Improving health information interventions to foster vaccine confidence and cultural safety of vaccination services

From monkeypox to measles, vaccination is essential to controlling infectious disease. COVID vaccines alone saved approximately 20 million lives in the first year. However, barriers to vaccination—including inaccessibility, lack of confidence in vaccine safety or effectiveness, and distrust in those providing vaccination—threaten our ability to stop epidemics.

My program of research applies unique interdisciplinary expertise in information science and population health to investigate how we can use information to reduce vaccination barriers. Over the next 5 years I will conduct a suite of studies aiming to improve population health interventions focused on vaccine communication and surveillance.

Studying how people use information and how vaccine communication and surveillance affects people in real-life contexts will help us meet needs of co-parents who disagree about child vaccination, people deciding whether to get new vaccines, and members of marginalized groups targeted by vaccination campaigns. It will generate evidence on how technologies can best be used for identifying and sharing information with vaccine hesitant people. Ultimately, this knowledge will improve vaccine uptake and reduce disease burden and inequity.