Rate My Professor Penny Hawe

Professor Penny Hawe is Professor Emeritus of Public Health in the Sydney School of Public Health, Menzies Centre for Health Policy, within the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney. She holds a PhD in measles control awarded in 1997 by the University of Melbourne. Her academic career began as a Senior Lecturer in the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney. In 2000, she was recruited to the University of Calgary in Canada to hold the foundation Markin Chair in Health and Society, a position she maintained until December 2014. Upon her return to the University of Sydney, she served as Professor of Public Health at the Leeder Centre for Health Policy, Economics and Data. She is a founding member of the Prevention Centre’s Leadership Executive from 2013 to 2023 and served as Lead Investigator on numerous projects. Currently mostly retired, she continues collaborative work on systems thinking and complex interventions with colleagues in the UK and USA. Hawe is a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health (UK). Her research focuses on community strength and resilience, complex community interventions, social network analysis, whole-school interventions to promote health, population-level health promotion, and improvement science. She has led projects such as assessing costs and benefits of whole-of-government prevention, learning from local communities via the Prevention Tracker, shedding light on health policy implementation, and economic analysis of prevention ripple effects.

Key publications include 'How do we fund Public Health in Australia? How should we?' (2024), 'Scale-up of prevention programmes: Sustained state-wide use of programme delivery software' (2022), 'Adapting interventions to new contexts—the ADAPT guidance' (2021), 'Lessons from complex interventions to improve health' (2015, Annual Review of Public Health), and 'Complex interventions: how “out of control” can a randomised controlled trial be?' (2004). Her work has advanced the evaluation of population health interventions through complex systems perspectives and contributed to policy on tobacco, alcohol, physical environments, and school-based programs to prevent bullying and promote inclusion. She has influenced public understanding of population health science and prevention funding strategies.