Associate Professor Cromar, who lectures in Environmental Health in the School of Medicine, has won the Australian Institute of Environmental Health's Award for Outstanding Individual Environmental Health Professional of the Year.
"It is an award given for an outstanding individual contribution in the area of environmental health," she said.
"Traditionally it would have been awarded to an Environmental Health Officer ... but this development is saying 'OK , we can look a bit more broadly than just in our narrow circle and start to recognise the expertise that other people in related areas have'."
Dr Cromar's expertise is in the area of risk assessment and public health aspects of water quality. She is a microbial ecologist by training and her nomination for this award recognises that many different disciplines are involved in maintaining public and environmental health.
Her work involves educating future Environmental Health Professionals including EHOs, those people who work mainly in local government to ensure public health is maintained.
The profession dates back to the 1850s when British Lawyer Edwin Chadwick saw the link between living conditions, sanitation and population health.
"There have been people called sanitary inspectors since that time and gradually over the years, the name has changed. These people are now known as Environmental Health Officers which more adequately reflects their range of roles in protecting the public against risks from the environment and maintaining healthy environments for people to live in," Associate Professor Cromar said.
"In the past 20 years, it has become a degree-qualified profession. There is a lot more project management now, very much proactive, rather than the more traditional reactive roles, so EHOs are out there making change rather than just responding to change."
In order to respond to the greater professionalism of the job, Associate Professor Cromar has been working with the Australian Institute of Environment Health to develop a national accreditation policy for both undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
"(This is) In response to the fact that qualifications have originally come from TAFE and are now University based, so there has been some rapid development in terms of professionalism," she said.
"Really I was interested in assisting the Institute to develop policy in this area because we (as academics) are looking at moving to include post graduate qualifications as a basis for practice and when we looked at developing a policy on post graduate qualifications, we realised that there was no consistent policy on undergraduate education. At the same time, the Institute were responding to the drivers from the education sector and the profession to standardise qualifications and so the timing was perfect.
"After several years, we finally tied the bow on a national undergraduate policy at the end of last year, this award is largely I think in recognition of all that work."
The post-graduate degree, which Associate Professor Cromar hopes to offer from next year, will be one of a small handful in Australia that will allow people who don't have an environmental health first degree - but perhaps a generic science degree - to graduate as a fully-qualified Environmental Health Officers in 18 months to two years.
It helps that she is involved in the development of standards for post graduate Environmental Health degrees
"I am trying to dovetail the two along," she said.
"The development of national policy on postgraduate programs will be sitting side-by-side with the development of our program, so we can ensure our program is directly relevant nationally."
And the good news is there are huge job vacancies for Environmental Health Officers, 150-200 unfilled vacancies a year, according to Associate Professor Cromar.
Associate Professor Cromar also edited Environmental Health in Australia and New Zealand, the first textbook specifically written for this region in the discipline and used as the course text for most of the current degree based EH programs around Australia
"That came out at the beginning of 2004 and has proved so popular that it is already into a second reprint with plans for a second edition in a couple of years," she said.
"It's the standard text now for most, if not all, undergraduate programs around the country, and also, importantly, is being picked up by local government officers.
"So people who are actually practising in the area are now using it too, and that's very encouraging. It's not just a dusty shelf text book but something that people actually use in their day-to-day work."
Associate Professor Cromar has also been an active research leader in the Department of Environmental Health which boasts the strongest record of PhD completions by a University Department in the environmental health area in Australia.
"We are very pleased to have taken a significant number of students all the way from undergraduate education through postgraduate to PhDs in environmental health. These people are now having a major impact on population health in this country and overseas with our PhD graduates working for organisations including the National Food Authority (ANZFA) in Canberra and the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Vietnam"
A long way from the days of the lowly sanitary inspectors.
