Rate My Professor Alice Grady

Dr. Alice Grady is a behavioural scientist and postdoctoral researcher in the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Newcastle's College of Health, Medicine and Wellbeing. She earned her Bachelor of Psychology in 2009 and Doctor of Philosophy in Behavioural Sciences in 2016 from the University of Newcastle, where her PhD investigated modifiable barriers along the care pathway for stroke patients in Australia. During her doctoral studies, she served as a research assistant at the Priority Research Centre for Health Behaviour. Following her PhD, Dr. Grady became a postdoctoral research fellow with the Hunter New England Population Health Research Group and was awarded the National Heart Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in 2019. She supervises PhD students and contributes to committees, including as a participant in the 2018 ThinkWell Early and Mid-Career Women’s Development Program through the Faculty of Health and Medicine's Gender Equity Committee and as Public Health Early Career Researcher representative on the Hunter Medical Research Institute Early and Mid-Career Researcher Steering Committee.

Dr. Grady's research focuses on implementation science and digital health interventions to translate public health evidence into scalable practices for chronic disease prevention, particularly enhancing children's nutrition and physical activity in early childhood education and care settings. Key projects include co-developing the 'Munch & Move' program, which promotes healthy eating and activity for children up to five years old and reaches over 70,000 children across 3,500 NSW childcare services, and the feedAustralia web-based menu-planning program, a winner of the 2018 Hunter New England Excellence Awards and NSW Health Awards that secured $1.2 million in Commonwealth funding for national expansion to support over 100,000 children. She has attracted more than $330,000 in funding, presented at 53 national and international conferences including the World Public Health Nutrition Congress, and authored over 100 publications. Notable works include the Cochrane systematic review 'Strategies to improve the implementation of healthy eating, physical activity and obesity prevention policies, practices or programmes within childcare services' (2016), 'Strategies for enhancing the implementation of school-based policies or practices targeting risk factors for chronic disease' (2017), 'Effectiveness of a Web-Based Menu-Planning Intervention to Improve Childcare Service Compliance With Dietary Guidelines: Randomized Controlled Trial' (2020, Journal of Medical Internet Research), and 'The Effectiveness of Strategies to Improve User Engagement With Digital Health Interventions Targeting Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Overweight and Obesity: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis' (2023, Journal of Medical Internet Research). Her international collaborations with the Cochrane Collaboration and World Health Organization inform public health policies and practices globally. In 2023, Dr. Grady received the University of Newcastle Beryl Nashar Young Researcher Award.