Professor Rod Sinclair named the nation’s leading dermatology researcher in The Australian’s 2026 rankings.
Leading Melbourne dermatologist and hair loss expert Professor Rod Sinclair has been named as one of Australia’s top 250 researchers in a report published this month.
The Australian’s report – Top 250 Australian researchers Research 2026 – lists the top performers across 250 fields of research.
In the Health and Medical Sciences discipline, Professor Sinclair was the only dermatologist to make the list. La Trobe University was listed as the lead institution in dermatology.
Professor Sinclair, who is affiliated with the University of Melbourne and owns Sinclair Dermatology in East Melbourne, is also the editor of Dermatology Republic.
He told DR it was the second year running he had made the list and described it as an opportunity to help raise the profile of dermatology research in Australia.
“Australian dermatology research is getting better, but we’re still really underweight compared to how medicine in Australia performs generally,” he said.
“So, Australia’s highly ranked internationally for medical research, but not for dermatology.
“It’s also nice because we’ve got lots of other things going on, with developing drugs and so forth, and so it’s quite good for people who are engaging with us to know that the research we do has an impact.”
The Australian’s 2026 Research editor Tim Dodd and League of Scholars CEO and cofounder Paul McCarthy explained how they decided on the top 250 research leaders.
“We give every Australian researcher and every Australian university or research organisation an impact score based on their research output in each of 250 fields of research,” they wrote in the report’s introduction.
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“The score is equal to the number of citations for papers published – by the individual and the institution – in the top 20 journals of each particular field over the past five years.
“The score is designed to reward research quality [only papers published in the top journals of each field are considered], impact [we count the citations for each paper and thus measure how much the research is being used by other researchers], and volume [because higher output also leads to a higher impact score, provided quality and impact standards are being met].
“We use publicly available information from Google Scholar to identify researchers, to obtain data on their citations and to link their work with universities and research institutions.”
See the full report here.
