Ros Thomas

Ros Thomas is a journalist and author who has long championed for the elderly and isolated. She holds a special interest in Aged Care, Alzheimer’s and Dementia Disease and advocates for carers across a range of community and legislative roles. Ros is dedicated to improving the lives of vulnerable Australians and their families.

As Deputy Chair of the West Australian Government’s Carers Advisory Council, Ros strives to protect the rights of carers and to enrich the lives of those they care for, advising the Minister for Community Services on ways to enhance protections and policies. She has been an Ambassador for Alzheimer’s WA.

Ros holds a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Psychology and Literature from the University of Western Australia. For twenty years, she was a national current affairs reporter for the ABC, Nine and Seven before becoming a long-running columnist for The West Australian Newspaper. Her debut novel How to Shame The Devil —the story of an elderly man embroiled in a #MeToo scandal from his past— became a 2022 WA bestseller.

Ros is a prize-winning author of short story, awarded the 2021 UK Staunch Prize from an international field of writers. Her fiction has been published in several British anthologies. She is an experienced public speaker who presents regularly to community forums, book events and charity causes.

Ros was awarded a 2023 Churchill Fellowship to study effective interventions in the identification and management of chronic loneliness in the UK, Netherlands, Sweden and the USA. She will investigate why severe isolation and weak social connections correlate with heart disease and mortality rates on a par with smoking and obesity. Her research will explore how Australia could adopt global best practice models to build better community networks. She hopes her Fellowship can be a catalyst for far-reaching social change.