Nicole Nathan

Nicole Nathan specialises in implementation science in health policy. She has twenty years experience as a health promotion manager with Hunter New England Population Health, where her primary role is to lead a multidisciplinary team to deliver healthy eating and physical activity programs to the community. Nicole is a MRFF Clinician Researcher with the University of Newcastle, with her research focusing on how best to sustain the implementation of public health programs.

Nicole originally trained as a PE teacher. She then became interested in making a difference at a population level and used her expertise in the field of population health to undertake a Masters in Public Health through the University of Newcastle.

Following the 2005 Global Obesity Summit, Nicole’s focus shifted to childhood obesity prevention, and she achieved her PhD in Implementation Science which saw the state-wide roll out of the Crunch and Sip fruit and veg break program across NSW. Nicole’s extensive experience in implementation science, demonstrated through her leading the schools’ stream of Australia’s largest child obesity prevention program, Good for Kids. Good for Life, and a series of trials of policy and practice change interventions in primary and secondary schools including some of the largest internationally.

In 2016 Nicole received an NHMRC Translating Research into Practice Fellowship; a Hunter New England Clinical Research Fellowship and the Sir Winston Churchill Fellowship, all of which focus on the science of implementation to improve the uptake of physical activity policies in schools. Her work has also been acknowledged through receipt of numerous state and national awards including the Australian National Preventive Health Agency award for research translation.