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Dr Nathan has more than 15 years’ experience as a health promotion manager with Hunter New England Population Health, where her primary role is to lead a multidisciplinary team to deliver child obesity prevention programs to the community. Dr Nathan is a trained physical education (PE) teacher, has a Masters in Medical Science (Hons) Health Promotion and in 2016 was awarded her PhD from the University of Newcastle.

Dr Nathan has extensive experience in both the topic and methodology of health services research and implementation science demonstrated through her leading; the schools’ stream of Australia’s largest child obesity prevention program Good for Kids. Good for Life; the NSW Healthy Children’s initiative in Hunter New England schools; and a series of trials of policy and practice change interventions in primary and secondary schools including some of the largest internationally.

Such research has received national recognition, including awards from the Australian National Preventive Health Agency for research translation, and the NSW Government, and have yielded changes in NSW health, education and other non-government agencies policies and practices.

In 2016 Dr Nathan was awarded a two-year NHMRC Translating Research Into Practice (TRIP) Fellowship, a three-year Hunter New England Clinical Research Fellowship and a prestigious Sir Winston Churchill Fellowship, all of which focus on the science of implementation to improve the uptake of physical activity policies in schools. As school-based physical activity policies are effective in improving child activity, improving their implementation could improve the health and wellbeing of more than 2 million Australian primary school students.