Professor David Wilkinson currently works as National Clinical Lead for Continuing Professional Development at the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, and as Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Journal of General Practice. He is in clinical practice as a specialist skin cancer GP in Maleny and at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital. He continues as Independent Chair of the Sunshine Coast Health Institute.
Prior to moving to the Sunshine Coast Hinterland in 2021 David was Deputy Vice Chancellor Engagement at Macquarie University (2013 to 2021). As a member of the Executive Group, his portfolio was accountable for 75% of university revenue ($750M per annum) through responsibility for all domestic and international student recruitment, marketing, brand management, philanthropy and alumni relations, and strategic corporate partnerships.
David grew up in the UK, trained in medicine there, worked in rural Africa from 1987 to 1998 as medical superintendent of a 450-bed rural district hospital, and director of a research centre, and has been in Australia since. In Africa he established a major rural health research enterprise within the South African Medical Research Council funded by the World Health Organisation, National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA and the UK Wellcome Trust. In 1994 he won a competitive National Institutes of Health Fellowship to study for a masters degree in Epidemiology (MSc) at Columbia University, New York. His research in Africa generated 3 doctorates: an MD, a PhD and a DSc.
His first appointment here was as Foundation Chair in Rural Health at the Universities of Adelaide and South Australia, before becoming Pro Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences at the University of South Australia and then moving to The University of Queensland to take up the role of Dean of Medicine.
He has had a distinguished academic career with H-Index >50 and with >8000 citations. He has held ARC, NHMRC and MRFF grants, a prestigious National Senior Teaching Fellowship in 2012, and a Fulbright Senior Scholarship in 2013. In 2008 the Royal College of Physicians (London) honoured David with the award of Fellowship (FRCP) in recognition of “distinguished contributions to medicine”. In 2001 the Royal College recognised his “decade of achievement” in Africa by awarding Membership of the Public Health Medicine Faculty (MFPHM), and in 2000 the College bestowed the Frederick Murgatroyd Memorial Prize "for making an important contribution to the science or practice of tropical medicine".