Distinguished Professor Tuan V Nguyen AM is an internationally recognised researcher in osteoporosis, fracture prevention and predictive medicine. His research seeks to answer a deceptively simple but clinically important question: why do some individuals develop disease and adverse health outcomes while others do not — and how can that knowledge be used to predict and prevent those outcomes?

At UTS, Professor Nguyen is Distinguished Professor of Predictive Medicine, Director of the Centre for Health Technologies, and a Theme Lead in the UTS Ageing Research Collaborative. He is an NHMRC Leadership Fellow III and also holds an adjunct professorial appointment at UNSW Sydney. His research spans epidemiology, genetics, biostatistics, artificial intelligence and digital health, with a particular focus on translating population and genomic data into tools for personalised risk prediction and better healthcare decision-making.

Over more than three decades, his work has helped shift osteoporosis research from population-level associations towards individualised prediction of fracture, bone loss and post-fracture outcomes. He led the development of the Garvan Fracture Risk Calculator, which has been incorporated into major clinical guidelines internationally. Building on this work, his group developed BONEcheck™, a digital platform for personalised osteoporosis risk assessment, as well as the Osteogenomic Profile for integrating genomic information into fracture prediction and Skeletal Age, a novel approach to communicating an individual’s skeletal fragility.

A distinctive feature of his research is the integration of long-term population studies with emerging technologies. He has played a major role in the Dubbo Osteoporosis Epidemiology Study, one of the world's longest-running studies of osteoporosis and fracture, and leads the Vietnam Osteoporosis Study, a large population-based investigation of bone health and chronic disease in Vietnam. These resources provide a foundation for research combining clinical data, genomics, data science and AI to develop more precise approaches to disease prediction and prevention.

His current research extends beyond identifying individuals at high risk to a broader question of how risk can be reduced across entire populations. This includes the application of AI to clinical decision-making, digital epidemiology, risk communication, and new strategies for preventing hip fractures among people who may not meet conventional diagnostic thresholds for osteoporosis. This population-wide prevention approach has recently been a focus of his work at the UTS Ageing Research Collaborative.

Professor Nguyen's research has been published widely in leading medical and scientific journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, JAMA, BMJ, Nature, Nature Genetics, and eLife. His research impact has achieved an h-index of 100 (Scopus 15/5/2025), and he has been recognised by ScholarGPS as a Highly Ranked Scholar (Lifetime), placing him among the top 0.05% of scholars worldwide for his lifetime scholarly contributions. He is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, the Royal Society of New South Wales and the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research. 

His contributions to osteoporosis research, prevention and higher education have been recognised through numerous awards and honours, including appointment as a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2022, UTS Chancellor's Medal for Exceptional Research in 2018, UTS Medal for Research Impact in 2026, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Osteoporosis Society in Vietnam in 2026. In 2022, Professor Nguyen’s life and contributions to medical research, osteoporosis prevention and higher education were acknowledged in the Parliament of New South Wales by the Hon. Tania Mihailuk MP and the Hon. Wendy Lindsay MP.