About the Author
Professor Stephen Tong
Specialist Obstetrician, Pregnancy Researcher
Stephen is a leading Professor of Obstetrics in Australia. He juggles two careers:
As a specialist obstetrician, he has been providing pregnancy care for two decades. Stephen has personally assisted in the birth of thousands of babies. He continues to practice his craft at Mercy Hospital for Women, one of the leading academic maternity hospitals in Australia. There, he also trains obstetric specialists of the future.
Over a long career, he has kept a friendly, watchful eye over many normal vaginal births, forming part of the enthusiastic support team urging spirited pushing. He has also lent a helping hand for births that needed one by performing – or supervising - thousands of caesars, or forceps-assisted births. He has consoled women touched by the devastation of stillbirth and provided expert care for those unfortunate to have developed nasty pregnancy complications. And on occasion, Stephen has led clinical teams who have moved with haste to save a life.
As a research academic, he is currently based at The University of Melbourne. Among one of Australia’s top Professors of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Stephen is widely known internationally. He has flown all over the world to deliver invited presentations at scientific conferences – Munich, Cape Town, New Orleans, Edinburgh, Manchester, Washington, Sao Paolo, Santiago, Auckland, Amsterdam, across Australia, and other locations.
Leading a big team of scientists and clinical researchers, Stephen is chasing discoveries to make pregnancy safer. Researchers under his helm or mentorship include Associate Professors, Senior Lecturers, a Rhodes Scholar, and many obstetricians and scientists.
He is one of the lead investigators running several clinical trials across the world – the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. These trials are testing new treatments to tackle major complications of pregnancy – preeclampsia and ectopic pregnancy. Treatments that may ultimately save the lives of mothers and babies. Many of these treatments were originally discovered by Stephen’s laboratory team in Melbourne before being launched into international clinical trials.
His team is also running a multi-million dollar research program doing their best to develop a new blood test to help women avoid stillbirth – a terrible outcome that prematurely ends three million pregnancies a year across the globe.
Stephen is also engaged in research in low and middle-income (LMIC) countries and is one of the leads of a research consortium that runs large population studies based in Pakistan, Solomon Islands, and South Africa. These studies are documenting how often life-imperiling complications befall pregnant women in these countries where resources are scarce - an attempt to uncover hidden tragedies so that something can be done about it, to save lives.
He is also co-director of Mercy Perinatal (the other co-director is his close friend, the legendary Professor Sue Walker, AO). Mercy Perinatal provides leadership in educating Australia’s obstetricians and midwives with the latest in clinical care. Mercy Perinatal is one of the regional leaders in pregnancy research and provides a clinical sub-specialty service for high-risk pregnancies.
He has authored over 250 scientific papers, many of which have been published in prestigious international journals based in the States, United Kingdom, and Europe. His research team has attracted over ten million dollars in competitive research grant funding. In recognition of his research achievements, has received three major national awards from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC).