Riz Tupai-Firestone
Ridvan Tupai-Firestone is a Samoan–New Zealand academic, and from January 2025 is a full professor in the Centre for Public Health Research at Massey University. Tupai-Firestone works on social and cultural health inequalities.
Early life and education
Tupai-Firestone was born in Samoa, and moved to New Zealand with her family in 1976. She has links to the villages of Falealupu on Savai'i island and Matautu on Falealili. Tupai-Firestone completed a Bachelor of Speech and Language Therapy at the University of Canterbury and then a PhD titled Obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome among taxi drivers: consequences and barriers to accessing health services at the Massey University.Academic career
Tupai-Firestone joined the faculty of Massey University, rising to associate professor in 2021 and full professor in 2025. She first worked in sleep science at the Moe Tika Moe Pai SleepWake Research Centre before focusing on public health. She is interested in social-cultural and health inequalities, community interventions for obesity and other diet-related health problems, and works with young Pacific people with non-communicable diseases. In 2020 she was awarded a Marsden grant to lead a team from five institutions to investigate associations between culture, food systems, diet and traditional practices, and diet-related diseases.Tupai-Firestone was the Pacific Strategy Leader for the A Better Start National Science Challenge, and was also part of the Healthier Lives challenge.
She was appointed Chair of the Lottery Health Research Committee in 2020. She was also on the jury of the 2024 Falling Walls Lab.