About

Dr Ray Moynihan is an academic health researcher, author, educator and journalist, based in Australia, in the Northern Rivers of NSW, with a global reputation.

In 2025 Ray is researching with colleagues at the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health, investigating how to address misleading medical information on social media. In 2024, along side his academic research, Ray was running a Junior Landcare project with Brunswick Valley Landcare, working with the Greens, and working as Bands Coordinator at the Byron Bay Public School.

In 2023 he coordinated an innovative series of seed propagation workshops and student tree-plantings for schools across the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, in collaboration with and funded by the Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy and others.

That followed the success of the Regeneration project which Ray ran in 2022-2023, including school workshops, a festival, and a community tree-planting, funded by the NSW government as part of a wider effort to reconnect regional communities ravaged by fires, floods and COVID.

Having reported across print, radio, television and social media, Ray has worked at the ABC TV’s investigative program, Four Corners and the 7:30 Report, ABC Radio’s Background Briefing and The Australian Financial Review.

Since winning a Harkness Fellowship, based at Harvard University in 1999, in addition to his journalism, Ray developed an impressive body of academic work and writing resulting in scientific articles in the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Medical Journal of Australia, PLoS Medicine and the British Medical Journal, BMJ.

Internationally recognized for his work on the business of medicine, Ray has often been interviewed by media globally, and invited to give presentations at universities, conferences and workshops around the world. He has published or broadcast material across many media outlets, including in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Crikey.com, The Conversation, The Byron Echo, ABC Radio National and The Saturday Paper.

The winner of awards for his investigative journalism, Ray’s 2005 book Selling Sickness was described in the New York Times as a “compelling case” and translated into a dozen languages. It was also a finalist in the Walkley Awards and short-listed for the Queensland Premier’s Award. His fourth book, Sex, Lies & Pharmaceuticals was released in late 2010 and generated widespread interest internationally.

Following the awarding of his PhD in 2015, in 2017 Ray won a prestigious National Health and Medical Research Council Fellowship, to investigate and address the problem of too much medicine and overdiagnosis. Together with colleagues from around the globe he also initiated the successful series of the Preventing Overdiagnosis international scientific conferences, which have been co-sponsored by the WHO, and he was a member of the scientific program committee helping to organise the conference, until 2020.

Ray has hosted a series of podcasts from Cochrane Australia, called The Recommended Dose, featuring conversations with some of the world’s big thinkers in healthcare. In late 2021, he co-hosted a podcast series with Cochrane Sustainable Healthcare and The BMJ.

In early 2022 he enrolled in a TAFE Certificate III course in Conservation and Ecosystem Management, in order to learn more about, and work within, the world of ecological restoration.

Ray is an honorary Assistant Professor at Bond University’s Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare, and has been an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Sydney and a conjoint lecturer at the University of Newcastle, in Australia.

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