is a New Zealand-born academic and is the Director of the Flinders Clinical Trials Platform at Flinders University in Adelaide in Australia. The Platform supports trial research across the entirety of Flinders University. Walker joined Flinders University in March 2025. Prior to this, she was a Professor of Social and Community Health at the University of Auckland in Auckland in New Zealand, specialising in the reduction of harm from non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. Walker has an interest in smoking cessation but also researches on alcohol, cannabis and sugar.

Academic career

After a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science, Walker joined the faculty of the University of Auckland in 1995, first as a Research Fellow. She completed a PhD in medicine titled Epidemiological studies of leg ulcers in Auckland, New Zealand at the University of Auckland in 2000. Walker was later appointed to full professor. Walker is associate director of the Centre for Addiction Research, and leads addiction research in the National Institute for Health Innovation. Her work has been published in The BMJ, JAMA, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Walker and Chris Bullen led a team that was awarded a Research Excellence Medal by the University in 2018, for their work on ways to assist people quit smoking. She was elected a Fellow of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco in 2019.

Selected works