Gail Pacheco & Nadia Charania
Professor Gail Pacheco (director of the New Zealand Policy Research Institute) and Dr Nadia Charania (a senior lecturer in public health and co-director of the AUT Migrant and Refugee Health Research Centre) have been awarded $1.2 million from the Health Research Council of New Zealand's 2024 Project Grants.
Their research will apply the principles of complexity science to analyse factors influencing childhood vaccination uptake, particularly among Māori, Pacific Peoples, and migrant and refugee families. The goal is to promote more equitable and resilient immunisation services for all children in Aotearoa New Zealand. This initiative is especially important given the lower vaccination rates in the country post-pandemic, resulting in particularly large immunisation inequities based on ethnicity.