Profile: Sue Rabbit Roff

Published on Tuesday 2 August 2011 18:51

SUE Rabbitt Roff is a social scientist who has spent a career spanning four decades studying subjects including teenage parenting, the health of nuclear-test veterans and human rights.

Over the course of her career, she has had more than 70 papers published and for the past 20 years she has been based at Dundee University in the Centre for Medical Education. At Dundee, she has carried out research into the health of nuclear-test veterans, discovering documentary evidence that troops had been ordered to run, walk and crawl through contaminated areas in the days following detonations in Australia, and presenting her findings to the Scottish Government. That led to her interest in the issue of informed consent in human experimentation, particularly in relation to living and deceased organ donation.

She was born in Wisconsin, US, but moved to Australia as a baby and lived there until she was in her 20s, working at the University of Melbourne and Monash University. In the 1980s, she moved to New York where she worked for human-rights organisations and was accredited as a non-governmental representative to the United Nations.

She also worked on a teenage parenting project in New York schools for the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.

Mrs Roff has two grown-up daughters. One is a doctor, the other a music producer.