Academy Fellow

Emma Baker is Professor of Housing Research and founding Director of the Australian Centre for Housing Research at Adelaide University. Her research examines how housing shapes inequality, health and people’s opportunities across their lives. Much of her work has focused on building better evidence about Australian housing - developing national data resources, finding new ways to measure the conditions people live in, and using those insights to understand a housing system undergoing significant change. Her work connects what happens inside individual homes with broader patterns of housing opportunity and inequality.  

A recurring challenge in housing research is the lack of information about housing conditions and residents’ experiences. Baker has led collaborative projects to develop the Australian Housing Conditions Dataset and related rental housing research infrastructure. These resources make information about housing quality, conditions and household circumstances available to researchers, governments and community organisations. They enable questions to be investigated that conventional data cannot adequately address, and are used in research, policy analysis and advocacy, including work informing rental reform. 

Her research also considers the wider changes reshaping Australian housing. As access to ownership becomes more uneven and more people rent for longer, established assumptions about housing careers and policy need reconsidering. Her work on housing pathways and a two-tenure future examines what these changes mean for households, how opportunities and risks are distributed, and how policy might respond. Much of this work follows people’s housing circumstances over time. It examines how affordability, tenure, residential instability and housing conditions interact, helping distinguish short-term difficulties from problems that persist or accumulate. This approach provides a fuller picture of housing disadvantage and the ways it contributes to inequalities across households, generations and places. Within this broader research, Baker investigates the relationship between housing and health. Working with colleagues in the social and health sciences, she examines the mental and physical health consequences of unaffordable housing, insecure renting and poor conditions. Collaborative research has also investigated links between housing circumstances and biological ageing. Her work on cold homes documents a problem often overlooked in Australia’s relatively mild climate. It examines who lives in homes that are difficult to keep adequately warm, the consequences for health, and the limitations of commonly used measures of cold housing and energy poverty. The findings have informed national and international discussions about housing quality, rental standards and household energy costs. 

Professor Baker works with government, housing providers, industry and community organisations on practical housing questions. Her research has contributed to Australian and international policy discussions about rental housing, affordability, Indigenous housing data and mental health. She also contributes to media and public discussion. Through centre leadership and national research collaborations, she supports students and emerging researchers.  

Professor of Housing Research, Adelaide University (2019–) 

Founding Director, Australian Centre for Housing Research (2021–) 

Director, AHURI Adelaide Research Centre (2020–) 

Deputy Director, NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Healthy Housing (2021–2025) 

Co-Chair, European Network for Housing Research, Residential Context of Health Working Group (2016–) 

2015–2018 – Australian Research Council Future Fellowship 

2015 – Federal Housing Minister’s Award for Excellence in Housing and Urban Research 

2008 – Australasian Housing Researchers Conference Early Career Award 

2024 – University of Adelaide Research Excellence and Impact Award 

Baker, E., Beer, A., Daniel, L., Bentley, R. & Lester, L. (2026). Housing careers, housing pathways and young people in developed economies. Housing Studies, 1–19. DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2026.2640192 

Beer, A., Baker, E., Ong ViforJ, R., Horne, R. & Gurran, N. (2026). The agency of change: conceptualizing pathways towards an affordable housing future. Housing Studies, 41(4), 891–909. DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2025.2502530 

Clair, A., Baker, E. & Kumari, M. (2024). Are housing circumstances associated with faster epigenetic ageing? Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 78(1), 40–46. DOI: 10.1136/jech-2023-220523 

Baker, E., Morey, C., Daniel, L., Beer, A., Bentley, R., Stone, W., Rowley, S., Nygaard, C. A. & London, K. (2023). An Australian housing conditions data infrastructure. Scientific Data, 10, 817. DOI: 10.1038/s41597-023-02739-2 

Clair, A. & Baker, E. (2022). Cold homes and mental health harm: evidence from the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Social Science & Medicine, 314, 115461. DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115461