Heather McKay

Keynote Speaker

Professor Heather McKay’s research program spans the life course from childhood to old age with a focus on (i) health promotion: upstream factors (e.g. physical activity) that promote the health of children, youth and older adults; (ii) implementation science: design, implementation and scale-up of health promoting interventions in school (children, youth) and community (older adults) settings, and (iii) knowledge translation and exchange in partnership with community and government stakeholders to promote health at the population level.

Heather’s passion is to build interdisciplinary cross sectoral teams to evaluate the role of scalable health promoting interventions on children’s and older adult’s social, mental and physical health. Her work delves into factors that influence implementation, adaptation and scale-up of interventions. Her team are among few teams worldwide that formally adapted, evaluated, enacted phased scale up and sustained effective health promoting programs for children (Action Schools! BC) and older adults (Choose to Move) with community and government partners for >8 years.