Heather McKay

I am passionate about community-engaged health research—working with community partners to adapt, implement and scale-up effective health promoting interventions to positively affect health at a population level. With my Active Aging Research Team, I have designed effective interventions that influence the health of children, and the physical, social and mental health of older adults. Through an implementation science and equity lens, I advance concepts, implementation strategies and evaluation methods that support scale-up of these interventions. With community partners, our innovations have been directly translated into practice, influenced government policy and been sustained over almost a decade.

I am also committed to building interdisciplinary teams of scholars and community partners to move research findings into action (knowledge mobilization). I currently lead a large, international, inter-institutional, cross-sectoral Implementation Science Team in Healthy Aging–as part of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and Public Health Agency of Canada, Healthy Cities Initiative. I was inducted as a Fellow into the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (2018).