Rate My Professor Nick Higginbotham

Nick Higginbotham is an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Newcastle, where he has served as a senior member of the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics since 1987. He holds a PhD and Master of Arts in environmental psychology from the University of Hawaii, focusing on human-environment interactions, and a Bachelor of Arts from United States International University. His doctoral fieldwork in Southeast Asia analyzed western-oriented psychiatric institutions in non-western contexts, pioneering the concept of culture-accommodation in mental health care, as detailed in his 1984 publication Third World Challenge to Psychiatry. Throughout his career, Higginbotham has held key leadership roles including Head of Discipline of Public Health, Deputy Director of the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Chair of the Postgraduate Education Program, and member of the School of Medicine and Public Health Executive and Faculty of Health Board. He has supervised 26 research theses that integrate interdisciplinary designs linking individual human action with broader social, cultural, and political-economic contexts.

Higginbotham's research specializations encompass transdisciplinary health social science, environmental psychology, health psychology, program evaluation, and survey design methods. He led a five-year National Health and Medical Research Council (NH&MRC) program grant in the 1990s to develop a community strategy reducing heart disease epidemics in the Upper Hunter coalfields and an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant (2005-2007) examining community responses to environmental transformation. Collaborating with Glenn Albrecht and Linda Connor, his work contributed to the concept of solastalgia, the distress caused by environmental change. Key publications include co-authoring the pioneering textbooks Health Social Science: A Transdisciplinary and Complexity Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Applying Health Social Science: Best Practice in the Developing World (Zed Books, 2001), which feature transdisciplinary analyses of heart disease informed by complexity theory. Notable articles are Environmental injustice and air pollution in coal affected communities, Hunter Valley, Australia (Health & Place, 2010), Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change (2007), and Air Quality in Association With Rural Coal Mining and Combustion in New South Wales, Australia (Journal of Rural Health, 2019). He has delivered keynote lectures on transdisciplinary health social science internationally and served as Associate Editor for Kluwer's International and Cultural Psychology book series. His research has garnered over 3,900 citations, influencing eco-health, rural mental health, and environmental distress studies.