Professor Holly Seale

Professor Holly Seale (BSc, MPH, PhD) is a social scientist in the School of Population Health at the University of New South Wales. Her research examines the social, behavioural, and health system factors that shape engagement with public health interventions, with a particular focus on vaccination, infection prevention and control, antimicrobial use, and pandemic preparedness in Australia and internationally. She holds a PhD in epidemiology and has a background in biomedical science.

A core focus of Professor Seale’s work is understanding and addressing persistent inequities in immunisation uptake. Her research adopts a whole-of-life perspective and focuses on populations that continue to experience lower coverage or face barriers to access, including children and adults with chronic medical conditions, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, migrants and refugees, and healthcare workers. Her work contributes to improving how vaccination programs are designed, communicated, and delivered in complex and diverse settings.Her work has been supported by funding from the NHMRC, ARC, MRFF, WHO, NSW Health, and other national and international partners.

Professor Seale has an established program of research in pandemic preparedness and response, with particular emphasis on risk communication, community engagement, and adherence to public health measures. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she provided behavioural and social science expertise to national and international advisory bodies, including the Australian Government’s National COVID-19 Health. She was also a member of the WHO Behavioural and Social Drivers of Immunisation working group, where she supported the development of global measures for assessing the causes of under-vaccination for COVID in low- and middle-income settings

Her research on antimicrobial resistance focuses on the role of pharmacists, drug vendors and community settings in reducing inappropriate antibiotic use. This work involves the development and evaluation of scalable interventions to support antimicrobial stewardship across both high- and low-income contexts and is currently being undertaken in Australia, Sierra Leone and Bangladesh.

Professor Seale also leads research on infection prevention and control that explores patient, family, provider, and system-level influences on engagement with infection prevention strategies. This work applies social science approaches to support quality and safety improvements in healthcare settings in Australia and across the Asia–Pacific region.

She is the Program Director for the Bachelor of Public Health at UNSW and teaches across the undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Professor Seale supervises higher degree research students and leads a multidisciplinary team working across vaccination, pandemic preparedness, and antimicrobial resistance research.