Petrea Cahir

Petrea is a postdoctoral researcher with the Aboriginal Families Study. Her PhD research describes the fictional storytelling skills of 5-7 year old Aboriginal children growing up in metropolitan, regional and remote communities in South Australia. She has a clinical background as a speech pathologist working in a range of acute and outpatient teams in the paediatric hospital setting. Petrea has worked on population level studies investigating child speech and language development. As a linguist, she was also involved in a project documenting the Malak Malak language (Daly River region).

Petrea hopes that the Stronger Futures CRE embraces the opportunity to deeply listen to all avenues of expertise and ensure that the fruits of collaborations are actioned into meaningful, tangible outcomes for policy and practice.

Petrea brings a willingness to listen as well as the drive to action community-identified needs. She brings expertise in child language development and sociolinguistics and and interest in how these intersect with social determinants of health and persistent social inequities.

Through her experience working as a clinician in health services and as a researcher on population health level studies, Petrea brings knowledge of how evidence translates to a range of contexts.

Petrea was born, grew up, lives and is bringing up her children on unceded Wurundjeri Country.

Being in the bush; watching her children learn about the world; and sharing laughter, food and music with friends and family are things that keep Petrea strong.