Rate My Professor Nick Higginbotham

Higginbotham's research specializations encompass transdisciplinary health social science, environmental psychology, health psychology, program evaluation, and survey design methods. He led a five-year National Health and Medical Research Council (NH&MRC) program grant in the 1990s to develop a community strategy reducing heart disease epidemics in the Upper Hunter coalfields and an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant (2005-2007) examining community responses to environmental transformation. Collaborating with Glenn Albrecht and Linda Connor, his work contributed to the concept of solastalgia, the distress caused by environmental change. Key publications include co-authoring the pioneering textbooks Health Social Science: A Transdisciplinary and Complexity Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Applying Health Social Science: Best Practice in the Developing World (Zed Books, 2001), which feature transdisciplinary analyses of heart disease informed by complexity theory. Notable articles are Environmental injustice and air pollution in coal affected communities, Hunter Valley, Australia (Health & Place, 2010), Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change (2007), and Air Quality in Association With Rural Coal Mining and Combustion in New South Wales, Australia (Journal of Rural Health, 2019). He has delivered keynote lectures on transdisciplinary health social science internationally and served as Associate Editor for Kluwer's International and Cultural Psychology book series. His research has garnered over 3,900 citations, influencing eco-health, rural mental health, and environmental distress studies.