Senior Research Fellow
School of Public Health & Preventative Medicine, Monash University
Dr Susan Harden is a UK-trained clinical oncology consultant specialising in thoracic malignancies and stereotactic ablative radiotherapy (SABR) who worked for 14 years at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust before moving to Melbourne.
She qualified in medicine from Oxford University, trained in London and Cambridge and was awarded a Doctorate in Medicine for her translational research undertaken at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital, Baltimore, USA, focusing on the low level molecular detection of lung, prostate and head and neck cancers.
Her current research interests are translational and radiotherapy trials for lung cancer and utilising national clinical quality cancer registry datasets to highlight and address variation in clinical outcome.
In 2016, Dr Harden was appointed as the first oncology clinical lead for the UK National Lung Cancer Audit (NLCA) and the UK National Mesothelioma Audit and successfully implemented the reporting of curative intent treatment rates for early stage lung cancer in England (surgery and radical radiotherapy, including SABR) and curative intent multimodality treatment rates for locally advanced lung cancers, both non-small cell (NSCLC) and small cell (SCLC), as quality measures into the Annual Reports.
In her role as senior lead for mesothelioma, she extended data collection and analysis to include peritoneal mesothelioma and conducted the first organisational audit of mesothelioma services across the UK in 2019. She has presented these data at multiple National and International meetings and is senior author on resulting publications.
In 2018 Dr Harden was competitively selected as a clinical lead for the National Cancer Registrations and Analysis Service (NCRAS), Public Health England with research focusing on the national radiotherapy dataset (RTDS). She has developed, conducted and published as senior author, a series of research projects designed to identify variation in adherence to national radiotherapy guidelines (muscle invasive bladder cancer) and the introduction of practice-changing radiotherapy trials into routine practice across England, including use of SABR for early stage lung cancer.
Since arriving in Australia, Dr Harden works as a Radiation Oncology Consultant at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (Thoracic, Urologic and CUP) and is a part time Senior Research Fellow with the Victorian Lung Cancer Registry at Monash University.