Associate Professor Holly Seale

Holly Seale is a social scientist and associate professor at the School of Population Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of New South Wales. Holly leads a program of research focused on the social and behavioural factors impacting engagement with infectious disease prevention strategies. Her work encompasses vaccination, pandemic preparedness, antibiotic resistance and stewardship and healthcare infection prevention and control.  

Her research on vaccine uptake focuses on promoting acceptance, strengthening communication, and enhancing access while applying a “whole-of-life” lens. It incorporates research focused on groups that traditionally have received less attention and continue to have suboptimal uptake: children and adults with chronic medical conditions, multicultural communities (focus on both migrants and refugees) and occupational groups, such as hospital healthcare providers. Her work has led to international roles supporting immunisation, including the WHO working group for measuring the Behavioural and Social Drivers of Vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic and with the Sabin Institute.

She leads a large program of work focused on enhancing pandemic preparedness with a particular focus on developing and strengthening communication and engagement strategies with multicultural communities. Her work on community compliance with pandemic mitigation strategies led to invites to provide specialised behavioural science knowledge to the WHO WPRO COVID-19 Think Tank on non-pharmaceutical interventions and the Australian Government National COVID-19 Health and Research Advisory Committee on community use of face masks.

Lastly, her work focuses on the role of primary care providers in reducing the inappropriate and unnecessary use of antimicrobial drugs in healthcare and community settings. This work includes the development and testing of scalable solutions to reduce antibiotic use in communities across low and high-income settings. Currently, this work is being undertaken in Australia and Bangladesh.

Her work in infection control also addresses issues impacting patient and family engagement with infection prevention and control strategies. She uses social science to drive quality and safety improvements in the healthcare sector, domestically and internationally, including in China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Vietnam and Bangladesh. Within this program, she explores the patient, provider and system factors influencing engagement and acceptance of infection prevention strategies and formulates and develops approaches/interventions to improve acceptance and compliance.

Associate Professor Seale is the Program Director for the Bachelor of International Public Health and teaches at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

She leads a team of researchers and higher-degree research students on projects across the three streams of focus. Her research funding has included an NHMRC Training Fellowship, NHMRC ideas/partnership/MRFF grants, ARC Discovery/Linkage, Cancer Australia grant and funding from WHO, NSW Health, South Eastern Sydney Local Health District, Prince of Wales Foundation and industry