Ridvan Tupai-Firestone (known as Riz) is a Samoan–New Zealand academic, and is from January 2025 is a full professor in the Centre for Public Health Research at Massey University.
[1] She has links to the villages of Falealupu on Savai’i island and Matautu on Falealili.
[1] 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.
[4][5] 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.
[4] In 2014 Tupai-Firestone was awarded the New Zealand Health Research Council’s Sir Thomas Davis Te Patu Kite Rangi Ariki Health Research Fellowship.