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 160 papers in peer reviewed journals. 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.

In 1997 he won the World Health Organisation's World No Tobacco Day Medal; in 1999, the National Heart Foundation of Australia's gold medal; and in 2003 he was voted by his international peers to be awarded the American Cancer Society's Luther Terry Award for outstanding individual leadership in tobacco control. He is editor of the British Medical Journal's specialist journal, Tobacco Control.

He is a life member of the Australian Consumers' Association and was its chairman 1999-2002.
He was a key member of the Coalition for Gun Control which won the 1996 Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's community Human Rights award.