Karen Villanueva

Karen Villanueva is a Research Fellow at the Social Equity Research Centre, RMIT University, and an Honorary Research Associate at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. Her place-based research focuses on the influence of urban neighbourhoods on child health behaviours and outcomes, with a focus on locational and socio-environmental determinants of children’s independent mobility, activity spaces, and early development. Karen has 83 peer-reviewed articles across various disciplines (Google Scholar h-index of 36; 6, 295 citations as of June 2026).  She has a track record in mixed-methods research on child liveability, including big data, qualitative methods, and project management of philanthropic and Federal and State government-funded projects. Karen participates in the working group to create child-specific policy (and spatial) indicators for the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities 1000 challenge. She has co-supervised 3 Honours, 2 Master's, and 5 PhD candidates, 11 research assistants, 2 interns, 2 international visitors, and numerous Work-Integrated Learning students, helping to grow capacity in this field.

 

A sample of her recent research and project management experience includes:

•    The Data to Decisions project uses big data and qualitative research methods to develop neighbourhood built environment indicators of early childhood development. Karen has experience conceptualising, facilitating the linkage of, and applying spatial measures and indices of the neighbourhood built environment to child mobility behaviours and health outcomes, including early childhood development. She helped to secure the linkage of spatial built environment measures (e.g., parks, housing, walkability, transport) to over 200,000 children’s homes in the 2015 Australian Early Development Census. 

 

•  The Research Alliance for Youth Disability and Mental Health (or 'RAY') program aims to improve the mental health and wellbeing of young Australians with disability. Karen is a Research Fellow on the program and is involved in exploring supportive neighbourhood built environments for children and youth with disability. More about the program can be found here: https://www.raydisabilitymentalhealth.org/about-us

•    'What works for place-based approaches in Victoria' produced a meta-synthesis review of the factors influencing Australian place-based approaches for the Victorian government, identifying several policy and practice key learnings of direct relevance to policies for children and families (Alderton and Villanueva et al. 2023). These findings have been used to develop training across the Victorian Government public sector. More about the project can be found here: https://jss.org.au/programs/centre-for-just-places/place-based-approaches-research/

 

•   The Kids in Communities Study (KiCS) is an Australian mixed-method investigation of how community-level factors in five areas—physical environment, social environment, socio-economic factors, access to services, and governance—influence early childhood development outcomes. Karen was the project manager for the study, which involved a collaboration of academic experts from six national and international universities, and policymakers and child development professionals from over 10 government and non-governmental partner organisations. More about the project can be found here: https://www.mcri.edu.au/kics

 

Before joining RMIT University, Karen was at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, the University of Melbourne, and the Centre for the Built Environment and Health, the University of Western Australia. She has also worked as a Project Coordinator for Emergency Risk Management at the City of Bayswater Local Government, Western Australia.