VaxPol Lab

Dr Katie Attwell’s flagship Commonwealth-funded project studies numerous facets of new mandatory vaccination policies for children in Australia, Italy, France and California. It considers agenda setting, design, use of expertise, enforcement, exemptions and the presentation of impacts and results. Dr Attwell is currently contracted to Oxford University Press to write a book on California’s vaccination policy with Professor Mark Navin, Oakland University, Michigan.

ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award DE190100158

The Coronavax project seeks to build dialogue between the community and government to uncover the conditions necessary for high uptake of the vaccine. 

For further information please see below.

Dr Samantha Carlson

Samantha is an early-career, mixed-methods social researcher with five years of experience in leading and designing research that seeks to understand how to improve access to and understanding about vaccination. She is a Postdoctoral Research Officer at the Wesfarmers Centre of Vaccines and Infectious Diseases at Telethon Kids Institute, and an Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia. Samantha draws on her expertise to contribute to important resources about vaccination for consumers and health care providers.

Dr Michael Deml

Dr Michael Deml holds a PhD in Epidemiology/Public Health (Faculty of Medicine, University of Basel, Switzerland) and a MA in Sociology (University of Geneva, Switzerland). A Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoc.Mobility Fellow, Michael joins Dr Katie Attwell and her team to study coronavirus vaccine rollout in the Australian context and the impacts of the epidemic on routine vaccine uptake and sentiment. His previous research has employed qualitative and mixed methods to study vaccine hesitancy and under-immunisation in Switzerland. As a social scientist, Michael is interested in patient-provider interactions, infectious disease prevention, medicalised prevention, the politics of prevention and health risk governance. 

Adam Hannah

Adam is a Lecturer in Political Science, focusing on comparative politics and public policy. He is primarily interested in the translation of political ideas and expert knowledge into health and social policy. He has particular expertise in international comparative research, including with regard to major bouts of health care and public pension reform in Sweden and the United States, policy responses to health crises such as antimicrobial resistance and COVID-19 vaccinations and distributional inequality across welfare systems. He has published in scholarly journals such as Policy & Politics, Public Administration, Policy Sciences, Policy & Society and The Journal of European Social Policy.

Jake Harvey

Mr Jake Harvey is an early career professional with four years of experience in mixed-methods social research. He is primarily interested in understanding how the values of policy implementers impact the implementation of mandatory vaccination policies. Currently working as a health policy analyst, Jake also has experience as a researcher within government, non-governmental bodies and in senatorial offices. Jake is currently researching, alongside Associate Professor Katie Attwell, how the values of implementers have affected the implementation of the No Jab, No Play policy enforced by some Australian states. 

Dr Julie Ji

Dr Julie Ji is an inaugural Forrest Postdoctoral Fellow based at the UWA School of Psychological Science’s Centre for the Advancement of Research on Emotion. She is an expert on mental imagery-based future thinking and its impact on emotion, judgment and behaviour in the context of depression, anxiety, and self-injury. Bringing insights and methodologies from her cutting-edge research, Dr Ji is working with VaxPolLab to investigate modifiable psychological factors driving vaccine hesitancy and refusal. Dr Ji completed doctoral training at the University of Cambridge in the UK, and joined UWA following postdoctoral training at the University of Virginia, USA.

Mark Christopher Navin

Mark Christopher Navin, PhD, HEC-C, is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Oakland University (Rochester, MI, USA) and Clinical Ethicist at Beaumont Health. He works primarily in clinical ethics and the ethics of public health, and also conducts empirical research about immunisation policies. His monograph Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Ethics, Epistemology and Health Care was published by Routledge in 2016. His articles have appeared in journals including JAMA Pediatrics, Milbank Quarterly, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Pediatrics, Vaccine, American Journal of Bioethics, Hastings Center Report, and Journal of Medical Ethics. Along with Katie Attwell, he is author of America's Vaccine Wars: California and the Politics of Mandates, under contract with Oxford University Press.

Professor Lisa Wood

Dr Lisa Wood is a tireless advocate for research being relevant and useful to the real world, with a breadth of research focusing on reducing health inequalities, across areas of homelessness, family and domestic violence and mental health. Lisa leads an expansive program of collaborative homelessness research, strongly anchored around priorities identified by services working at the coalface of homelessness and people with a lived experience. Tackling barriers to preventive healthcare is a high priority, and together with Homeless Healthcare, she has led since 2019 the implementation and evaluation of targeted influenza vaccination clinics for people experiencing homelessness.

Since the onset of COVID-19, Lisa has worked closely with the health and homelessness sectors in WA and nationally to amplify the need for people experiencing homelessness to be recognised as high priority population group because they cannot ‘stay home’ and have a high prevalence of risk factors for COVID mortality. Through the Coronavax 3 project, Lisa is contributing to ensuring that the barriers and enablers to COVID vaccination for vulnerable populations groups are heard.